Before anyone complains that this removes the human aspect of art, it's worth stressing that sculptors have always looked for ways to automate work and save time (as the website itself points out).
As far back as ancient Egypt, grids and measuring tools were used to reproduce figures at different scales. Roman workshops churned out copies of Greek statues in marble and bronze, using casts and moulds. From the 18th century onwards, sculptors used outright pointing machines to transfer models into marble. James Watt, the steam engine guy, even built a mechanical sculpture-copying machine that could (somewhat) automatically reproduce reliefs and medallions.
Gothic architectural decoration wasn't about expressing the inner world of its makers in the way we think of art today. Much of it was produced by large masonry workshops using standardized geometry, wooden templates and repeated designs.
Understood and agreed, they need to construct or repair buildings efficiently...
However there is the concept of 'the resistance of the material' where the act of working with the material with bare hands and simple tools is a meditative process. Something I would have thought applicable to the contemplative and monastical life of a monk.
They address this in a roundabout way in the article:
> Ornate pieces that used to take months for a skilled carver, now can be accomplished in a matter of days. Instead of cutting out the beauty, using the excuse that it takes too long, thus doesn’t fit into the budget, modern technology can be used to make true Gothic in all its beauty a reality again today.
The options are either use the best tool for the job, or don't do the job at all because the budget (time or monetary I'm not sure) is not there.
Sure - but if you take especially late Gothic cathedrals like Milan's, there's 3400 Statues and 135 spires, decorated with almost 100.000 Crockets (the decorative elements on the steeple roofs). I feel these things are more mass production than meditative process...
They still do, it's just that the first 95% of carving things out of rock is literally getting the rock into the shape needed to start doing actual scuplting.
I'm short, it's artistic boilerate with no meaningful value to either the artist or the viewer.
I don't see any reason that someone couldn't still enjoy working with the material with bare hands and simple tools to meditate, even with the automated stone carving. People still play chess even though AI dominates.
I have a fascination with hobos and freight train riders and watch a fair amount of videos on Youtube about it. One of hobo had a RAG he would query about train yards and catchout points. Wasn't a full timer, but built it last spring I gathered. Not art exactly, but a similar idea. Humans like shortcuts.
100% with you on effort reduction. I was making closets at home and was doing pilot holes for attaching the back 1/4" plywood. I calculated I had to do 50 odd holes for all of them. Then i discovered the brad stapler gun(all electric) and I was done in 5 mins what would have taken an hour to get right with a jig.
Wood working projects get out of hand when you add a small feature. I cannot imaging what would happen if you had to do this with stone carving!
One small correction/addition! While the pointing machine is 18th century, the practice of pointing itself is quite a lot older. Its precursor was the three-compass method, which was known in antiquity and recovered in the 15th century. In fact, if you look closely at Michelangelo's David, you can see the little holes on the marble used for pointing.
That said, actual Gothic sculpture and decoration fell into that gap when pointing was lost. And the frankly lower quality of most medieval sculpture more or less reflects that. And anyway, nothing wrong with neo-Gothic.
Worth noting that the stonemasons of Sagrada Familia (the catholic basilica Barcelona) have been using CNC to carve it's stones since early 1990s. Most Barcelonians thought they would never see the temple finished in their lifetimes, myself included. Part of the progress that made its completion possible this year is thanks to this technology improving over time.
EDIT: Actually, it’s a mix of CNC roughing to shape the stone, followed by manual finishing. According to the Sagrada Família’s website, this allows each stone to remain a unique piece of craftsmanship while significantly speeding up the process.
What's kind of funny about CNC is there is a wood working tool that is the opposite of what you just mentioned. The Shaper Origin is a CNC router where the gross movements of the router are provided by the human operator's hands moving the thing, and the fine movements of the cutting head inside the router body are provided by XYZ positioning of the cutting head reacting to the machine's position over the workpiece using optical tracking. So you can get precision and an expansive work range, with a small footprint of the tool.
I think that is more for space/budget reasons than really being a preferred way to work. One thing is handy for is being able to carve something in place though. I saw someone use it to do inlays in the middle of a large plank tabletop that would have required a truly huge CNC machine to be able to hold the plank.
Didn't know that. This is what most excites me about the technology. Building beautiful and well crafted things historically has been extremely expensive. There is an Italian company I follow on X that specializes in CNC sculpting of Renaissance quality marble statues. Would love to see more bronze and marble statues around town celebrating society's heroes and heroines.
I love this story. They started roasting coffee and saving money for nearly a decade, until they could buy land in the mountains, and then set out to build a medieval monastery entirely in stone and developing the CNC machining. It's amazing what people can do when they have a goal.
I've always wondered why we haven't seen a broad architectural movement returning to highly ornate decorative facades now that technology has made this kind of thing (more) possible. We could be having so much more fun in architecture right now!
Perhaps this is because I've let Twitter radicalize me on this particular subject, but it seems like modern architecture is totally ideologically captured to be against this stuff.
There's this insistence that forms have to be "honest", so ornamental facades are out. Any attempt to revive a form is called "pastiche" (except modernist, which...uh, has been around for awhile now!). People always insist on "deconstruction" and "contrast" so they can never just build a rowhouse that looks like the other rowhouses. Etc.
There's study after study that shows that regular people are way more inclined to let things get built if it just looks good, and when people are presented with choices they'll basically always pick the classic-looking building. And yet we never seem to get them.
The more charitable read is that cost is part of the equation and people don't want to pay it, but that's 100% not the whole story. (Another part of the story is that people who buy the plans care the most about internal space with tons of light coming in, which probably drives a bunch of decisions on the outside.)
The arts have always been influenced by the philosophy of their time.
However, there is a divide between vernacular and classical architecture. Vernacular is utilitarian and it is what most people build (you build your house to serve your needs) while classical is not only utilitarian but also communicates a message (authority in gov. buildings).
Most people find vernacular architecture pretty. For example, Florence, San Miguel de Allende, New Orleans, etc. All of them have different architecture caused by the locally available materials and the weather of the place. Contrary to popular belief most of their 'beauty' doesn't come from an old appreciation of the arts people, instead these buildings only met the needs with what was available and worked best.
For example, in the north of Mexico houses were built with thick limestone ('sillar de caliche'). The thickness helped as insulation (hot weather). The limestone was plastered with 'cal' in a light color with an 'aborregado' finish that helped reflect the sunlight thus keeping the house cooler. The houses were tall because hot air rises, windows looked almost like doors because people opened them during the night to let the air in. The buildings are beautiful but they are extremely utilitarian. Nowadays most houses in Mexico are built with cement and rebar, which is ugly.
The architect Leon Krier made the argument that all of this was a 20th century phenomenon caused by industrialization and fossil fuel dependency, which has not only affected buildings but how cities get built (urban planning). He believed this would end once fossil fuels reservoirs decreased.
Modern architecture ideology is hilarious from an outsider's perspective.
But modern architecture being bland and non-decorative? You can lay the majority of the blame for that on building owners.
My partner works for a building engineering firm that is hired by architects and building owners, and we both are not fond of modern architectural trends and have discussed it at length.
In short, buildings have two scenarios - one, the person or company paying for the building plans on keeping it over the next decade plus, or two, the buyer plans on flipping the building as soon as possible.
In the first case, and extremely so in the second, buyers are entirely without taste and despise spending any money that they don't absolutely have to. The desire to min/max buildings has led to function over form to the point of nearly ignoring form.
"Cheap" is the top priority, followed closely by "inoffensive to the people we want to rent this to / flip this to". This results in cheap, low effort facades and an absolute minimum of permanent decorative elements.
Buildings are seen as short term (10 years or less) consumable items, and nothing endures long enough to make it seem worthwhile to buyers to put any money towards design excellence.
My cynical take is that architecture has been fully captured by the wealthy elite.
The elites like things the masses dislike as a way to signal their social distances from the masses. By designing a building that conforms to their elite taste at the expense of nearly everyone else who has to look at the thing, it reinforces their power and control over the space.
It's the moral equivalent of buying a beachfront property and blasting noise every morning from a giant PA system just so that everyone trying to just relax on the beach knows who is really in charge.
A friend of mine wrote about neo-pastiche in Plessis-Robinson, France in Archiscopie magazine. He showed me very impressive images of styrofoam shaped as greek, roman and hausmannian elements sprayed with a cheap render slapped on a concrete building that end up gentrifying neighborhoods. Perhaps a low quality, poorly performing, ecologically irresponsible building is what you want ? I'd rather be paying for what I consider important for a building (longevity, ecology and thermal efficiency) than some esthetical addendum.
In the end, the construction industry is really a deciding factor : you only see, as a classic survivorship bias phenomena, what the best building with all the money in the world looked like, ie cathedrals, palaces, and expect every building to have the same standard today. It is not realistic, nor responsible. Cheap building for the masses have always been the norm!
This has been my hope for a while! I live in a 1911 house and the amount of small detail everywhere would be impossibly expensive by modern construction standards. I also like modern minimalism, but I know many of the drywall corners everywhere in modern homes aren't design decisions as much as cost savings measures.
We can, but will you pay for it? The standard house building a house is cheap - some of those decorations would increase the costs by as much as double - but they won't increase the value of the house.
I have a rule of thumb that seems to hold: until you get to about 3500 sq feet in a house people will choose larger over decorations where possible. Larger than that and you don't want to clean the house yourself (that is unless your wealth supports regular professional cleaning you won't go much larger). Of course as a rule of thumb it isn't a hard rule, some people want more space, others can live with less. As houses get larger people are willing for more decoration cost.
For apartments it is worse - renters rarely will pay extra to live in a nice building.
If history has shown something is that minimalism always wins (don't confuse minimalism with the horrible/cheap building and design practices that are norm today)
Up until the late 1800s, beauty was expensive. Therefore, it was a costly (i.e., believable) signal of wealth, status, and taste. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, modern manufacturing got going and made beauty cheap. The ornate wrought iron door that took some workman hundreds of hours to produce was a good signal. Now, a cast simulacrum can be made at scale and ordinary people can have beautiful doors.
This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time.
(and, to head you off at the pass: you may like brutalism or Obama's library, but the data clearly show that regular people do not)
We should really do something about this. Buildings affect everyone around them, and we should force people designing them to make buildings that regular people find beautiful.
I like this general hypothesis, but dislike this formulation:
> This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time.
I don't find "gothic" design beautiful though I can recognize the skill and devotion it represents; I do love shaker and bauhaus and scandi design. There is no "objective sense" when it comes to beauty.
I think you could rephrase this as "where what's beautiful is no longer determined by the amount of skill and effort to construct it", which I think is also true but also more meaningful and much more accomodating to the range of actual "ordinary people's" tastes ...
After seeing the real thing in a museum, I would love to have an Egyptian relief replica on the inside wall of my house. No sarcasm, I think it would be badass.
Oooh this is cool. Create gothic-esque designs in stone construction using CNC. I like the apology right at the top: "medieval builders were always on the forefront of technology". Word.
I would to love to learn more about the metals used in their drill bits. I think about oil/gas drilling and tunnel boring machines. They are facing some of the harshest conditions possible. (Imagine a tunnel boring machine trying to carve through granite rock in Manhattan or Swiss Alps. It is tough!) These CNC machines are doing similar on a "micro-scale". How often do they need to sharpen or replace these drill bits? And what is the cost?
This is the same group of monks that run mystic monk coffee. I'm very fond of the Paradiso blend and am currently warming up to the thanksgiving blend though it wasn't my favorite at the start of the bag.
Monumental Labs[0] takes a mixed approach to autonomy and human craftsmanship. For fine detail pieces like marble sculpture, the robot takes the project from stone block to a rough, 3D printed look. Then a human craftsman does fine work and polishing. For something like a plinth on a stone structure, the robot's output is good enough since the piece will only ever be viewed from afar (e.g. street level for a balcony).
This is both incredible and I think… “misses the point” is the wrong phrase, but maybe omits something both subtle and crucial in the process.
A gothic cathedral is both an incredible work of art and also the work of hundreds or thousands of hands over decades and centuries - you are looking not just at the final product, but at the love and commitment it took to make that work of art, the long-term dedication and belief that it should exist even if we don’t live to see it exist. You’re looking at an expression of love not just for God and for art and beauty, but for future generations and people we’ll never know. The time and effort isn’t an unfortunate part of the process, it’s intrinsic to what we feel when we witness the cathedral - a connection to others, reaching both ways.
I understand why the monks have developed this technique, and I don’t disagree with them - the act of building a gothic cathedral is outside the capacity of modern society. I’ll never begrudge someone a hack to preserve some beauty in this machine we’ve created. But I can’t help but feel like they’ve created a facsimile of a cathedral - they’ve created the palace at Disneyland, not Notre Dame.
The proportions, materials, overall design is quite beautiful. How is that not an expression to God? Having a few hundred people die falling off of scaffolding and taking 50 years to build is not helping anyone today.
Perhaps a few dead bodies and a couple hundred years of recitations will do the trick?
Put another way, if monks in the year 1k had a CNC router like this, they wouldn’t have peasants take 50 years to arrive at their expression to God.
It’s the architecture and the design that reflects the Lord almighty. The peasants doing it are a means to an end: so the church stands tall, so they can massacre the non-believers, burn witches, infidels, and imprison astronomers. All in the comfort of a beautiful cathedral.
If the monks in the year 1k had CNC machines, they’d have built bigger and more elaborate cathedrals. The act was the message. The gothic cathedral was impossible by medieval standards, and that was part of the act of building it.
And, to your point, yes, if the monks followed the construction with a hundred years of prayer and sacrifice to consecrate the building, indeed the building would carry a more powerful emotional resonance than it does now. The sacrifice is the point, the effort is the point. It’s an act of devotion, not just one of construction.
Not every building with stone carvings will be gothic cathedrals with regular incomes- there will be thousands of small churches out there, which don't have the budget for expensive stonemasons to hand carve items for repairs.
If we want to protect historic buildings for generations to enjoy then we're going to need to be more pragmatic.
The Sagrada Família is a "recently" built cathedral, and I'd say is on a similar level as a Gothic cathedral. So modern society is not necessarily incapable of similar feats.
Yes, I’d agree with this. I’d almost say it’s the exception that proves the rule - it’s such an exceptional project in the modern sense that its presence highlights the absence of others.
I suppose things like the Svalbard seed vault are similar secular efforts, as is the Long Now’s clock, although that feels somewhat more self-indulgent than these others. I’m interested in others, if you can think of them.
I do agree with you over all, but I am not certain it's outside the capacity of modern society. You only need to look at the group in France[0] where they are building a medieval castle using only period appropriate tools and techniques. It is more of a research project than an act of devotion, but I think it demonstrates that we are still capable of such acts.
Not that I disagree, but I want to confirm: you are suggesting the reason (or one of the reasons) they chose to do stone carving, as opposed to some other form of monastic pursuit, was because it took a lot of time and effort?
A great deal of monastic pursuit was in the interest of slowing down, focusing, applying one’s entire self to something, and recognizing the greatness of god and creation, so yes, anything that encouraged focus and contemplation would have been privileged on those merits.
> But I can’t help but feel like they’ve created a facsimile of a cathedral - they’ve created the palace at Disneyland, not Versailles.
You could at least compare to Notre Dame. It’s a bit tone deaf to draw comparison to Versailles, which was a vanity project to glorify the French monarchy.
I think you're missing a subtlety of the situation. You're right that gothic cathedrals were enormous undertakings, and that the enormity was itself a worshipful and meditative act that drew in the entire community, current and future.
Even with the CNC machines, this is still a multi-decade endeavor that will span generations because the number of monks (and outside support) is small and not getting larger. They've scaled down the work required to match their capabilities, and still creating something that will last centuries. Relative to their community, it's still a cathedral effort.
Reddit Cofounder Alexis Ohanian has a startup, Monumental Labs, which is applying robotic milling to stonework. The finishing process is still done by hand and appears quite labour intensive
It may be worthwhile noting that the medieval Carmelites have pulled off some impressive civil engineering projects in their own right. St. John of the Cross himself is credited with the design and construction of an aqueduct for their monastery in Spain.
It may seem from our perspective that monasteries are full of prayer and spiritual endeavors, but they are also the site of a large amount of manual labor and highly-educated expertise that can be brought to bear on large projects like this.
Illustrated books often have a note about how the illustrations are made. One of my son's books had a joke note, saying that the illustrations were taken from a text of the monks of St. Parmesan (or something to that effect). Maybe the author was in on it, but it seems like a poorly thought out joke because so many cheeses were made by monks!
... and the audience is too mature to mention that the internet stole the acronym Computer Numerical Control, so its often shortened to Numerical Control to make it safe to search?
There are other options that are - unfortunately - more likely. Historically the clergy was only a small fraction of the total number of excess males removed.
Before anyone complains that this removes the human aspect of art, it's worth stressing that sculptors have always looked for ways to automate work and save time (as the website itself points out).
As far back as ancient Egypt, grids and measuring tools were used to reproduce figures at different scales. Roman workshops churned out copies of Greek statues in marble and bronze, using casts and moulds. From the 18th century onwards, sculptors used outright pointing machines to transfer models into marble. James Watt, the steam engine guy, even built a mechanical sculpture-copying machine that could (somewhat) automatically reproduce reliefs and medallions.
Gothic architectural decoration wasn't about expressing the inner world of its makers in the way we think of art today. Much of it was produced by large masonry workshops using standardized geometry, wooden templates and repeated designs.
So, yeah, using a CNC machine is truly Gothic.
Understood and agreed, they need to construct or repair buildings efficiently...
However there is the concept of 'the resistance of the material' where the act of working with the material with bare hands and simple tools is a meditative process. Something I would have thought applicable to the contemplative and monastical life of a monk.
There's a fascinating article from BBC 4 on the topic https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000xqt
They address this in a roundabout way in the article:
> Ornate pieces that used to take months for a skilled carver, now can be accomplished in a matter of days. Instead of cutting out the beauty, using the excuse that it takes too long, thus doesn’t fit into the budget, modern technology can be used to make true Gothic in all its beauty a reality again today.
The options are either use the best tool for the job, or don't do the job at all because the budget (time or monetary I'm not sure) is not there.
Sure - but if you take especially late Gothic cathedrals like Milan's, there's 3400 Statues and 135 spires, decorated with almost 100.000 Crockets (the decorative elements on the steeple roofs). I feel these things are more mass production than meditative process...
They still do, it's just that the first 95% of carving things out of rock is literally getting the rock into the shape needed to start doing actual scuplting.
I'm short, it's artistic boilerate with no meaningful value to either the artist or the viewer.
I don't see any reason that someone couldn't still enjoy working with the material with bare hands and simple tools to meditate, even with the automated stone carving. People still play chess even though AI dominates.
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I have a fascination with hobos and freight train riders and watch a fair amount of videos on Youtube about it. One of hobo had a RAG he would query about train yards and catchout points. Wasn't a full timer, but built it last spring I gathered. Not art exactly, but a similar idea. Humans like shortcuts.
100% with you on effort reduction. I was making closets at home and was doing pilot holes for attaching the back 1/4" plywood. I calculated I had to do 50 odd holes for all of them. Then i discovered the brad stapler gun(all electric) and I was done in 5 mins what would have taken an hour to get right with a jig.
Wood working projects get out of hand when you add a small feature. I cannot imaging what would happen if you had to do this with stone carving!
One small correction/addition! While the pointing machine is 18th century, the practice of pointing itself is quite a lot older. Its precursor was the three-compass method, which was known in antiquity and recovered in the 15th century. In fact, if you look closely at Michelangelo's David, you can see the little holes on the marble used for pointing.
That said, actual Gothic sculpture and decoration fell into that gap when pointing was lost. And the frankly lower quality of most medieval sculpture more or less reflects that. And anyway, nothing wrong with neo-Gothic.
What's more gothic than dark satanic mills
I think they moved them to Canary Wharf and covered them in glass.
You are getting downvoted because the largely American audience here doesn’t get the reference: https://oxfordsong.org/song/jerusalem
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For example, Rodin had it figured out. He just hired more sculptors!
Worth noting that the stonemasons of Sagrada Familia (the catholic basilica Barcelona) have been using CNC to carve it's stones since early 1990s. Most Barcelonians thought they would never see the temple finished in their lifetimes, myself included. Part of the progress that made its completion possible this year is thanks to this technology improving over time.
EDIT: Actually, it’s a mix of CNC roughing to shape the stone, followed by manual finishing. According to the Sagrada Família’s website, this allows each stone to remain a unique piece of craftsmanship while significantly speeding up the process.
What's kind of funny about CNC is there is a wood working tool that is the opposite of what you just mentioned. The Shaper Origin is a CNC router where the gross movements of the router are provided by the human operator's hands moving the thing, and the fine movements of the cutting head inside the router body are provided by XYZ positioning of the cutting head reacting to the machine's position over the workpiece using optical tracking. So you can get precision and an expansive work range, with a small footprint of the tool.
I think that is more for space/budget reasons than really being a preferred way to work. One thing is handy for is being able to carve something in place though. I saw someone use it to do inlays in the middle of a large plank tabletop that would have required a truly huge CNC machine to be able to hold the plank.
Didn't know that. This is what most excites me about the technology. Building beautiful and well crafted things historically has been extremely expensive. There is an Italian company I follow on X that specializes in CNC sculpting of Renaissance quality marble statues. Would love to see more bronze and marble statues around town celebrating society's heroes and heroines.
Monumental and Robotor do this
E.g. https://x.com/Monumental_Labs/status/2102775795689419214?a=x...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robot-role-marble-art-sculpting...
It's one of the things I think may be cool with AI robots when they get good at those. You should be able to build all sorts of fancy things.
Nerd Catnip Alert! Can you share the X.com account that "specializes in CNC sculpting of Renaissance quality marble statues"?
Wow, the monks are not messing around either, they built a full monastery with cathedral and all in gothic style! https://newmountcarmelfoundation.org/building-a-mountain-mon...
I love this story. They started roasting coffee and saving money for nearly a decade, until they could buy land in the mountains, and then set out to build a medieval monastery entirely in stone and developing the CNC machining. It's amazing what people can do when they have a goal.
I've always wondered why we haven't seen a broad architectural movement returning to highly ornate decorative facades now that technology has made this kind of thing (more) possible. We could be having so much more fun in architecture right now!
Perhaps this is because I've let Twitter radicalize me on this particular subject, but it seems like modern architecture is totally ideologically captured to be against this stuff.
There's this insistence that forms have to be "honest", so ornamental facades are out. Any attempt to revive a form is called "pastiche" (except modernist, which...uh, has been around for awhile now!). People always insist on "deconstruction" and "contrast" so they can never just build a rowhouse that looks like the other rowhouses. Etc.
There's study after study that shows that regular people are way more inclined to let things get built if it just looks good, and when people are presented with choices they'll basically always pick the classic-looking building. And yet we never seem to get them.
The more charitable read is that cost is part of the equation and people don't want to pay it, but that's 100% not the whole story. (Another part of the story is that people who buy the plans care the most about internal space with tons of light coming in, which probably drives a bunch of decisions on the outside.)
The arts have always been influenced by the philosophy of their time.
However, there is a divide between vernacular and classical architecture. Vernacular is utilitarian and it is what most people build (you build your house to serve your needs) while classical is not only utilitarian but also communicates a message (authority in gov. buildings).
Most people find vernacular architecture pretty. For example, Florence, San Miguel de Allende, New Orleans, etc. All of them have different architecture caused by the locally available materials and the weather of the place. Contrary to popular belief most of their 'beauty' doesn't come from an old appreciation of the arts people, instead these buildings only met the needs with what was available and worked best.
For example, in the north of Mexico houses were built with thick limestone ('sillar de caliche'). The thickness helped as insulation (hot weather). The limestone was plastered with 'cal' in a light color with an 'aborregado' finish that helped reflect the sunlight thus keeping the house cooler. The houses were tall because hot air rises, windows looked almost like doors because people opened them during the night to let the air in. The buildings are beautiful but they are extremely utilitarian. Nowadays most houses in Mexico are built with cement and rebar, which is ugly.
The architect Leon Krier made the argument that all of this was a 20th century phenomenon caused by industrialization and fossil fuel dependency, which has not only affected buildings but how cities get built (urban planning). He believed this would end once fossil fuels reservoirs decreased.
Modern architecture ideology is hilarious from an outsider's perspective.
But modern architecture being bland and non-decorative? You can lay the majority of the blame for that on building owners.
My partner works for a building engineering firm that is hired by architects and building owners, and we both are not fond of modern architectural trends and have discussed it at length.
In short, buildings have two scenarios - one, the person or company paying for the building plans on keeping it over the next decade plus, or two, the buyer plans on flipping the building as soon as possible.
In the first case, and extremely so in the second, buyers are entirely without taste and despise spending any money that they don't absolutely have to. The desire to min/max buildings has led to function over form to the point of nearly ignoring form.
"Cheap" is the top priority, followed closely by "inoffensive to the people we want to rent this to / flip this to". This results in cheap, low effort facades and an absolute minimum of permanent decorative elements.
Buildings are seen as short term (10 years or less) consumable items, and nothing endures long enough to make it seem worthwhile to buyers to put any money towards design excellence.
My cynical take is that architecture has been fully captured by the wealthy elite.
The elites like things the masses dislike as a way to signal their social distances from the masses. By designing a building that conforms to their elite taste at the expense of nearly everyone else who has to look at the thing, it reinforces their power and control over the space.
It's the moral equivalent of buying a beachfront property and blasting noise every morning from a giant PA system just so that everyone trying to just relax on the beach knows who is really in charge.
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A friend of mine wrote about neo-pastiche in Plessis-Robinson, France in Archiscopie magazine. He showed me very impressive images of styrofoam shaped as greek, roman and hausmannian elements sprayed with a cheap render slapped on a concrete building that end up gentrifying neighborhoods. Perhaps a low quality, poorly performing, ecologically irresponsible building is what you want ? I'd rather be paying for what I consider important for a building (longevity, ecology and thermal efficiency) than some esthetical addendum.
In the end, the construction industry is really a deciding factor : you only see, as a classic survivorship bias phenomena, what the best building with all the money in the world looked like, ie cathedrals, palaces, and expect every building to have the same standard today. It is not realistic, nor responsible. Cheap building for the masses have always been the norm!
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This has been my hope for a while! I live in a 1911 house and the amount of small detail everywhere would be impossibly expensive by modern construction standards. I also like modern minimalism, but I know many of the drywall corners everywhere in modern homes aren't design decisions as much as cost savings measures.
We can, but will you pay for it? The standard house building a house is cheap - some of those decorations would increase the costs by as much as double - but they won't increase the value of the house.
I have a rule of thumb that seems to hold: until you get to about 3500 sq feet in a house people will choose larger over decorations where possible. Larger than that and you don't want to clean the house yourself (that is unless your wealth supports regular professional cleaning you won't go much larger). Of course as a rule of thumb it isn't a hard rule, some people want more space, others can live with less. As houses get larger people are willing for more decoration cost.
For apartments it is worse - renters rarely will pay extra to live in a nice building.
> but they won't increase the value of the house.
But they will make your life better.
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This might have influenced too many people?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime
If history has shown something is that minimalism always wins (don't confuse minimalism with the horrible/cheap building and design practices that are norm today)
That's not true at all. You can clearly see vacillation between more elaborate and simpler architectural forms throughout history.
This just sounds like some whiggish defense of modernism.
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I think a good theory is:
Up until the late 1800s, beauty was expensive. Therefore, it was a costly (i.e., believable) signal of wealth, status, and taste. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, modern manufacturing got going and made beauty cheap. The ornate wrought iron door that took some workman hundreds of hours to produce was a good signal. Now, a cast simulacrum can be made at scale and ordinary people can have beautiful doors.
This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time.
(and, to head you off at the pass: you may like brutalism or Obama's library, but the data clearly show that regular people do not)
See Tom Wolfe's excellent From Bauhaus to Our House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
Also this ACX discussion (it's a few posts) is really good: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-everyone-on-taste https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/three-model-organisms-for-t...
We should really do something about this. Buildings affect everyone around them, and we should force people designing them to make buildings that regular people find beautiful.
These people are trying: https://www.humanise.org/
I like this general hypothesis, but dislike this formulation:
> This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time.
I don't find "gothic" design beautiful though I can recognize the skill and devotion it represents; I do love shaker and bauhaus and scandi design. There is no "objective sense" when it comes to beauty.
I think you could rephrase this as "where what's beautiful is no longer determined by the amount of skill and effort to construct it", which I think is also true but also more meaningful and much more accomodating to the range of actual "ordinary people's" tastes ...
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After seeing the real thing in a museum, I would love to have an Egyptian relief replica on the inside wall of my house. No sarcasm, I think it would be badass.
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Oooh this is cool. Create gothic-esque designs in stone construction using CNC. I like the apology right at the top: "medieval builders were always on the forefront of technology". Word.
Anyone who digs this should take a look at the art (and process) of Barry X Ball. https://www.barryxball.com/ https://www.instagram.com/barryxballstudio/
or monumental labs
I would to love to learn more about the metals used in their drill bits. I think about oil/gas drilling and tunnel boring machines. They are facing some of the harshest conditions possible. (Imagine a tunnel boring machine trying to carve through granite rock in Manhattan or Swiss Alps. It is tough!) These CNC machines are doing similar on a "micro-scale". How often do they need to sharpen or replace these drill bits? And what is the cost?
This is the same group of monks that run mystic monk coffee. I'm very fond of the Paradiso blend and am currently warming up to the thanksgiving blend though it wasn't my favorite at the start of the bag.
Monumental Labs[0] takes a mixed approach to autonomy and human craftsmanship. For fine detail pieces like marble sculpture, the robot takes the project from stone block to a rough, 3D printed look. Then a human craftsman does fine work and polishing. For something like a plinth on a stone structure, the robot's output is good enough since the piece will only ever be viewed from afar (e.g. street level for a balcony).
[0]: https://www.monumentallabs.co/
Man, I really hope that eventually this technology will allow us to build beautiful housing again.
For a second I thought the guy at the computer is the CNC statue.
I would love to see a statue of a guy designing the statue at the computer
It would be fun to be able to order custom stone statues or artwork made like this.
I've been watching these robots carve stone on instagram for years now...
This is both incredible and I think… “misses the point” is the wrong phrase, but maybe omits something both subtle and crucial in the process.
A gothic cathedral is both an incredible work of art and also the work of hundreds or thousands of hands over decades and centuries - you are looking not just at the final product, but at the love and commitment it took to make that work of art, the long-term dedication and belief that it should exist even if we don’t live to see it exist. You’re looking at an expression of love not just for God and for art and beauty, but for future generations and people we’ll never know. The time and effort isn’t an unfortunate part of the process, it’s intrinsic to what we feel when we witness the cathedral - a connection to others, reaching both ways.
I understand why the monks have developed this technique, and I don’t disagree with them - the act of building a gothic cathedral is outside the capacity of modern society. I’ll never begrudge someone a hack to preserve some beauty in this machine we’ve created. But I can’t help but feel like they’ve created a facsimile of a cathedral - they’ve created the palace at Disneyland, not Notre Dame.
The proportions, materials, overall design is quite beautiful. How is that not an expression to God? Having a few hundred people die falling off of scaffolding and taking 50 years to build is not helping anyone today.
Perhaps a few dead bodies and a couple hundred years of recitations will do the trick?
Put another way, if monks in the year 1k had a CNC router like this, they wouldn’t have peasants take 50 years to arrive at their expression to God.
It’s the architecture and the design that reflects the Lord almighty. The peasants doing it are a means to an end: so the church stands tall, so they can massacre the non-believers, burn witches, infidels, and imprison astronomers. All in the comfort of a beautiful cathedral.
If the monks in the year 1k had CNC machines, they’d have built bigger and more elaborate cathedrals. The act was the message. The gothic cathedral was impossible by medieval standards, and that was part of the act of building it.
And, to your point, yes, if the monks followed the construction with a hundred years of prayer and sacrifice to consecrate the building, indeed the building would carry a more powerful emotional resonance than it does now. The sacrifice is the point, the effort is the point. It’s an act of devotion, not just one of construction.
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Not every building with stone carvings will be gothic cathedrals with regular incomes- there will be thousands of small churches out there, which don't have the budget for expensive stonemasons to hand carve items for repairs.
If we want to protect historic buildings for generations to enjoy then we're going to need to be more pragmatic.
Most buildings are not historic. Protecting everything ruins the value for things that are worth protecting.
I have come to the conclusion that if it is worth protecting you can see it in tourist numbers - people who go out of their way to look at something.
Like I said, I’m not mad at the monks for this, and I’ll never be mad at someone for creating more powerful means of expressing beauty.
The Sagrada Família is a "recently" built cathedral, and I'd say is on a similar level as a Gothic cathedral. So modern society is not necessarily incapable of similar feats.
Yes, I’d agree with this. I’d almost say it’s the exception that proves the rule - it’s such an exceptional project in the modern sense that its presence highlights the absence of others.
I suppose things like the Svalbard seed vault are similar secular efforts, as is the Long Now’s clock, although that feels somewhat more self-indulgent than these others. I’m interested in others, if you can think of them.
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I do agree with you over all, but I am not certain it's outside the capacity of modern society. You only need to look at the group in France[0] where they are building a medieval castle using only period appropriate tools and techniques. It is more of a research project than an act of devotion, but I think it demonstrates that we are still capable of such acts.
[0] https://www.guedelon.fr/en/
We don't lack the ability. We lack the time/energy/money (these are all the same thing!).
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Not that I disagree, but I want to confirm: you are suggesting the reason (or one of the reasons) they chose to do stone carving, as opposed to some other form of monastic pursuit, was because it took a lot of time and effort?
A great deal of monastic pursuit was in the interest of slowing down, focusing, applying one’s entire self to something, and recognizing the greatness of god and creation, so yes, anything that encouraged focus and contemplation would have been privileged on those merits.
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> But I can’t help but feel like they’ve created a facsimile of a cathedral - they’ve created the palace at Disneyland, not Versailles.
You could at least compare to Notre Dame. It’s a bit tone deaf to draw comparison to Versailles, which was a vanity project to glorify the French monarchy.
Yeah, that’s fair, updated.
I think you're missing a subtlety of the situation. You're right that gothic cathedrals were enormous undertakings, and that the enormity was itself a worshipful and meditative act that drew in the entire community, current and future.
Even with the CNC machines, this is still a multi-decade endeavor that will span generations because the number of monks (and outside support) is small and not getting larger. They've scaled down the work required to match their capabilities, and still creating something that will last centuries. Relative to their community, it's still a cathedral effort.
Adore everything about this
Finally, I can write my code as it was intended.
To be set in stone? Wow, that is some confidence!
cybermonks of wyoming
love it
Reddit Cofounder Alexis Ohanian has a startup, Monumental Labs, which is applying robotic milling to stonework. The finishing process is still done by hand and appears quite labour intensive
https://www.monumentallabs.co/work
It may be worthwhile noting that the medieval Carmelites have pulled off some impressive civil engineering projects in their own right. St. John of the Cross himself is credited with the design and construction of an aqueduct for their monastery in Spain.
https://www.ocarm.org/en/item/4545-st-john-of-the-cross-myst...
It may seem from our perspective that monasteries are full of prayer and spiritual endeavors, but they are also the site of a large amount of manual labor and highly-educated expertise that can be brought to bear on large projects like this.
Illustrated books often have a note about how the illustrations are made. One of my son's books had a joke note, saying that the illustrations were taken from a text of the monks of St. Parmesan (or something to that effect). Maybe the author was in on it, but it seems like a poorly thought out joke because so many cheeses were made by monks!
... and the audience is too mature to mention that the internet stole the acronym Computer Numerical Control, so its often shortened to Numerical Control to make it safe to search?
We should all be into consensual numerical control.
Oh jeez, this explains a lot of the funny looks I get when I tell people I'm building a CNC machine in my garage with belts and pipes and such.
If you're ever feeling weird about it, don't forget that you can always use CBT!
When AI wipes out programming jobs over the next few years, do you think we will see a revival in the number of young men going into monkhood?
I think robotically driven historic building renovation is one of the safest jobs.
1. Loads of pent up historic demand 2. Work is complex, sensitive and physical. 3. There's more history every day!
There are other options that are - unfortunately - more likely. Historically the clergy was only a small fraction of the total number of excess males removed.
>"When AI wipes out programming jobs over the next few years, do you think we will see a revival in the number of young men going into monkhood?"
The church historically absorbed excess males in this way and gave them a dignified purpose in life, it's not a crazy thought at all.
Concretely it absorbed an excess of male heirs so they could live a comfy life and would not try an hostile takeover over their elder brothers' state.
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