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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

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

For example, Rodin had it figured out. He just hired more sculptors!

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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)

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/

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.

or monumental labs

Man, I really hope that eventually this technology will allow us to build beautiful housing again.

I would love to see a statue of a guy designing the statue at the computer

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.

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.

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/

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?

> 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.

To be set in stone? Wow, that is some confidence!

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!

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.

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.