How To Build a 13th-Century Castle, Using Only Authentic Medieval Tools & Techniques

in Architecture, History, Television | March 31st, 2022

It’s the rare Englishman who will readily defer to a Frenchman — except, of course, in the field of castle-building. This was true after the Norman Conquest of 1066, which introduced French castles to Britain, and it remains so today, especially under the demands of period accuracy. In order to learn first-hand just what materials and technical skills went into those mightiest structures of the Middle Ages, the BBC Two series Secrets of the Castle had to go all the way to Burgundy. There Château de Guédelon has been under construction for the past 25 years, with its builders adhering as closely as possible to the way they would have done the job back in the thirteenth century, the “golden age of castle-building.”

Hosted by historian Ruth Goodman along with archaeologists Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold, Secrets of the Castle comprises five episodes that cover a variety of aspects of the medieval castle: its tools, its defense, its architecture, its stonemasonry, and its connections to the rest of the world.

The work of “experimental archaeology” that is Guédelon demands mastery of nearly millennia-old building methods, the simple ingeniousness of some of which remains impressive today. So, in our increasingly disembodied age, does their sheer physicality of it all: apart from the horses carting stone in from the quarry (itself a strong determinant in the siting of a castle), everything was accomplished with sheer human muscle.

Much of that manpower was leveraged with machines, often elaborate and sometimes amusing: take, for example, the pair of human-sized hamster wheels in which Gill and Pinfold run in order to operate a crane. Such a hard day’s work can only be fueled by a hearty meal, and so Goodman learns how to cook a simple vegetable stew. Same with how to clean and indeed craft the cooking pots needed to do so. For a castle wasn’t just a fortified symbol of a kingdom’s strength, but a place where all manner of life went on, as well as a stone embodiment of human knowledge in the Middle Ages. Secrets of the Castle originally aired in 2014, and since then a great deal more period-accurate work has gone into Guédelon. Scheduled for completion next year, the castle will presumably — as long as the skills of its builders prove equal to those of their forebears — still be standing in the 29th century.

An Animated Video Shows the Building of a Medieval Bridge: 45 Years of Construction in 3 Minutes

What Did People Eat in Medieval Times? A Video Series and New Cookbook Explain

A 13th-Century Cookbook Featuring 475 Recipes from Moorish Spain Gets Published in a New Translated Edition

How Women Got Dressed in the 14th & 18th Centuries: Watch the Very Painstaking Process Get Cinematically Recreated

A is for Architecture: 1960 Documentary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Modern Times

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Insulated Glass Changed Architecture: An Introduction to the Technological Breakthrough That Changed How We Live and How Our Buildings Work

in Architecture, History, Technology | February 11th, 2022

When we think of a “midcentury modern” home, we think of glass walls. In part, this has to do with the post-World War II decades’ promotion of the southern California-style indoor-outdoor suburban lifestyle. But business and culture are downstream of technology, and, in this specific case, the technology known as insulated glass. Its development solved the problem of glass windows that had dogged architecture since at least the second century: they let in light, but even more so cold and heat. Only in the 1930s did a refrigeration engineer figure out how to make windows with not one but two panes of glass and an insulating layer of air between them. Its trade name: Thermopane.

First manufactured by the Libbey-Owens-Ford glass company, “Thermopane changed the possibilities for architects,” says Vox’s Phil Edwards in the video above, “How Insulated Glass Changed Architecture.” In it he speaks with architectural historian Thomas Leslie, who says that “by the 1960s, if you’re putting a big window into any residential or office building” in all but the most temperate climates, you were using insulated glass “almost by default.”

Competing glass manufacturers introduced a host of variations on and innovations in not just the technology but the marketing as well: “No home is truly modern without TWINDOW,” declared one brand’s magazine advertisement.

The associated imagery, says Leslie, was “always a sliding glass door looking out onto a very verdant landscape,” which promised “a way of connecting your inside world and your outside world” (as well as “being able to see all of your stuff”). But the new possibility of “walls of glass” made for an even more visible change in commercial architecture, being the sine qua non of the smoothly reflective skyscrapers that rise from every American downtown. Today, of course, we can see 80, 900, 100 floors of sheer glass stacked up in cities all over the world, shimmering declarations of membership among the developed nations. Those sliding glass doors, by the same token, once announced an American family’s arrival into the prosperous middle class — and now, more than half a century later, still look like the height of modernity.

How the Radical Buildings of the Bauhaus Revolutionized Architecture: A Short Introduction

The Surprising Reason Why Chinatowns Worldwide Share the Same Aesthetic, and How It All Started with the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

Tony Hawk & Architectural Historian Iain Borden Tell the Story of How Skateboarding Found a New Use for Cities & Architecture

Why Europe Has So Few Skyscrapers

A Glass Floor in a Dublin Grocery Store Lets Shoppers Look Down & Explore Medieval Ruins

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Incredible Story of the Hoover Dam

in Architecture, History | January 26th, 2022

On September 30, 1935, a crowd of thousands watched as President Franklin Roosevelt officially opened the Hoover Dam, the largest public works project of its time. “Approximately 5 million barrels of cement and 45 pounds of reinforcement steel” went into it, History.com notes, enough to pave a four-foot-wide sidewalk around the Earth at the equator. The massive hydroelectric dam provided water to 7 surrounding states, transforming the arid American West into an agricultural center. Currently, it generates over four billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, “enough to serve 1.3 million people,” notes PBS.

That a project this size could be completed in just five years seems awe-inspiring enough. That it could be done during the worst years of the Great Depression, even more so. When the dam was first proposed in 1922 to deal with flooding on the Colorado River, the crisis still lay over the horizon.

.

A glorious post-war future seemed assured, masterminded by Hoover, the former engineer. (He did not design the dam, but brokered the deal that pushed it through Congress.) During the dam’s construction, on the other hand — a feat compared to building the pyramids in Egypt — the U.S. economy had fully hit rock bottom. Although it had been dedicated to Hoover by President Coolidge in 1928, the Hoover Dam wouldn’t come to bear his name until 1947.

In its early years, the massive, smooth white concrete curve — stretching 1,244 feet across the Black Canyon on the Arizona-Nevada Border — was simply called the Boulder Canyon Dam. It drew some 21,000 workers to divert the river through tunnels, excavate the riverbed down to bedrock, and build the enormous structure and its machinery. “Due to the strict timeframe, workers suffered from horrible work conditions in the tunnels as the heat and carbon monoxide-filled air became unbearable, leading to a strike in August of 1931,” writes Alexia Wulff at the Culture Trip.

Once they began clearing the blasted walls of the canyon, workers “hung from suspended heights of 800 feet above ground — some fell to their death or were injured by the falling rock and dangerous equipment.” Over 100 men died in this way and such deaths, and near-misses, seemed commonplace after a while. In the TED-Ed video by Alex Gendler at the top of the post, we see one jaw-dropping near-miss dramatized in animation. “Business as usual,” says the narrator. “Just another day in the construction of the Hoover Dam.”

Learn much more about the engineering marvels, and the “blood, concrete, and dynamite,” as Gendler puts it, in the short B1M video further up and the full National Geographic documentary just above. While it has been surpassed in size, the Hoover Dam remains one of the largest power plants in the country, and may even be ideal for use as a giant battery that can store excess power created by wind and solar. Even if that idea fails to pan out in coming years, the story of the dam’s construction will keep inspiring engineers and scientists to reach for big solutions, even — and perhaps especially — in the middle of a crisis.

Watch Venice’s New $7 Billion Flood Defense System in Action

Why Europe Has So Few Skyscrapers

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An 8‑Minute Animated Flight Over Ancient Rome

in Animation, Architecture, History | January 25th, 2022

“At roof-top level, Rome may seem a city of spires and steeples and towers that reach up towards eternal truths,” said Anthony Burgess of the great city in which he lived in the mid-70s. “But this city is not built in the sky. It is built on dirt, earth, dung, copulation, death, humanity.” For all the city’s ancient grandeur, the real Rome is to be found in its brothels, bathhouses, and catacombs, a sentiment widely shared by writers in Rome since Lucilius, often credited as Rome’s first satirist, a genre invented to bring the lofty down to earth.

“The Romans … proudly declared that satire was ‘totally ours,’ ” writes Robert Cowan, senior lecturer in classics at the University of Sydney. “Instead of heroes, noble deeds, and city-foundations recounted in elevated language,” ancient Romans constructed their literature from “a hodgepodge of scumbags, orgies, and the breakdown of urban society, spat out in words as filthy as the vices they describe.” Little wonder, perhaps, that the author of A Clockwork Orange found Rome so much to his liking. For all the Christianity overlaid atop the ruins, “the Romans are not a holy people; they are pagans.”

In the video above, see an 8‑minute rooftop-level flight above the ancient imperial city, “the most extensive, detailed and accurate virtual 3D reconstruction of Ancient Rome,” its creators, History in 3D, write. They are about halfway through the project, which currently includes such areas as the Forum, the Colosseum, Imperial Forums, “famous baths, theaters, temples and palaces” and the Trastevere, where Burgess made his home millennia after the period represented in the CGI reconstruction above and where, he wrote in the 1970s, antiquity had been preserved: “Trasteverini… regard themselves as the true Romans.”

The language of this Rome, like that of Juvenal, the ancient city’s greatest satirist, offers “a ground-level view of a Rome we could barely guess at from the heroism of the Aeneid,” writes Cowan. “The language of the Trasteverini is rough,” writes Burgess, “scurrilous, blasphemous, obscene, the tongue of the gutter. Many of them are leaders of intensity, rebels agains the government. They have had two thousand years of bad government and they must look forward to two thousand more.”

As we drift over the city’s rooftops in the impressively rendered animation above, we might imagine its streets below teeming with profane, disgruntled Romans of all kinds. It may be impossible to recreate Ancient Rome at street level, with all of its many sights, smells, and sounds. But if we’ve been to Rome, or ever get the chance to visit, we may marvel, along with Burgess, at its “continuity of culture.… Probably Rome has changed less in two thousand years than Manhattan has in twenty years.” The Empire may have been fated to collapse under its own weight, but Rome, the Eternal City, may indeed endure forever.

The History of Ancient Rome in 20 Quick Minutes: A Primer Narrated by Brian Cox

What Did the Roman Emperors Look Like?: See Photorealistic Portraits Created with Machine Learning

Josh Jones is a writer based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Why Europe Has So Few Skyscrapers

in Architecture, History | December 28th, 2021

Guy de Maupassant ate lunch at the restaurant in the base of the Eiffel Tower nearly every day, that being the only place in Paris where he wouldn’t have to look at the Eiffel Tower. 130 years later, the observation deck of the Tour Montparnasse is known to offer the most beautiful vista on the French capital — thanks precisely to the invisibility of the Tour Montparnasse. Spare a thought, if you will, for that highly conspicuous building, quite possibly the loneliest in Europe. Since its completion in 1973, it has stood as the sole skyscraper in Paris proper, its famous unsightliness having inspired a ban on the construction of buildings over seven stories high in the city center.

Paris isn’t alone in its lack of skyscrapers, a condition travelers from Asia and America notice in cities all over the Continent. In the video above, construction-themed Youtube channel The B1M explores the reasons for this relative paucity of tall towers in the capitals of Europe. “When skyscrapers first rose to prominence in the 19th century, first in Chicago and later in New York, many European cities were already firmly established with grand historic buildings and public spaces that left little room for large new structures,” says its narrator. At that time, a growing sense of cultural competition between America and Europe also meant that “each continent became wary of adopting the other’s concepts.”

Then came the Second World War, in the wake of whose devastation of Europe “an overwhelming desire to restore what had been destroyed took hold.” Few Continental cities held off the kind of demand for floor space that drove skyscraper construction in America. In the east, the Soviets built mostly “mid-rise, repetitive structures that sought to rehouse much of the population”; in the west, the restrictive phenomenon of “Brusselization” took hold in response to a wave of bulky postwar-modernist structures “that had little regard for architectural or cultural value.” This led to “a general dislike for modern buildings across Europe, with many seeing them as bland or soulless.”

No one who’s spent time in American city centers built up predominantly in the 1960s and 70s can dismiss those European detractors’ fears. But it would be a lie to claim that European cities have avoided skyscrapers entirely: even Paris has simply pushed them a few miles away, into unromantic business districts like La Défense. Ever-taller buildings have symbolized modernity for well over a century now, and no civilization can afford to keep modernity at too great a distance. Taking note of how attitudes toward skyscrapers have been “softening across the Continent” in the 21st century, this B1M video speculates on the possibility of a “skyscraper boom” in Europe. But even if that should happen, the Tour Montparnasse will surely continue standing alone.

Why Do People Hate Modern Architecture?: A Video Essay

The Creation & Restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral, Animated

Watch the Building of the Empire State Building in Color: The Creation of the Iconic 1930s Skyscraper From Start to Finish

An Introduction to the Chrysler Building, New York’s Art Deco Masterpiece, by John Malkovich (1994)

Watch 50+ Documentaries on Famous Architects & Buildings: Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Hadid & Many More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch the Building of the Empire State Building in Color: The Creation of the Iconic 1930s Skyscraper From Start to Finish

in Architecture, Film, History | December 23rd, 2021

Ambition is not unknown in the New York City of the 2020s, but the New York City of the 1920s seems to have consisted of nothing but. Back then, where else would anyone dare to propose the tallest building in the world — much less end up with the job twelve days ahead of schedule and $9 million under budget? The construction of the Empire State Building began in January of 1930, just three months after the Wall Street Crash that began the Great Depression. Though economic conditions kept the project from attaining profitability until the 1950s (and stuck it with the nickname “Empty State Building”), it nevertheless stood in symbolic defiance of those hard times — and, ultimately, came to stand for New York and indeed the United Sates of America itself.

You can see footage of the Empire State Building’s construction in the compilation above, which gathers clips from contemporary newsreels and other sources and presents them in “restored, enhanced and colorized” form.

These images showcase the history-making skyscraper’s technical innovations as well as its marshaling of labor at an immense scale: at the height of construction, more than 3,500 workers were involved. That most of them were recent immigrants from countries like Ireland and Italy reflects the popular image of early 20th-century America as a “land of opportunity”; the sheer scale of the skyscraper they built reflects the previously unimaginable works made possible by America’s resources.

The Empire State Building set records, and over the 90 years since its opening has remained a difficult achievement to surpass. Only in 1970 did it lose its title of the tallest building in New York City, to Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center — and then regained it in 2001 after the latter’s collapse. Today, one can easily point to much taller and more technologically advanced skyscrapers all around the world, but how many of them are as beloved or rich with associations? Back in 1931, architecture critic Douglas Haskell described the Empire State Building as “caught between metal and stone, between the idea of ‘monumental mass’ and that of airy volume, between handicraft and machine design, and in the swing from what was essentially handicraft to what will be essentially industrial methods of fabrication” — as good an explanation as any of why they don’t build ’em like this anymore.

Watch the Completely Unsafe, Vertigo-Inducing Footage of Workers Building New York’s Iconic Skyscrapers

A New Interactive Map Shows All Four Million Buildings That Existed in New York City from 1939 to 1941

An Introduction to the Chrysler Building, New York’s Art Deco Masterpiece, by John Malkovich (1994)

Watch the Building of the Eiffel Tower in Timelapse Animation

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

New York’s Lost Skyscraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tower

in Architecture | December 15th, 2021

New York is never just one city; it’s always several, interacting with – or pushing out – each other. This goes for the city’s architecture as much as for its population. Its strata of public works projects, cultural institutions, department stores, hotels, hostels, housing, and skyscraping office buildings tell the story of its evolution. Now, artists, urbanists, and architects protest faceless condos and big box stores. In decades past, they fought the faceless towers that rose into the atmosphere and blocked the sun. Such opposition stretches back well over 100 years, to the turn-of-the-century New York of the Flatiron Building and Beaux Arts wonders like Penn Station, a building, The New York Times writes, that “once made travelers feel important.”

“In the 1890’s,” writes Christopher Gray, Paris-trained architect Ernest Flagg “denounced the growing crop of skyscrapers, and by the turn of the 20th century he was horrified by the darkened streets and raw side walls produced by such buildings.” Flagg’s opinions were of little interest to his New York employers, so he “shifted his focus to reforming skyscraper design” instead of decrying them outright.

The endeavor produced a modern marvel, “a one-of-a-kind tower” rising above the New York City skyline, notes the video above, “a total masterpiece of architecture and engineering unlike anything seen before” — the Singer Tower, built for the Singer Sewing Machine Company in 1908.

So impressive was it for its time that Flagg’s building won comparisons to the pyramids of Ancient Egypt. For a brief moment, between the years 1908 and 1909, it was the tallest building in the world, until it lost the title to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, another unusual building unlike the rectangular skyscrapers against which Flagg railed. Unconcerned with maximizing available real estate, he “urged that skyscraper towers more than 10 or 15 stories high should be set back from the property lines, so that the tower occupied only one-quarter of the lot,” writes Gray. “All four sides could then be treated architecturally, and ‘we should soon have a city of towers instead of a city of dismal ravines.’ ”

Working in a Beaux-Arts style, Flagg put his theories to the test in the Singer Tower, also called the Singer Building, expanding an original 10-story base to 14 stories, then building a smaller 33 ‑story tower atop it. Capped by a dome with a lantern and flagpole rising from it, the tower’s “bulbous top became one of New York’s best known landmarks.” Its lobby had the ornate luxury “seen in world’s fair and exposition architecture of the period.” But Flagg’s vision of “a city of free-standing towers” would remain the dream of a single architect. Despite his work for legislation to curb skyscrapers that took up entire city blocks, such buildings, including the 34-story City Investing Building, would continue to rise around the distinctive Singer Tower.

Finally, Flagg’s quirks proved too much for New York’s real estate elite. When the Singer company moved its headquarters in 1961, interest in the Tower remained low “because the small square footage of the building’s narrow tower was antithetical to the booming growth of modern business, which demanded more, not less, office space,” writes Katie Hiler. Deconstruction of the first skyscraper “ever to be peacefully demolished” began in 1967, five years after the demolition of Penn Station. In place of the Singer Tower would rise the 54-story One Liberty Plaza, a harbinger of things to come in the city’s new financial hub, the World Trade Center.

The Story Behind the Iconic Photograph of 11 Construction Workers Lunching 840 Feet Above New York City (1932)

An Introduction to the Chrysler Building, New York’s Art Deco Masterpiece, by John Malkovich (1994)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

When the Colosseum in Rome Became the Home of Hundreds of Exotic Plant Species

in Architecture, Biology, History | December 7th, 2021

The Colosseum is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Italy, and thus one of the most popular tourist attractions in all of Europe. But the nature of its appeal to its many visitors has changed over the centuries. In the Atlantic, novelist and podcaster Paul Cooper notes that, “the belief that Christian martyrs had once been fed to the lions in the arena,” for example, once made it a renowned site of religious pilgrimage. (This “despite little evidence that Christians were ever actually killed in the arena.”) But in that same era, the Colosseum was also a site of botanic pilgrimage: amid its ruins grew “420 species of plant,” including some rare examples “found nowhere else in Europe.”

Notable tourists who took note of the Colosseum’s rich plant life include Charles Dickens, who beheld its “walls and arches overgrown with green,” and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote of how “the copsewood overshadows you as you wander through its labyrinths, and the wild weeds of this climate of flowers bloom under your feet.”

Cooper quotes from these writings in his Atlantic piece, and in an associated Twitter thread also includes plenty of renderings of the Colosseum as it then looked during the 18th and 19th centuries. He even selected images from Flora of the Colosseum of Rome, or, Illustrations and descriptions of four hundred and twenty plants growing spontaneously upon the ruins of the Colosseum of Rome (readable free online at the Internet Archive), the 1855 work of a less well-known Englishman named Richard Deakin.

A botanist, Deakin did the hard work of cataloging those hundreds of plant species growing in the Colosseum back in the 1850s. The intervening 170 or so years have taken their toll on this biodiversity: as Nature reported it, only 242 of these species were still present in the early 2000s, due in part to “a shift towards species that prefer a warmer, drier climate” and the growth of the surrounding city. In its heyday in the first centuries of the last millennium, the arena lay on the outskirts of Rome, whereas it feels central today. Pay it a visit, and you both will and will not see the Colosseum that Dickens and Shelley did; but then, they never knew it as, say, Titus or Domitian did. In recent years there have been moves to restore and even improve ancient features like the retractable floor; why not double down on the exotic flora while we’re at it?

via The Atlantic

The Roman Colosseum Has a Twin in Tunisia: Discover the Amphitheater of El Jem, One of the Best-Preserved Roman Ruins in the World

A Virtual Tour of Ancient Rome, Circa 320 CE: Explore Stunning Recreations of The Forum, Colosseum and Other Monuments

High-Resolution Walking Tours of Italy’s Most Historic Places: The Colosseum, Pompeii, St. Peter’s Basilica & More

Building The Colosseum: The Icon of Rome

With 9,036 Pieces, the Roman Colosseum Is the Largest Lego Set Ever

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How To Build a 13th-Century Castle, Using Only Authentic Medieval Tools & Techniques

How Insulated Glass Changed Architecture: An Introduction to the Technological Breakthrough That Changed How We Live and How Our Buildings Work

The Incredible Story of the Hoover Dam

An 8‑Minute Animated Flight Over Ancient Rome

Why Europe Has So Few Skyscrapers

Watch the Building of the Empire State Building in Color: The Creation of the Iconic 1930s Skyscraper From Start to Finish

New York’s Lost Skyscraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tower

When the Colosseum in Rome Became the Home of Hundreds of Exotic Plant Species

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search