20 ms·

Workers rely on medieval era tech to reconstruct the Notre Dame

108 points by berkeleyjunk 3y ago

falcolas 3y ago
I've seen some videos on TikTok by stonemasons who are re-building the decorative shapes in chunks of marble; it's very cool to watch and see them doing it. It's probably not even remotely economic or "productive", but sometimes that's OK.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Funny, how the knowledge about cathedral building was rather well preserved. After all, all cathedrals still standing have a cadrebof employed masons and other artisans to maintain and renovate them. The actual building is dofferent, I assume an lot of that will be rediscovered during the Notre Dam restauration.
  - falcolas 3y ago
    It's my belief that the underpinning design principles have not been lost - cathedrals are quite well studied by architects as I understand it. So, while some of the specifics are probably having to be identified and re-implemented, the basics are broadly understood. Stonemasons as a mass-employer has gone away, but like blacksmithing there are still individuals out there who carry on the tradition.
- jfengel 3y ago
  The whole building isn't economic or productive. They could probably make more money tearing it down and replacing it with a Starbucks. The vast majority of human activity isn't productive. And that's awesome. We've got so much wealth that we can afford to use it on things that are merely pretty or interesting, like video games and space telescopes and flowers. It would be nice if we could use more of it to ensure that people have the basics, but that's rarely about lack of money. It's nearly always due to some more systemic problem that can't be fought just by throwing money at it.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    > The whole building isn't economic or productive. They could probably make more money tearing it down and replacing it with a Starbucks. It likely has economic impact vastly larger than any Starbucks via tourism.
    - barelyauser 3y ago
      And what does "economic impact" means? A bunch of people burning jet fuel to get there and spend some hours looking at it? Why not working towards helping other people?
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        Buying from the cafes nearby. Patronizing the hotels. Going to see a show after. All the things one does in the neighborhood around a tourist attraction. A week-long golf tournament in my town brings in 200k+ people and local government touts a $190M economic impact number for that. I'm sure it's fudged to be as high as possible, but pretending Notre Dame doesn't have an economic benefit to Paris would be odd.
        barelyauser 3y ago
        Money means nothing. Human time is what matters. Consider that back at their place of origin things did not get done. Economic impact means nothing. If I gave you $100 to watch me do nothing, what value this transaction created? There is virtually nothing to show for at the end but we created $100 of economic impact...
        ceejayoz 3y ago
        > If I gave you $100 to watch me do nothing, what value this transaction created? That seems entirely up to you.
      - lo_zamoyski 3y ago
        I have always been disgusted by this sort of low, mediocre, pseudo-moral argument. "Why build these grand churches? You could feed people with that money!" "Why put all this effort into beautiful buildings? You could build more low-income housing for the same cash!" It sickens me. We can do both. Man does not live by bread alone. Utilitarian mediocrity is satisfied with a full stomach and keeping warm.
bambax 3y ago
The rebuilding is apparently going well, but this is hiding the fact that nobody seems to be doing any inquiry about why the fire wasn't stopped in time. As far as we know, the fire was an accident (not foul play) -- but an extremely preventable one. There were works in progress on the roof of the cathedral, so people were coming and going, some of them possibly smoking, electrical devices were being used, etc. And to monitor all this activity, there was only one guy, who had started on the job a couple of weeks earlier, who had received little to no training, and who didn't even know where the alarm was. The point was to "save on costs", that is, in order to save maybe 1,300 euros / month over three months, the people in charge caused 1 billion euros of damage and lost irreparable historical artefacts. There is a whole administrative department in France, whose sole responsibility is to make sure this kind of catastrophe never happens. At the very least, people should have been fired, from the site manager to the culture minister. Yet nobody's being investigated, let alone prosecuted or punished. Incredible.
- soco 3y ago
  "Save the costs" is the official religion of the MBA era we live in and no sacrifice is too big. Am I sarcastic? I can't tell.
  - dr-detroit 3y ago
    Its a waste of money you could actually help people instead. When Victor Hugo published his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1831 nobody cared about Notre Dame. Anything of value had been stolen during the French Revolution and the Cathedral was in terrible repair.
  - scottLobster 3y ago
    Yep, to the modern administrative class "don't shit where you eat" is laughably old fashioned. Modernity brings a new contest: who can shit where they eat the most for the longest? Last one to get cholera wins! And don't worry about the actual cholera infection, that's what taxpayer bailouts are for!
    - 3y ago
soco 3y ago
They also rely on medieval era trees to reconstruct it, as the more than 1000 oak trees painstakingly sought through entire France had to be more than 1 m wide. Okay not medieval - they are only about 200 years old. Could have made a nice title though.
- Fiahil 3y ago
  Between 200 and 400 years old, yes, exactly ! Most of those trees are older than the United States :)
- shagie 3y ago
  There's the story by the Long Now foundation about the oak beams at the New College in Oxford https://longnow.org/ideas/humans-and-trees-in-long-term-partnership/ https://longnow.org/ideas/humans-and-trees-in-long-term-part... /// https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-oxford https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-ox... /// https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2013/oct/02/david-cameron-oxford-college-trees-myth https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2013/oct/02/david-... Another example (and less debatable in its authenticity) Why the US Navy Manages Its Own Private Forest - https://www.military.com/history/why-us-navy-manages-its-own-private-forest.html https://www.military.com/history/why-us-navy-manages-its-own... /// https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/2015/05/11/the-wooden-walls/ https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/2015/05/11/the-wooden-wall... (and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28793461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28793461 )
  - kryptiskt 3y ago
    In the 1950s, Lund Cathedral bought the quarries where the stone for it originally came 900 years ago, so they know they have a source of the right stone for renovations.
- franky47 3y ago
  We have a forest in the center of France that was dedicated to producing ship masts. Surely some of those oak trees may have fit the bill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_Tron%C3%A7ais https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_Tron%C3%A7ais
cirrus3 3y ago
There is a great episode of NOVA about it: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/rebuilding-notre-dame/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/rebuilding-notre-dame/
cmcaleer 3y ago
Whatever happened to the many hundreds of millions French billionaires said they would donate for it? I know a couple have coughed up, and most of the companies who said they would have but I don't all who promised to do so have.
- dnissley 3y ago
  Nothing here suggests they're running short on funds
hwc 3y ago
they should have built the roof with steel & glass so it can't burn!
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  But it would have been ugly.
- klyrs 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Palace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Palace
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Don't forget the controversial but spectacular Christ (née Crystal) Cathedral in Orange County: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_Cathedral_(Garden_Grove,_California) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_Cathedral_(Garden_Grove... Which was a Televangelical showpiece until it was purchased and renovated by the Roman Catholic diocese. Everything old is new again!
franky47 3y ago
There are many solutions in old hand-tool woodworking that were elegant back then, and are still more relevant today than spinning a tool at 20k RPM. Example: when removing waste with a chisel for joinery, going cross-grain allows popping large chunks with ease, rather than route them to dust. And it's a lot of fun! Power tools do have a use for repeatability and mass-production, which may be useful in the Notre Dame build, but I find the carpenters' approach more honorable.
- samtho 3y ago
  As a woodworker, I get what your saying but calling the approach of using older methods as “more honorable” kind of rubs me the wrong way. It’s not like the original builders had a choice of what to use, I would bet they would choose the modern stuff if you could somehow loan them the technology from the future. Using modern tools is not antithetical to craftsmanship, it’s about the care, attention to detail, designs choices, using appropriate materials/fasteners, etc. Not saying they have to change the look at all, but they can make good and faithful reproductions with modern tools that capture the essence of what was lost.
  - mywittyname 3y ago
    Cheap and quick has been the carpenter's mantra since the dawn of time. One look at the inside of an old piece of furniture shows how little effort went into things that weren't readily seen. Mortise and tenon joints are fast and easy (read: cheap and quick) to make with a chisel and hammer. You can bet carpenters of old would be using nails and screws to build all kinds of things, if they were as cheap and abundant as they are now.
    - mauvehaus 3y ago
      As a professional furniture maker, I assure you that cutting mortises by hand is not high on anybody's list of cheap and quick things to do. At the furniture scale, we've had foot and spring powered mortiser since before we had electricity. For timber framing and similar scales, most of the waste has been bored out with manual boring machines and then the rest of the mortise is finished by hand. Chopping is a pain in the ass, and people have been doing their best to avoid it for centuries. Hell, we're still inventing new ways to cut mortises: see the Festool Domino, which is recent enough to still be protected by patents.
shirleyquirk 3y ago
I came here to share that the importance of using contemporaneous materials, if not methods, was highlighted for me when I worked on Bath cathedral and saw how the victorian 'improvements' of using iron rather than wood to fix the stonework caused much damage a century later; iron expands when it rusts and causes cracking. Then I see linked in that article that Notre Dame was a very early example of using iron staples! I can only think that they were used away from water, unlike Bath, where the repairs were on the window fixings.
- mywittyname 3y ago
  > iron expands when it rusts and causes cracking. This is often a contributing factor in the failure of modern steel-reinforced concrete structures.
- scottshea 3y ago
  I am glad I got to see your handiwork! Love the Bath Cathedral
ars 3y ago
> it’s ethically and artistically far more imperative to stay true I could maybe understand artistically if the end result looks different. But ethically? It's a building, ethics don't apply to it.
- barney54 3y ago
  I didn't realize that using power tools was unethical.
- ElFitz 3y ago
  One could argue the ethical imperative isn’t towards the building itself but towards future generations.
  - ars 3y ago
    Why would future generations care if you used a handsaw or a powersaw to cut some wood?
    - ElFitz 3y ago
      They could care about being left with something that is qualitatively worse than what burned down during our time because people chose to cut corners. Now, does using a powersaw instead of a handsaw produce qualitatively worse results? I have no idea. I know nothing about woodworking. And I’ve certainly never worked on restoring or rebuilding any kind of monument. Let alone a centuries old one. Perhaps they consider it to be important to set what they see as the proper mindset? Perhaps it’s just for show? Or to tell them themselves they did it the best they could? Perhaps there is an objective technical justification? How could I know? The closest I’ve ever come to cutting wood was using some hydraulic wedge thing at the back of a tractor. So I’m not arguing and will not be arguing about the specifics of their choices in tools and techniques. That’d be vain and pointless, and I could not argue in good faith. Which is fine, because the technique is not my point. My point sole is that, despite it being a building, there can still be an ethical imperative. That’s all.
Animats 3y ago
They're using ordinary power tools, such as bandsaws and sanders. There's some hand tool work on the connections between beams. It looks like cabinetmaking carpentry on a larger scale, with lots of chiseled joints.[1] The real hand work is on artistic stonework. That really is being done by hand. Omni CNC's proposals to make replacement parts with their stone-cutting computer controlled milling machines were turned down.[2] [1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/travel/notre-dame-restoration-get-first-look-at-new-wooden-spire/vi-AA18Kxox https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/travel/notre-dame-restoratio... [2] https://www.omni-cnc.com/how-cnc-stone-cutting-machine-help-rebuild-norte-dame-church/ https://www.omni-cnc.com/how-cnc-stone-cutting-machine-help-...
- hef19898 3y ago
  And for good reason. Machining stone masonry for a cathedral, when you actually have a ton of people being really good at doing it by hand, is somewhat like Musk's cave submarine.
  - UncleEntity 3y ago
    For some reason English folk restoring French châteaus came up on my YouTube feed and I kind of like watching them. Being able to hire craftspeople who can do things “the old way” is apparently very important when dealing with (the bureaucracy around) old buildings. A lot of these buildings were built, rebuilt and expanded over centuries so they have different construction techniques between different areas which also needs specialized knowledge.
x3874 3y ago
Interesting. The architects and workers reconstructing Warsaw also had to rely on drawings, paintings etc., most of them made by Canaletto. https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/09/21/bellotto-the-18th-century-artist-who-helped-warsaw-rise-from-the-ashes-of-wwii/ https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/09/21/bellotto-the-18th-cen...

108 points by berkeleyjunk 3y ago

I've seen some videos on TikTok by stonemasons who are re-building the decorative shapes in chunks of marble; it's very cool to watch and see them doing it. It's probably not even remotely economic or "productive", but sometimes that's OK.

hef19898 3y ago
Funny, how the knowledge about cathedral building was rather well preserved. After all, all cathedrals still standing have a cadrebof employed masons and other artisans to maintain and renovate them. The actual building is dofferent, I assume an lot of that will be rediscovered during the Notre Dam restauration.
- falcolas 3y ago
  It's my belief that the underpinning design principles have not been lost - cathedrals are quite well studied by architects as I understand it. So, while some of the specifics are probably having to be identified and re-implemented, the basics are broadly understood. Stonemasons as a mass-employer has gone away, but like blacksmithing there are still individuals out there who carry on the tradition.
jfengel 3y ago
The whole building isn't economic or productive. They could probably make more money tearing it down and replacing it with a Starbucks. The vast majority of human activity isn't productive. And that's awesome. We've got so much wealth that we can afford to use it on things that are merely pretty or interesting, like video games and space telescopes and flowers. It would be nice if we could use more of it to ensure that people have the basics, but that's rarely about lack of money. It's nearly always due to some more systemic problem that can't be fought just by throwing money at it.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > The whole building isn't economic or productive. They could probably make more money tearing it down and replacing it with a Starbucks. It likely has economic impact vastly larger than any Starbucks via tourism.
  - barelyauser 3y ago
    And what does "economic impact" means? A bunch of people burning jet fuel to get there and spend some hours looking at it? Why not working towards helping other people?
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      Buying from the cafes nearby. Patronizing the hotels. Going to see a show after. All the things one does in the neighborhood around a tourist attraction. A week-long golf tournament in my town brings in 200k+ people and local government touts a $190M economic impact number for that. I'm sure it's fudged to be as high as possible, but pretending Notre Dame doesn't have an economic benefit to Paris would be odd.
      - barelyauser 3y ago
        Money means nothing. Human time is what matters. Consider that back at their place of origin things did not get done. Economic impact means nothing. If I gave you $100 to watch me do nothing, what value this transaction created? There is virtually nothing to show for at the end but we created $100 of economic impact...
        ceejayoz 3y ago
        > If I gave you $100 to watch me do nothing, what value this transaction created? That seems entirely up to you.
    - lo_zamoyski 3y ago
      I have always been disgusted by this sort of low, mediocre, pseudo-moral argument. "Why build these grand churches? You could feed people with that money!" "Why put all this effort into beautiful buildings? You could build more low-income housing for the same cash!" It sickens me. We can do both. Man does not live by bread alone. Utilitarian mediocrity is satisfied with a full stomach and keeping warm.

bambax 3y ago

The rebuilding is apparently going well, but this is hiding the fact that nobody seems to be doing any inquiry about why the fire wasn't stopped in time. As far as we know, the fire was an accident (not foul play) -- but an extremely preventable one. There were works in progress on the roof of the cathedral, so people were coming and going, some of them possibly smoking, electrical devices were being used, etc. And to monitor all this activity, there was only one guy, who had started on the job a couple of weeks earlier, who had received little to no training, and who didn't even know where the alarm was. The point was to "save on costs", that is, in order to save maybe 1,300 euros / month over three months, the people in charge caused 1 billion euros of damage and lost irreparable historical artefacts. There is a whole administrative department in France, whose sole responsibility is to make sure this kind of catastrophe never happens. At the very least, people should have been fired, from the site manager to the culture minister. Yet nobody's being investigated, let alone prosecuted or punished. Incredible.

soco 3y ago
"Save the costs" is the official religion of the MBA era we live in and no sacrifice is too big. Am I sarcastic? I can't tell.
- dr-detroit 3y ago
  Its a waste of money you could actually help people instead. When Victor Hugo published his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1831 nobody cared about Notre Dame. Anything of value had been stolen during the French Revolution and the Cathedral was in terrible repair.
- scottLobster 3y ago
  Yep, to the modern administrative class "don't shit where you eat" is laughably old fashioned. Modernity brings a new contest: who can shit where they eat the most for the longest? Last one to get cholera wins! And don't worry about the actual cholera infection, that's what taxpayer bailouts are for!
  - 3y ago

soco 3y ago

They also rely on medieval era trees to reconstruct it, as the more than 1000 oak trees painstakingly sought through entire France had to be more than 1 m wide. Okay not medieval - they are only about 200 years old. Could have made a nice title though.

Fiahil 3y ago
Between 200 and 400 years old, yes, exactly ! Most of those trees are older than the United States :)
shagie 3y ago
There's the story by the Long Now foundation about the oak beams at the New College in Oxford https://longnow.org/ideas/humans-and-trees-in-long-term-partnership/ https://longnow.org/ideas/humans-and-trees-in-long-term-part... /// https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-oxford https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-ox... /// https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2013/oct/02/david-cameron-oxford-college-trees-myth https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2013/oct/02/david-... Another example (and less debatable in its authenticity) Why the US Navy Manages Its Own Private Forest - https://www.military.com/history/why-us-navy-manages-its-own-private-forest.html https://www.military.com/history/why-us-navy-manages-its-own... /// https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/2015/05/11/the-wooden-walls/ https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/2015/05/11/the-wooden-wall... (and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28793461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28793461 )
- kryptiskt 3y ago
  In the 1950s, Lund Cathedral bought the quarries where the stone for it originally came 900 years ago, so they know they have a source of the right stone for renovations.
franky47 3y ago
We have a forest in the center of France that was dedicated to producing ship masts. Surely some of those oak trees may have fit the bill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_Tron%C3%A7ais https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_Tron%C3%A7ais

cirrus3 3y ago

There is a great episode of NOVA about it: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/rebuilding-notre-dame/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/rebuilding-notre-dame/

cmcaleer 3y ago

Whatever happened to the many hundreds of millions French billionaires said they would donate for it? I know a couple have coughed up, and most of the companies who said they would have but I don't all who promised to do so have.

dnissley 3y ago
Nothing here suggests they're running short on funds

hwc 3y ago

they should have built the roof with steel & glass so it can't burn!

lo_zamoyski 3y ago
But it would have been ugly.
klyrs 3y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Palace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Palace
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Don't forget the controversial but spectacular Christ (née Crystal) Cathedral in Orange County: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_Cathedral_(Garden_Grove,_California) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_Cathedral_(Garden_Grove... Which was a Televangelical showpiece until it was purchased and renovated by the Roman Catholic diocese. Everything old is new again!

franky47 3y ago

There are many solutions in old hand-tool woodworking that were elegant back then, and are still more relevant today than spinning a tool at 20k RPM. Example: when removing waste with a chisel for joinery, going cross-grain allows popping large chunks with ease, rather than route them to dust. And it's a lot of fun! Power tools do have a use for repeatability and mass-production, which may be useful in the Notre Dame build, but I find the carpenters' approach more honorable.

samtho 3y ago
As a woodworker, I get what your saying but calling the approach of using older methods as “more honorable” kind of rubs me the wrong way. It’s not like the original builders had a choice of what to use, I would bet they would choose the modern stuff if you could somehow loan them the technology from the future. Using modern tools is not antithetical to craftsmanship, it’s about the care, attention to detail, designs choices, using appropriate materials/fasteners, etc. Not saying they have to change the look at all, but they can make good and faithful reproductions with modern tools that capture the essence of what was lost.
- mywittyname 3y ago
  Cheap and quick has been the carpenter's mantra since the dawn of time. One look at the inside of an old piece of furniture shows how little effort went into things that weren't readily seen. Mortise and tenon joints are fast and easy (read: cheap and quick) to make with a chisel and hammer. You can bet carpenters of old would be using nails and screws to build all kinds of things, if they were as cheap and abundant as they are now.
  - mauvehaus 3y ago
    As a professional furniture maker, I assure you that cutting mortises by hand is not high on anybody's list of cheap and quick things to do. At the furniture scale, we've had foot and spring powered mortiser since before we had electricity. For timber framing and similar scales, most of the waste has been bored out with manual boring machines and then the rest of the mortise is finished by hand. Chopping is a pain in the ass, and people have been doing their best to avoid it for centuries. Hell, we're still inventing new ways to cut mortises: see the Festool Domino, which is recent enough to still be protected by patents.

shirleyquirk 3y ago

I came here to share that the importance of using contemporaneous materials, if not methods, was highlighted for me when I worked on Bath cathedral and saw how the victorian 'improvements' of using iron rather than wood to fix the stonework caused much damage a century later; iron expands when it rusts and causes cracking. Then I see linked in that article that Notre Dame was a very early example of using iron staples! I can only think that they were used away from water, unlike Bath, where the repairs were on the window fixings.

mywittyname 3y ago
> iron expands when it rusts and causes cracking. This is often a contributing factor in the failure of modern steel-reinforced concrete structures.
scottshea 3y ago
I am glad I got to see your handiwork! Love the Bath Cathedral

ars 3y ago

> it’s ethically and artistically far more imperative to stay true I could maybe understand artistically if the end result looks different. But ethically? It's a building, ethics don't apply to it.

barney54 3y ago
I didn't realize that using power tools was unethical.
ElFitz 3y ago
One could argue the ethical imperative isn’t towards the building itself but towards future generations.
- ars 3y ago
  Why would future generations care if you used a handsaw or a powersaw to cut some wood?
  - ElFitz 3y ago
    They could care about being left with something that is qualitatively worse than what burned down during our time because people chose to cut corners. Now, does using a powersaw instead of a handsaw produce qualitatively worse results? I have no idea. I know nothing about woodworking. And I’ve certainly never worked on restoring or rebuilding any kind of monument. Let alone a centuries old one. Perhaps they consider it to be important to set what they see as the proper mindset? Perhaps it’s just for show? Or to tell them themselves they did it the best they could? Perhaps there is an objective technical justification? How could I know? The closest I’ve ever come to cutting wood was using some hydraulic wedge thing at the back of a tractor. So I’m not arguing and will not be arguing about the specifics of their choices in tools and techniques. That’d be vain and pointless, and I could not argue in good faith. Which is fine, because the technique is not my point. My point sole is that, despite it being a building, there can still be an ethical imperative. That’s all.

Animats 3y ago

They're using ordinary power tools, such as bandsaws and sanders. There's some hand tool work on the connections between beams. It looks like cabinetmaking carpentry on a larger scale, with lots of chiseled joints.[1] The real hand work is on artistic stonework. That really is being done by hand. Omni CNC's proposals to make replacement parts with their stone-cutting computer controlled milling machines were turned down.[2] [1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/travel/notre-dame-restoration-get-first-look-at-new-wooden-spire/vi-AA18Kxox https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/travel/notre-dame-restoratio... [2] https://www.omni-cnc.com/how-cnc-stone-cutting-machine-help-rebuild-norte-dame-church/ https://www.omni-cnc.com/how-cnc-stone-cutting-machine-help-...

hef19898 3y ago
And for good reason. Machining stone masonry for a cathedral, when you actually have a ton of people being really good at doing it by hand, is somewhat like Musk's cave submarine.
- UncleEntity 3y ago
  For some reason English folk restoring French châteaus came up on my YouTube feed and I kind of like watching them. Being able to hire craftspeople who can do things “the old way” is apparently very important when dealing with (the bureaucracy around) old buildings. A lot of these buildings were built, rebuilt and expanded over centuries so they have different construction techniques between different areas which also needs specialized knowledge.

x3874 3y ago

Interesting. The architects and workers reconstructing Warsaw also had to rely on drawings, paintings etc., most of them made by Canaletto. https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/09/21/bellotto-the-18th-century-artist-who-helped-warsaw-rise-from-the-ashes-of-wwii/ https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/09/21/bellotto-the-18th-cen...