Yet another Hacker News

163 points bschne 2 hours ago 46 comments

vessenes 1 hour ago | parent

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.

yendor44 1 hour ago | parent

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.

dyauspitr 1 hour ago | parent

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?

Oarch 1 hour ago | parent

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!

ramesh31 1 hour ago | parent

>"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.

Maken 56 minutes ago | parent

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.

ramesh31 41 minutes ago | parent

>"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."

That was often a consequence, but in general it provided an alternative pathway to male success in life and a means of advancing through a respected status hierarchy that did not depend on the traditional markers. Something sorely lacking today, when even outside the question of inheritance you are faced with the near impossibility of achieving the economically independent and socially valuable life that your grandfather or father had by simply working.

bluGill 18 minutes ago | parent

There are plenty of people who do achieve an economically independent and socially valuable life.

Those that don't most often have decided to set an unrealistic definition of economically independent and socially valuable life. Their grandfathers never had it that definition, but they somehow think their grandfathers never struggled and otherwise had it a lot easier than their grandfathers really did.

there is a second group that has decided it is impossible, and thus refuse to try.

Don't get me wrong, bad luck happens to everybody. Most don't get luck so bad they can't recover though. Some get worse luck than others.

In general set reasonable goals and you can achieve them.

jacquesm 46 minutes ago | parent

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.

nrh 1 hour ago | parent

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/

idbnstra 1 hour ago | parent

or monumental labs

smstl 1 hour ago | parent

Adore everything about this

shellfishgene 1 hour ago | parent

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...

opengrass 1 hour ago | parent

For a second I thought the guy at the computer is the CNC statue.

roughly 1 hour ago | parent

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.

tantalor 1 hour ago | parent

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?

roughly 10 minutes ago | parent

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.

zehaeva 1 hour ago | parent

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/

bluGill 24 minutes ago | parent

We don't lack the ability. We lack the time/energy/money (these are all the same thing!).

venzaspa 58 minutes ago | parent

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.

bluGill 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

roughly 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

whatthejesus 57 minutes ago | parent

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.

roughly 13 minutes ago | parent

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.

throwaway219450 57 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

roughly 15 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, that’s fair, updated.

weirdish 1 hour ago | parent

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!

toddmorey 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

_Microft 48 minutes ago | parent

This might have influenced too many people?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime

bluGill 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

nnnnico 24 minutes ago | parent

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)

lo_zamoyski 14 minutes ago | parent

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.

wolframhempel 1 hour ago | parent

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.

RobotToaster 58 minutes ago | parent

What's more gothic than dark satanic mills

taion 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

radiorental 13 minutes ago | parent

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

kvjbj 58 minutes ago | parent

j h jnmjvj

foota 49 minutes ago | parent

Finally, I can write my code as it was intended.

SoMomentary 20 minutes ago | parent

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

ajw287 48 minutes ago | parent

... 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?

pixl97 40 minutes ago | parent

We should all be into consensual numerical control.

ricardobeat 38 minutes ago | parent

I think you'll to explain that a little more in depth.

SoMomentary 17 minutes ago | parent

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.

ricardobeat 42 minutes ago | parent

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.