
Guédelon Castle - bane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%A9delon_Castle
======
pianoben
This reminds me of a road trip I took with a girlfriend in 2010 or so. We
drove south out of St. Louis, MO, going nowhere in particular, and ended up
near the Arkansas border. I could have sworn I was dreaming, but nearby there
was a bona-fide 13th-century French castle under construction, using period-
appropriate tools and techniques, in the middle of the Ozarks!

It was absolutely surreal. There was a working farm to grow food for the
laborers, stone was sourced from a nearby quarry, there was a smithy on-site,
and even some tools were original to the period and were imported from France.

Just looked it up - I guess it closed down. Too bad, but maybe unsurprising:
[https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/arkansas/ar-ozark-
medieval-f...](https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/arkansas/ar-ozark-medieval-
fortress-remnants/)

~~~
mkl
That one's mentioned in the linked article too:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_Medieval_Fortress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_Medieval_Fortress)

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kylek
Way cooler pics on the official website-

[https://www.guedelon.fr/en/galerie_16.html](https://www.guedelon.fr/en/galerie_16.html)

~~~
themodelplumber
Wow. Wow! Thank you. I have so many questions but lack the architecture
vocabulary to even know where to start. :O

~~~
brutus1213
I learned a great deal from reading a novel: Pillars of the Earth. This book
is about construction of a medieval cathedral and spans generations.

I really enjoyed the book when I read it as a young person. Now that I'm
older, I have some issues with the writing (detailed portrayals of violence).
Just realize it is R rated stuff - similar to GoT. On the plus side, you will
definitely learn about architecture :)

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loufe
Indeed! I just went and volunteered last year (first trip to Europe)! You can
do a 7 day rotating internship with them (provided you have a good base in
french). They really let you do almost everything, I worked in masonry,
carpentry, tile making, grout making, etc. They are a great group and the
project is really cool, I made a bunch of friends during my time there too. I
strongly recommend the experience.

~~~
voiper1
Warning, you need to speak French.

>French is the main language spoken on site; for safety reasons, it is
important to speak French.

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brutus1213
I'm not sure why this is news but if people are upvoting, great! I'm a huge
medeival buff. I first learned about this castle in a very cool documentary on
youtube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydoRAbpWfCU&t=714s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydoRAbpWfCU&t=714s)

Enjoy!

~~~
gbear605
This documentary series is part of a larger collection of BBC series in which
the cast does accurate historical reenactment of farm work. They're worth
seeing and you can find all of them on Youtube or Vimeo.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_historic_farm_series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_historic_farm_series)

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pm3003
I grew up in the East of France and Guedelon was a popular field trip
destination for school students. I remember going there once in middle school
and once in high school.

The workers, architects etc were all very enthusiastic, and boring stuff like
medieval masonry, measurement systems, plans etc got really interesting with
them.

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appleflaxen
The most impressive aspect is that they can build with period tools this while
still complying with whatever the French equivalent of OSHA would be.

~~~
labster
In the future, there are going to be some terribly confused archaeologists.

~~~
wiredfool
There’s a coin and a parchment under one of the initial stones. But yeah, once
people forget, there’s going to be this castle 700 years out of the time
sequence.

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dpw
Wow, unusual topic for the front page of HN. I visited about 5 years ago. It
was my wife's idea to go (it's quite far from other attractions, so you have
to plan a visit), but we both really enjoyed it. The castle is the highlight
of course, but there's quite a lot more to the site than that, and it's easy
to spend a full day there.

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duxup
One thing I remember thinking on one of my first trips to Europe was "Why
doesn't someone 'restore' a castle to a specific era?" It would be such a cool
experience.

Granted, many that are in reasonable shape have evolved over time so doing so
would maybe remove a lot of history.... that's not desirable. But there are
plenty in ruined states that might be good candidates.

It was such a contrast to where in the US some historical sites are rebuilt
wholesale and seeing them operational and alive is a lot of fun.

~~~
seszett
Many castles have been renovated and restored, some of them to a state close
to one period of the past, others with a new style, etc. In France, a whole
lot of monuments were restored during the 19th century mainly.

For example the castle of the Dukes of Brittany in Nantes, was renovated in
the mid 19th century to remove the modern additions and get it back to its
supposed 16th century state (the period when it was actually used by the Dukes
of Brittany).

The castle of Belle-Île was also restored, in the 20th century, to its 18th
century state, this one entirely through private funds.

Another castle I know well is the Suscinio castle, which was a complete ruin
and was restored in the second half of the 20th century, but not to its former
state.

And for another restoration effort with yet another kind of result, het
Gravensteen in Ghent was restored in the 19th to its supposed 12th century
state, but they got it mostly wrong. That's what happened with most
restoration efforts during this period, as far as I know.

Today, the most common stance is often to preserve ruins as they are, keep
them from degrading further and do the least work possible on them because we
are well aware of all the botched restoration efforts of the past.

~~~
Peckingjay
Nice list, I'd mention the Haut-Koenigsbourg castle which also got renovated
in the 19th century as well.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_du_Haut-K%C5%93ni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_du_Haut-K%C5%93nigsbourg)

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timthorn
The BBC has filmed several programmes where a group of historians relive life
from different periods. One of these series was filmed there:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04sv5nc](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04sv5nc)

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bambataa
Apropos of castles, I've been on a look out for a hypothetical game I describe
as "the thinking player's Stronghold". You would have control over a region
and would need to choose the best place to site the castle, ensure supplies
and build the correct structure for your location. I imagine that it would
need to be modified as the attackers' technology developed.

The idea came to while walking around various forts. They're various
interesting and I don't think any base-building game has really delved into
them properly. Stronghold is quite superficial and Dwarf Fortress seems to
focus more on the economy.

~~~
prepend
I played a lot of “Castles” (Interplay, 1991 [0]) on my 386. It was pretty
simple and mostly involved getting resources and building your castle to
withstand an eventual attack. It’s almost an exact description of your
requirements.

It’s odd that no one has made a game that fills this same need for me in the
past 30 years.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castles_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castles_\(video_game\))

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lqet
I would love to see something similar done for a gothic cathedral. And I don't
mean a one-man show like Justo Martínez [0] or a "modern" cathedral like the
Sagrada Familia, but an actual authentic gothic cathedral like it would've
been professionally built in the 14th century. These buildings are just so
interesting and beautiful [1]. I remember seeing an arte documentary a few
years ago in which several French gothic cathedrals were analyzed. Apart from
their structural complexity, there constructions were surprisingly modern. In
many of them, concealed iron rods or chains were used to ensure stability and
make it look like the stones are somehow magically kept in place - or to safe
the building. For example, an iron chain was tightened around Amiens cathedral
[2][3] to fix structural defects which resulted from a mistake made during
construction. An interesting aspect of their esthetic appeal is also their
regularity, which is kind of a side effect of using a catalog of standardized
building elements which were mass-produced by the stone quarries to keep the
costs down. For example, if you look at this picture [4], you can actually
spot a lot of these basic form elements which could be re-used for other
windows or doors.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justo_Gallego_Mart%C3%ADnez](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justo_Gallego_Mart%C3%ADnez)

[1]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ce/20...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ce/20121007_Beauvais_CathedralStPierre_DSC00749_PtrQs.jpg/1280px-20121007_Beauvais_CathedralStPierre_DSC00749_PtrQs.jpg)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiens_Cathedral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiens_Cathedral)

[3]
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Philippe_Dillmann/publi...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Philippe_Dillmann/publication/225434112/figure/fig1/AS:439926857703426@1481898144856/Photograph-
of-a-Amiens-cathedral-view-of-a-nave-pillar-and-of-the-triforium-b-the.png)

[4]
[https://img.fotocommunity.com/rosettenfenster-8359847c-0966-...](https://img.fotocommunity.com/rosettenfenster-8359847c-0966-446f-83fe-0478b2520cc1.jpg?width=1000)

~~~
ddrdrck_
Not a whole cathedral from scratch, but in Saint-Denis, near Paris, they plan
to restore the Basilica spire [1] that was taken down on 19th century, using
medieval techniques as in Guedelon

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Saint-
Denis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Saint-Denis)

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ghostDancer
If you like this , maybe you will like how they are rebuilding a whale ship
from the XVI century trying to use traditional techniques and materials. :
[http://www.albaola.com/en](http://www.albaola.com/en)

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boomboomsubban
How does ~26 years to construct compare to 13th century castles? I'm not sure
if I'd expect it to take less time due to inadvertently using modern
techniques or take more time due to the less available labor.

~~~
pm3003
I remember one of the architects explaining it to me in 2003 or 2004. If
memory serves :

Basically the construction could be faster if well organized and continuous (I
believe he said less than 10 years).

However they voluntarily kept the pace relatively slow, for pedagogic
purposes, and because it would be more realistic, because the construction of
a Middle-age castle could be slowed or interrupted by a variety of factors
impacting the availability of manpower, money, or commodities,including farm
yields, wars, climate, etc...

~~~
boomboomsubban
Thank you, I think "good organization" would be one of those modern
innovations most difficult to avoid, along with literacy, worker
transportation, and abundance of fresh/clean food/water. Seems like they're
trying to account for it though.

~~~
pm3003
Good organization could be managed at tge time if one was powerful enough. I
just checked Château Gaillard on Wikipedia, it's a typical medieval
stronghold, quite advanced for its time. It was built in the exceptionnally
short time 2 years along with the nearby town by Richard the Lionheart, with
huge suns of money.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_Gaillard](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_Gaillard)

~~~
boomboomsubban
That's an impressive feat, but I imagine things like daily weather forecasts,
copiers, and every worker having a pager/phone would have sped up production
still. So much of modern day convenience allows organization far beyond what
they could manage.

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foobarian
I'm struck by how yellow/orange the soil is in this part of France.

~~~
rhn_mk1
What's the color in other parts?

~~~
eru
Not sure about France, but we have black soil in lots of parts of Germany.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem)

For France, see
[https://www.britannica.com/place/France/Soils](https://www.britannica.com/place/France/Soils)

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jpxw
Beautiful. In 200 years time, it will be buildings like this that people will
look upon fondly and want to be around.

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nycticorax
It's striking to me that it already looks like an old castle, at least from a
distance.

