The Abbey of St. Wandrille is located in Normandy and was originally founded in 649. Looted by the Vikings in 858, sacked by the Huguenots in 1562, secularized by the Jacobins in 1790, and suppressed by the Third Republic in 1901, the monastery has had a stormy history. The monks have had to abandon it and go into exile on several occasions, most recently from 1901 to 1931.
This Benedictine abbey once boasted a magnificent Gothic church, but a tower collapsed in 1631 and in the 1800's the church was quarried for its stone. Only ruins remain. Rather than try to restore it, the monks in the 1960's purchased a 14th-century farm building from a nearby manor, transported it to the monastery grounds, and converted it into a chapel. The stone exterior is similar enough to that of many old rural churches, except for the somewhat unusual set of double doors in the west façade.
The light flooding in through the windows above the altar and the central location of the crucifix give this church an austere beauty.
The rafters, though, are a reminder that the church used to be a barn. And that is the most remarkable fact about St. Wandrille: This medieval barn, which was originally intended simply to store grain, was constructed so sturdily that it has stood for over half a millennium, and was designed with such grace that it could be turned into a church in the 20th century.
The photograph comes from this site.
The abbey's French Wikipedia page gives a detailed history.
Not only do they not "build them like they used to"; in many cases, the opposite is true. One need only look at suburban strip malls and housing tracts for architectural examples, or to "discount" clothiers and electronics manufactures on the retail side. Stuff is cheap for a reason: in the case of paper, that's good; in the case of microchips in babydolls, that's bad.
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Also: Do you forsee "quarries" of our (now) disposable goods in the future? I do. As mining, drilling, and the like become so much more dangerous (and expensive!), I fully expect enterprising individuals to go after the resources left for scrap in our dumps, landfills, thrift stores.
You're spot on about poor quality in so many things these days.
ReplyDeleteAs for spoliating old stuff, some things (like clothes in the thrift store) are easier to access than others (like wrecked buildings whose bits have been dumped in the land fill. Still, you're probably right that we'll find ways to use some of this. Biology may play a leading role here. Remember all the little microbes that ate up so much of the oil in the Gulf? I recall the FT reporting that some of them were *unknown to science* before they started growing like made on that tasty diet of oil. Point is, if we could find some nifty microbes that could crawl around in a landfill, targeting various things and turning them into something useful (say, nutrient-rich soil, or fuel), we could recover not just the space, but the physical materials themselves.
Barry,
ReplyDeleteThe problem with quarrying our disposable goods is that those goods might not be of sufficient quality to be worth scavenging, and will simply take up space. Unless, of course, Aaron can engineer some of those garbage-digesting microbes for us.
Steve,
ReplyDeleteI know what you're saying about much of our trash being low-quality--at present. I am convinced that men of business, science, and/or environmentalism will figure out ways to salvage that "trash", though; there's simply far to much money to be made pioneering technology like that. One similar, historical example I like: used to be that gasoline was burned off as waste, when it was produced as a biproduct in kerosine manufacture; people thought it was simply too combustubile to be harnessed as not worth the trouble. Then, somebody figured it out...
Here's hoping somebody figures out a microbe that eats plastic and craps iron. Who says I don't believe in Exceptionalism!?