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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

I posted this because I feel like this might be one of the last few multi-generational efforts under a single project umbrella that I might see during my lifetime. As an American I'm in awe of many of the old Cathedrals and Basilicas in Europe that took hundreds of years to complete.

Most of the cathedrals in the U.S. were "tossed up" after a few years of construction. (One of the rare counter examples is the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., however it's not Catholic.)

If we start any current projects in the world that we know will take generations to finish:

* I won't see the end of them

* I'm not sure there's the will to do it

The idea of something like a generation ship, or interstellar colony ships is something far away from what we seem to be able to do today, but I like to think that projects like cathedrals are about as close to what those kinds of things might be like.

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Multigenerational projects will be those of enormous scale. Interstellar exploration and colonization of other planets, especially terraforming, are obvious ones. But for a single building to take that much time? That's unimaginable today.

I'm pretty sure the Sagrada Familia could have been finished sooner if more money had been thrown at it, but in a sense, I also think such a prolonged construction process is itself a work of art. We are often in too much of a hurry, leading us to cut corners.

That we're still looking at a decade from now to completion, given that the Burj Khalifa took 6 years from groundbreaking to opening, is a testament to how much of the work of the Sagrada Familia doesn't scale. The challenge isn't "the building" as a structure -- it's that every single surface in (and on) the thing is a unique sculpture.

I don't think "cutting corners" as a negative -- it's realistic, if you want to ship. Nobody who said "let's build a new church here" lived to see its completion. It's awesome to see, however impractical for 99% of solutions, the occasions when a "screw time and budget -- this thing is going to be perfect" approach is followed through.

I believe money was also a constraining factor in the speed of construction of historical cathedrals.

One of the people working on ITER compared it to a cathedral: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bot... (been on HN a few times)

The Long Now Foundation also thinks about this kind of thing.

I've seen it in a few stages over the recent years. The step from open-roof construction site to a close place of worship was - and still is - captivating.

(Though walking up and down the spires in the earlier stages was much more fun than the lift, if a little scary.)

While it certainly doesn't have the duration of this construction: After watching the LOTR making of, I'd say projects like this are the closest equivalent to the construction of a medieval cathedral, w.r.t. scope and scale, attention of detail, the imagination of a whole, complex interwoven result that conveys a planned experience.

Also a very nice engineering detail that makes this building unique is the usage of multiple paradigms.

This is in fact the reason why it is used as a cover of CTM (in many ways an awesome SICP sequel):

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51JGRqYyy+L.jpg

Another good one is St. John the Divine in New York City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_John_the_Di...

Started in 1892, one of the largest cathedrals, as yet unfinished.

Didn't Bishop Pike declare the Anglican cathedral in San Francisco "finished", though nobody else regarded it as being done?

There are rock-cut temples in India which are pretty jaw-dropping in the number of years it must have taken to complete:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rock-cut_architecture

You should read Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth. It's a quick read and digresses a lot on a fictional romantic side story, but the main character is a middle ages master mason who has grand plans to build a cathedral ... which he hopes his son will continue after his death.

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