While in Provins I got to talking to Anika from Micefa about castle construction and she mentioned something that got me very excited. What she mentioned to me was Guédelon Castle, a castle being built as if the year was 1229; and I don’t just mean the style, the tools and methods are all those of the 13th century.
As the class toured Provins, I kept thinking about how everything was built and those are the questions Guédelon is being built to answer! The project started in 1997 and still has years to go, being due to be completed in 2023.
The most exciting thing about Guédelon is all the research it’s putting to the test and new things that are being discovered. It seems that so often with ancient structures we’re not entirely sure how things were created. We may know why the structure works and how it would be done today, but with the Guédelon project there are people there working hands on to figure out how the people of the era would have done it.
I feel like it makes architectural history that much more human, thinking about all the toil that went into our favorite landmarks and how different the world was when they were constructed.
