All posts tagged: Cathedrals

St Paul’s Cathedral Faces Backlash After Partnering With Fabric

St Paul’s Cathedral Faces Backlash After Partnering With Fabric

Published by Jenni Sidey

St Paul’s Cathedral, the main cathedral in London that serves as the seat of the Bishop of London, is facing backlash after it announced that it’s entering a four-year partnership with Fabric, the capital city’s iconic nightclub known for its variety of contemporary music, from drum and bass to house and techno. St Paul’s Cathedral has a rich history and has been part of many state events such as the funerals of British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, as well as the wedding of King Charles III, when he was Prince of Wales, to Princess Diana. The cathedral is also home to important artworks, from a copy of William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World (1853) that was completed with help from Edward Robert Hughes to Henry Moore’s Madonna and Child (1943). Related Articles In addition to its importance to the Church of England, St Paul’s Cathedral is also the burial place of Horatio Nelson, a British naval commander who was instrumental in the Napoleonic Wars. His family have come out and …

How Medieval Cathedrals Were Built Without Science, or Even Mathematics

How Medieval Cathedrals Were Built Without Science, or Even Mathematics

Published by José Betancourt

Sci­ence and engi­neer­ing may be con­flat­ed to some degree in the pub­lic mind, but any­one who’s spent much time in an aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ment belong­ing to one or the oth­er of those branch­es of endeav­or knows how insis­tent­ly dis­tinc­tions can be drawn between them. Bill Ham­mack, a pro­fes­sor of engi­neer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois Urbana-Cham­paign who’s been there since he was a mas­ter’s stu­dent in 1986, sure­ly has his own thoughts on the sub­ject. The video above from his pop­u­lar YouTube chan­nel Engi­neer­guy explains how cathe­drals were designed in the Mid­dle Ages, using the exam­ple of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Specif­i­cal­ly, it gets into how such a build­ing’s arch­es and sup­port­ing walls could have been engi­neered with­out the aid of sci­ence at all, or even the use of math­e­mat­ics. Com­pared to today, the scope of knowl­edge human­i­ty com­mand­ed back in medieval times may have been impos­si­bly nar­row — to say noth­ing of the knowl­edge pos­sessed by any giv­en human, espe­cial­ly out­side the lit­er­ate elite. Yet what was then known proved more than suf­fi­cient to build struc­tures …