[MR] NYTimes.com Article: Cybersleuths Take On the Mystery of the Collapsing Colossus

Mon Oct 29 03:57:22 PST 2001

This is a cool article...

Drea

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Cybersleuths Take On the Mystery of the Collapsing Colossus

October 27, 2001 

By EMILY EAKIN

A newspaper headline in the northern French town of Beauvais put the question
bluntly: "Will the Americans Save the Cathedral?." The Americans in this case
are a team of architectural historians and computer scientists from Columbia
University. The cathedral is the local behemoth: a 700-year-old, extravagant
experiment in High Gothic architecture that was once the tallest building in
Europe but is now on the World Monuments Fund's list of 100 most endangered
sites. 

The Cathedral of St. Peter at Beauvais has been in dire straits almost since its
inception. In 1284 it collapsed and had to be rebuilt practically from scratch.
In 1573, during a service on Ascension Day, a lantern tower perched on the roof
fell down. Successive architects tinkered with the design. And the cathedral was
never finished: no one ever got around to building the nave. 

Today the cathedral is as unstable as it is colossal, its towering five-aisled
choir and phalanx of flying buttresses regularly battered by gale-force winds
from the English Channel less than 100 miles away. And the French can't agree on
what should be done about it. Some argue that metal and wood supports introduced
in 1993 will hold the building together. Others say they are doing more damage
than good - calling the cathedral "St. Peter's in Chains." 

But now the Columbia team has come up with an ingenious idea for resolving the
debate: scanning the building. In July two Columbia computer scientists arrived
in Beauvais with a laptop computer and a 60-pound black box: a $100,000 3D laser
scanner. For 10 days they roamed around the cathedral, recording detailed images
of its façade and interior by bouncing a laser beam off its surfaces. They
returned to New York City with 75 digital scans, each one containing about a
million data points and capturing the building from a different angle. 

The scans are now being processed and stitched together by a powerful computer
on the Columbia campus. The goal is to create a digital replica of the building
that will serve as a stand-in for the real thing, allowing the Columbia team to
perform a battery of tests and to try out strategies for restoration. 

"Once we create a computer model, we can do all kinds of structural analysis of
the building and figure out the best way to shore it up and figure out where
it's weak," said Peter Allen, a Columbia computer scientist who is working on
the project. 

While computer models are now a routine part of new construction, scanning
existing structures is a relatively recent development. In part, that's because
sophisticated 3-D laser scanning technology has been available for only about
five years. 

"Beauvais is the largest, most complex building ever to be scanned," said
Stephen Murray, the Columbia architectural historian in charge of the project.
"With this modeling technique we can actually remove the bits of the building
that have been added and take it back to its original pre-collapse state." 

Despite its design flaws and disrepair, experts agree that the cathedral is a
rare achievement; one 19th-century architectural historian called it the
"Parthenon of French Gothic." Few people know it better than Mr. Murray, 56, who
has spent the last four decades under its spell and has devoted an entire book
to it: "Beauvais Cathedral: Architecture of Transcendence" (Princeton University
Press, 1989). As a graduate student at the University of London in the 1960's,
he used to visit France on his motorcycle, spending the first night in Beauvais
after crossing the English Channel. 

"There never was a cathedral like this before," he said. "It's a building that
has gone through a dreadful structural history. In the stones of the building,
one can read the signs of a fairly tormented life. It's almost like a book that
can be read." Though it lacks a Quasimodo, the history of Beauvais, as Mr.
Murray tells it, has its share of drama. The pet project of the wealthy and
disaffected Bishop Miles of Nanteuil, Beauvais may have been partly intended as
an act of defiance against the French crown. Bishop Miles had close ties to a
group of powerful northern barons opposed to the regency of Blanche of Castile,
the Spanish widow of Louis VIII and the mother of the teenage Louis IX. 

By the time work began on the cathedral around 1225, the barons were in open
revolt. First, they tried to kidnap the young king. When that plan failed, they
resorted to slander, spreading rumors that Blanche was pregnant by the papal
legate, the Vatican's representative in France. Infuriated, Blanche went to
great lengths to dispel them. At one meeting of her council, Mr. Murray writes
in his book, she flung off her robe to "show her flat silhouette."

The bishop's plan to build a massive cathedral was a means of asserting his
independence from the king, Mr. Murray said, adding that the bishop's successors
were responsible for the building's ultimate, record-breaking height. "They
badly wanted this building to go beyond any existing structure that they knew
about." 

Finally completed in 1272, with a keystone 152.5 feet high, the choir was taller
than both the new cathedral at nearby Amiens and the Pantheon in Rome. It lasted
just seven years. 

Why it collapsed in a terrific din on a Friday night in 1284 is still something
of a mystery. Mr. Murray hopes the computer model may shed some light on that
event as well. 

"The last thing that almost certainly brought it down was extreme wind," Mr.
Murray said. "But the building was fatally flawed in some way. Conflicting
artistic visions in the 13th century certainly contributed. The model will help
pin down exactly how it happened and help us figure out what's going on now." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/27/arts/27TANK.html?ex=1005189845&ei=1&en=7396f768e1c50418

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