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Old Posted Mar 31, 2015, 12:42 AM
Gava Gava is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2007
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hed Kandi View Post
While in India a few months ago I had a chance to visit the remarkable Hindu temple, Akshardham. Akshardham is an interesting temple in that it not only boasts some of the most magnificent sculptures and detailing seen anywhere, but it was also built in less than 5 years and constructed using methods that date back thousands of years. In fact, the entire temple is built without the use of steel nor concrete. Akshardham officially opened in 2005.


It was then that I pondered the construction of another temple, La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. This church also lays claim to an outstanding level of detail and yet it has been under constuction since 1882 and is not expected to be complete until 2026.


Though both edifices are host to an impressive level of detail, how is it that Akshardham was completed in a fraction of the time compared with La Sagrada Familia?
Sagrada Familia is basically a gigantic puzzle made up of small peices of stones cut to their exact shape and size. Back in the days of Gaudi, that was done by hand, people with a hammer and a chisel cuting away. In his era there was basically no method of speeding up the construction process regardless of funding so he calculated with a construction period lasting hundreds of years.

To make things even more complicated, he opted to use ruled geometry extensively, this he did because he wanted the church to be self supporting and at the same time as transparent as possible to let the most amount of daylight into the buliding he possibly could get away with.
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