[Sca-cooks] Cathedral building times

[Terry Decker]

One needs to be clear as to whether completion means functionally usable or
the final building work is over.

Chartes Cathedral was functional built between 1195 and 1228 (33 years) but
it wasn't consecrated until 1260 and construction continued until 1513.  So,
was Chartes completed in 33 years, 65 years or 318 years?

Restoration and conservation projects usually take longer than original
construction because one is concerned with preserving the original structure
rather than simply cobbling a new structure together.

Bear

>Margali commented:
>> Actually what offends me the most is the common acceptance of the
>> building of a cathedral taking a similar amount of time over 20 or 30
>> years [just a figure that i vaguely remember reading that several major
>> cathedrals took about that long to complete...]
>I think your figure of 20 to 30 years is a bit low. You may be as much
>as a magnitude off, although the fact that such construction was often
>done in phases may obscure this a bit.  However, I don't have any books
>that would give me these numbers handy. I think that even major
>expansions could take fifty years.
>
>Stefan