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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

You indeed do, and I support that. I wonder, though - setting aside the catholic notion of God and the associated church embedded in this project, how do you think of future generations? How do you think about things beyond yourself? How do you consider the impacts of your actions on the future?

I’m not being facetious with these questions, nor am I making an accusation - I think it’s a genuinely interesting question for the modern world, and it’s what I’m circling around here more than the notion of glorying god: the cathedral was a gift to the humans of future generations, one whose sacrifice indicated the value its makers placed on the wellbeing of its recipients. How do you think of your actions in that light? Do you?

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Things like this are my secular cathedral: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Canada

It's not an accident that the architecture of the Canadian National Gallery explicitly references Christian church architecture.

Or the Smithsonian. Or the NASA museum at Cape Canaveral. Also cathedrals.

Walking the entire length of a Saturn V rocket laid on its side at the NASA museum at Cape Canaveral is as close to a holy moment as this old atheist has ever experienced.

There is a balance. I've seen old houses - they look pretty, but as an engineer they suck. Terrible insulation, bad (ergonomic) layout... Plenty of useless features - who needs cable TV or phone jacks these days...

Which means there needs to be a balance - looks nice enough for today, but don't think for a moment it will meet the needs of the future so it needs to be easy to replace as well.

There’s a balance, sure - I’m asking you what you put on the long side of the ledger.

Regarding houses - American architecture starting around the 40s divorced itself from its locale, but a great deal of older houses were built to be long-term dwellings, and this is reflected in their architecture, where they sit, how the wind and sun move across the structure, the materials they use, etc in a way that still generates value today. They may be harder to run a CAT5 through, but they’re a hell of a lot easier to keep cool in the summer.

> the cathedral was a gift to the humans of future generations

do you know that (a) the designers of those cathedrals actually thought that? (b) the the people who built those cathedreals actually thought that?

Yes. All of the writing at the time indicates this was the case.

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