Stone Setting and the Chapter House Progress

Spirits are high at the monastery as the monks make the necessary preparations to continue setting the stone on the Chapter House!  Some work was completed last fall but then the mountain winter made its appearance.  After a prolonged shutdown due to the extreme cold (sometimes even in the -30’s!) Spring finally seems to have arrived here in Wyoming.  However the monks didn’t stand idle during the winter months and kept busy carving the thousands of stones to complete the Chapter House progress once spring rolled around.  All in all there are 3368 carefully cut stones to make up the building, quite a lot to keep track of!  The Grand Cloister, (the courtyard in the middle of the hermitages) is full of rows and rows of the hundreds of pallets of stone waiting for their final resting place in the walls of this chapel.  Chapter House First Look – see below.

(The Carmelite Monks balance work and prayer. They work on construction during their allotted work period. See their Horarium here.)

Now a crew of monks is busy with the final preparations.  The silence of the monastery is broken by the clinking of hammers and the beeping of forklift backup alarms.  Hydraulic scaffolding is arranged around the Chapter House and the stones that are next on the list are being loaded onto the scaffolding.  Hopefully in a few short months the stone setting on the Chapter House progress will be complete! Chapter House First Look:

How do we build a Gothic building?  A lot goes into a Gothic chapel but when the results will stand for centuries, the time invested doesn’t seem too much. It is still one stone at a time, just like the medieval builders, but the advantages of modern machinery have definitely made the process a lot easier.  This little video gives an idea of the transformation that will take place on the Chapter House as each stone is placed.   As you can see there will certainly be quite the difference before and after!