99% Invisible - 178- The Great Restoration

Episode Date: August 26, 2015

Stirling, Scotland is the home of Stirling Castle, which sits atop a giant crag, or hill, overlooking the whole town of Stirling. There has been a castle on that hill since the 12th century at least, and maybe before, but … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886, it was a dull copper color. The whole statue is covered with a layer of copper metal about the thickness of two pennies. But after about 1900, the physical processes that govern the known universe began to take their toll, and the copper skin oxidized into a greenish patina that can be seen on the statue to this day. When the statue underwent a massive restoration in the 1980s, the head and shoulder were realigned, the point on the crown that had been digging into her arm for a century was shortened the defects in the internal skeleton were thoroughly addressed, and of course, the weather beaten exterior was cleaned, but there

was no notion that the statue's skin should be returned to the dull copper color she was born with. But if they had shined up Lady Liberty to her original copper color, the people of New York City. Probably would have reacted like this. I don't like looking at it. This is not someone from New York, as you can probably guess. That's Barbara Clark, five generations of her family have lived in Sterling, Scotland. My name's Barbara Clark, and I've lived in Sterling all my life apart from when I was

at university. Sterling is also the home of Sterling, a truly marvelous place that I just love to visit that sits atop a giant cragg or hill overlooking the whole town of Stirling. Some castle has been there since the 12th century and maybe before, but the current buildings date from the 15th and 16th centuries. Well, obviously it's part of our lives. We see it every single day and as children we plead in it, we ran all around it.

When we think of medieval castles, we usually picture a grand structure with subdued, dark stone masonry. But when you gaze upon Sterling Castle today from the town below, you will notice that one of the buildings is different from the others. Since 1999, after a long restoration effort, the Great Hall of Sterling Castle has been bright yellow. This bright yellow building, you know, sticking out like a sore thumb, and people were just horrified. I can remember just thinking, this is a nightmare.

The story of how the great hall of Stirling Castle came to be painted bright yellow illustrates the unexpected complexity in the art of restoration. It comes down to this question, when you choose to restore something, which moment in time are you restoring it to? Some kind of nameless group of people reached that decision and I don't question their motives, but I question their understanding of the effect that it was going to have on people's feelings towards the castle. Who made that decision?

Oh, I know. It was this guy. My name is Peter Buchanan. I work with Historic Scotland. My title now is Project Manager. I joined Historic Scotland in 1991 to work on the Stern and Castle project. Historic Scotland is the government organization charged with educating the public and safeguarding Scotland's historic treasures. They took over the care of Sterling Castle and started the Great Hall Restoration in 1991. First, let's get some Castle facts straight. The Castle and a lot of people have this very tailed Disneyland thing in their heads where it's all one huge building with turrets. Most medieval castles were a collection of buildings for certain things. They had a chapel, that a palace, they would have had kitchens. The Great Hall is one of those key buildings in a castle, and to quote Bill Bryson in his book

At Home, no room has fallen further in history than the hall. Now a place to wipe feet and hang hats, once it was the most important room in the house. It is a huge gathering space and the one here at Stirling was also for the Parliament of Scotland. So the kings sat here, they would set laws, they would have banquets and feasts, they would entertain lavishly. When Peter Buchanan adopted the great hall of Stirling, it was in an awful state. So Stirling Castle up until 1964 was a military garrison. From 1800 to 1964, the castle was owned by the war office, and they did not treat the castle as a historic artifact to be preserved. Most of the buildings within the castle were used by them.

The great hall was used as barricade accommodation. Turning the one big fancy room into barracks meant adding floors, altering windows, replacing the ceiling, really changing everything. Once the military left, the place was gutted. And when Peter's team took over in 1991, the building was a shelf. It still had a military roof on it,

but it was left with a huge question mark as to what we should do with it. The typical mandate of Historic Scotland is to preserve historic places in the state they were found. But the great hall of Stirling Castle required some drastic measures. So what state do you restore it to? Do you preference the military period

from the 1800s or the medieval and Renaissance period? Strategically, the castle had been important for hundreds of years. Stirling's role in the history of Scotland has been sent to us since practically the earliest times of the first recorded kings. Castle Hill overlooks a bog on one side and the bridge over the fourth river on the other. So for hundreds of years it was the place that controlled trade for the whole region. Mary Queen of Scots was crowned there.

And it was seen that the cultural significance of these things aren't weighed the significance of the military period. Using this logic they decided to restore the Great Hall to a state it was about three to four hundred years in the past. But that kind of restoration is not simple. First of all the records aren't all that consistent. Now, the series of etchings of the Great Hall. Unfortunately, they all show slightly different things. Traditionally, you have ridge beasts, heraldic beasts on the top of the Great Hall.

These are big stone statues of unicorns and lions that sit on the apex of the roof. All of our etchings show these, but they show different numbers of them. So the etchings, they're great to give a kind of an idea of what the cast might have looked like, but as a tool for restoration, they weren't much use. To help figure out where the Ridge Bees should be placed on top of the building, they had to figure out the original structure of the roof. Sometimes in the 20th century, the roof had been completely replaced by the military. But the original hall of the roof. Sometime in the 20th century, the roof had been completely replaced by the military, but the original hall had this glorious Hammer Beam roof. A Hammer Beam roof is a medieval technique that uses wood beams as a network of cantilevers

and trusses on the inside to make the roof strong over such a big wide open room. You can see all the timber when you look up from inside the hall, it's stunning. It's a jigsaw puzzle of beautiful triangles that are amazing to behold. Triangles are the best. Because the ridge beasts weighed three-quarters of a ton, they could only be placed where the hammer beam roof was the strongest. This is as true now as it was 300 years ago. We've got a hammer beam roof to construct, and we've got no hammer beam roof left. We want to get it right, but we need clues to be able to do that. They found one diagram, a cross section of the hammer beam roof of the Great Hall from

1719. But since it's the only record, it's hard to know if it's completely accurate. Since there was no other information about what the roof looked like, they began researching the surveyors from 1719 who drew the diagram and they found that other diagrams they drew of other castles were very accurate. So here's our leap of faith. This is where you start to have to use conjecture in your restoration to make value judgments and we've decided that we will put the whole of the structure back. So this is what we're basing it on. So using that one historic document,

they reconstructed the roof, which determined where the heavy stone ridge beasts would be placed on top. One discovery gets another and another, and the original building comes into focus, and that's the detective work of restoration. Careful research, discovery, verification, sometimes conjecture, leaps of faith,

it's this beautiful amalgam of history, science, verification, sometimes conjecture, leaps of faith, it's this beautiful amalgam of history, science and art. The Hammerbeam roof was completed in 1999 and everyone who sees it, including the sterling folk, seemed to agree, it looks really great. So far, no controversy. But as we know, the roof was not the only thing to change, so the controversy is coming. the roof was not the only thing to change, so the controversy is coming. The building, when we'd taken it over in 1991, was almost completely grey stone. There was none of the original finishes left, but in one corner, just under the West Bay, there had been a little lean-to-shelter built in front of a door. And when we took it away, we found a complete panel of the original lime wash.

Lime wash is pure lime meaning calcium oxide not the green citrus fruit and it also contains earth-based pigments. It's a coating that's meant to protect the stone masonry. In the case of sterling they found a significant yellow ochre layer of lime wash. The bright yellow was very intentional. Hundreds of years ago the built world was basically brown, but on this giant hill there was this great yellow piece of ostentatious bling that signaled for miles that this was a place for a king. And we did huge sample panels of the line rushes all around the building to show people what it might have looked like and what the Cutters might have been. And we brought a lot of people from the starting area to see this as well because what we were intending to do based on the analysis and the information we had

was to put the finishes back. And that is exactly what they did, which is why the great hall is yellow, which did not exactly go over well with the people of sterile. Strangely in restoration terms, it's the one element that we had the most evidence for. They actually had physical pieces of the exterior lime wash all over the castle. The hammer beam roof on the other hand was based much more on conjecture. But everyone loves the hammer beam roof. When Peter's team was putting on the yellow finish, the great hall was completely covered and scaffolding and plastic. This may have contributed to the intensity of the reaction from

the locals once it was unveiled. Here's Sterling resident Barbara Clark again. The entire hall was shrouded in tarpollin for about ten years. And nobody knew really what was going on. We knew there were lots of stone masons up there, but nobody knew anything about anything else. So when the Great Anvailing came, it was a total surprise. It just looked so awful. And to this day, I don't like it. When I asked Peter Buchanan what he would have done differently if he had to do it all over again, he says he would do all the same restorations, but he would have been more aggressive about outreach.

We could have tried harder. We set up for a couple of weekends down in the centre of Stirling to explain what we were doing. We had lots of groups and lots of people around to see the samples before we went any further. But really getting that message out through the media and getting to people to understand it is very, very difficult. And when it is a change on the scale, I think that possibly a bigger marketing campaign should have gone out there. This was 15 years ago before Twitter and Facebook made it easier to reach people. Certainly we've learnt the experience from the great hall as to how we should be getting messages out.

If people really understand what you're doing and really buy into it from day one, then I think it makes it a lot easier to be accepted. All restorations are unique. I don't think the Statue of Liberty should have been returned to copper when it was restored. As a landmark, people fell in love with it and it gained its significance when it was green. It made sense to keep it that way. But I found being in the bright yellow-great-haul at Sterling Castle really exciting.

I'm sympathetic to the fact that the color was shocking to the residents who grew up with it looking completely different, but its brightness brought it to life for me, and made me reinterpret my faded and ultimately wrong image of the past. It's now assumed that nearly all the Greek and Roman sculptures that we know in love were painted bright vibrant colors, even though most of us can only imagine them as white marble. When I see color reconstructions of ancient statues, I think they look ridiculous. But I can't help but feel that I know the Greeks and Romans a little bit better after

seeing what they thought looked good. I feel the same about the Renaissance artisans who designed the color schemes inside and outside sterling castle. They were mixing colors that really didn't match. They were using them in extraordinary ways. They were having great film and showing an awful lot of wealth and power in the process. But this is probably the first and last such restoration for Historic Scotland. New scanning and 3D rendering technology means that you can quote unquote the store a place and teach people what it looked like

at any point in history inside the virtual world of a computer exhibit without doing anything drastic to the actual physical structure at all. And to be honest, I'm much happier with that approach. We can do extraordinary things now through technology that we couldn't have done 15 years ago. And it's a really, really easy way to educate people

to show them what things might have been like without being too heavy-handed to the monument. So I suspect the Great Hall will remain as a unique restoration of the Historic Scotland's history. Which totally makes sense. But every once in a while, it's nice to be bold and daring like our ancestors were, and slap on that bright coat of paint, and see just how vivid the world once was.

So I spent a whole weekend sterling, and while I was there, my friends Helen Zoltzman and Martin Oswig came up to visit from London. Helen and Martin work on the great podcast Answer Me This Together, which is one of my absolute favorites. It's one tons of awards and it's incredibly popular in the UK. And when we started Reotopia, I talked with Helen about the idea of her doing a new show specifically for us on whatever she wanted. Helen is a language and etymology fanatic,

and she pitched us the illusionist, which I'm going to describe as 99% invisible for words. Mainly so everyone who listens to this show will understand that if you love 99% invisible, you'll love the illusionist. You can find out more and subscribe at the allusionist.org. That's allusionist with an A, but as a little summertime treat I thought I'd just play for you the latest episode of The Allusionist by Helen's

Ultimate. Welcome to The Allusionist, in which I, Helen's Ultraman's, Woptulcalve are five magic linguistic beings. Coming up in the show, word games. To prepare yourself for which here's a game word, game as in the genre of meat is so called because it was obtained through the game or sport of hunting.

And this history looks in venison, which evolved from the Latin verb venare, meaning to hunt, and came through English through the old French venison, which meant the meat of a large game animal, usually deer or wild boar. the Nari meaning to hunt, and came through English through the old French Venosule, which meant the meat of a large game animal, usually deer or wild boar, and that's the clearest to why the animal is called a deer until the point at which it's being eaten, where upon it becomes venison. The same with pairings like cow and beef and pig and pork and sheep and mutton, the words for the creatures in their living state are the Anglo-Saxon ones,

whereas the meat words originated from French. After the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066, there came a few hundred years in which the aristocracy was speaking French, and they were the ones who could afford to eat the meat. And also, they were usually the ones whose words were being recorded in writing for posterity. So there you go, meat words, on with the show. Gather round children, Grandmas got a story about how we had to make our own fun on long-boring journeys before we had iPads, or indeed any equipment at all beyond the capitol, because who hasn't had to while away hours stuck in a car or on a box or a train playing Word Games. Such fun!

I spy where you're listing boring things, or the Ministers cat where you're listing adjectives. The number plate game where you have to name things that start with the same letters as you can see on the number plate of the car you've been stuck behind in a traffic jam forever, or replacing words in songs with rude words, or the old family favourite. Guess how many words you can say before the driver shouts at you to shut up, and you have to sit in silence for two hours. Bonus points if you got beyond four. Here's my issue with these games. None of them are actually much fun to play, except for the replacing words in a song with rude words game, which is still pretty good. But really most of these word games are, but

was fun as filling in a spreadsheet. They do fulfill the function of obliterating an awkward silence without everyone having to think of conversational topics, but the prize isn't so much winning the game as the journey being over so you don't have to play the game anymore. Also words are all over the place and on the average day you'll be deploying or taking in many thousands. So how do you take these things which are ubiquitous and can cocked fun out of them? What are the elements of a top-notch word game? A bit of viciousness I can't even do to be honest. That's Leslie Scott, but not very vicious looking founder of Oxford Games. She has created more than 40 games,

a lot of which are word-based, such as anagrams where you compile anagrams at speed, the children's literature game Bookworm, and the bluffing games flummoxed inspiration and ex-liberus. But she's probably best known for a non-word game, the Builder Procarious Tower out of Woodenbricks game, Jenga. I actually think a game has to be competitive, otherwise it should be called another a different occupation, I mean a different kind of pastime. There are people who completely disagree with me, there are actually companies that are set up to make cooperative games. I can't imagine it.

You know, I think in a funny way, Jenga is the most cooperative game that I know, but it still has an element that somebody loses. A lot of people win it, but there's one person that lose. And I think if you don't have that element to it, it becomes another pastime. It's not a game, in my opinion. So you need to bring out people's malevolence I think so, to bring the fun. I think so.

And the element of jeopardy of the possibility of becoming the worst person in the room. Yes. Several of Leslie's games involve bluffing. In Flummoxed, you have to write a definition for a word from a foreign language, and in Ex Libris, the first or last line of a famous book, and in each case, convince the other players that yours is the real one. You don't really have to know anything to play the games. You just have to be a good liar, which is fun in an etymological sense because fun originally meant a hoax or a trick and as a

verb to make a fool of someone. But to goal people is fun fun too. For a little while anyway, because another crucial factor for a good game, according to Leslie, is speed. For me, yes. I love Scrabble until about halfway through the game and then it just slows down to a point where You're waiting and waiting for people to they as they sort of move their little there's seven tiles around endlessly I'm like I just get so I just get very bored by Scrabble if I'm really honest, but it's a very clever game. I Mean there's so many people that love Scrabble that Clearly that's a personal preference.

Before an anagram, I would have said that my favourite word game was Boggle, which is pretty fast. Three minutes? No messing. Pretty decisive, whether you want it or not. That's another thing. If you're stoking the competitive spirit, you don't need the additional ugliness of there being no clear indicator of victory. Boggle operates on a pretty straightforward point

system, predicated on the quantity of words and the letters they're in, but if you're supposed to be scoring on the words qualities, those are rather more complex to ascertain. Not many people realise that actually the success of Scrabble, the ultimate word game, is based on the fact that it was designed by a statistician who figured out the scoring system. I mean it was the first time somebody had sort of had a word game where you the score of the letter is based on the fact that he research absolutely incredibly thoroughly the numbers of times a particular'r ymdyn yw'r ysgwyrddol, ac yn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymd stack to start with was based on this and then the actual scoring is based on that. And it works. I mean, whether you like the actual player of the game, we have a mathematician to thank

the Scrabble, which I think is not fun. Sorry, Scrabble. But a game where you can try out just by memorising every two letter word will never have my affection. Now, I don't want Leslie to think I'm casting aspersions, but words are free, and so are the car games like Ice Buy and Number Plate. So how does she get people to pay to play games like Flomoxed or Ex Libris, which you could play using books that you already have on your shelves? I mean, sure you could make yourself a chess set if you wanted to. I think it's just simply that you open a box and you sit down with your group of friends

and you don't have to just rummage around trying to find books that are suitable that happen to be sitting on your bookshelf. And flammocks you don't need 112 dictionaries? Yes, exactly. It's exactly that. If you've just got a copy of X-Leabras, there isn't all that sort of faffing. It's there. You get on with it and you play

it and more importantly with ex-leabers is that the plot summaries that we've written are actually quite carefully written. They're not just the back of the sort of stuff that you get at the back of a book. Sometimes to lead you down the wrong path, but often so that they're names that are mentioned in there so it doesn't come up as a complete surprise that you're incorporating those names into your first or last lines. That took quite a long time and because X-Leap is also, because you can play the first or the last line, it does actually sort of limit the books that you use. Not all of them have brilliant first and last lines if you're still of mean, or usable ones then. So you're paying for the curation or... Exactly, the fun.

Actually, curations are good words, I'll use that. When you've invented your game, you need to name it. Something that indicates what's involved. The name and anagram of Tells the Story. And has a whiff of fun and hasn't already been nabbed by someone else. As the years have gone on, it's got more and more difficult to come up with a name for a game that hasn't already been used. It is quite a process and whether it's a game or not, I mean the whole process of naming

a product. It's actually a part of the process that I quite like. People would like to argue that it's a science. I'm not sure that there's a science to it. But there is something in it, there is something about it that, you know, words like say Viagra. It was quite a clever word for something that does what it does, gives the sense of vitality and water flowing as a Niagara. And with games it's tricky because you do want something snappy. Like Jenga?

It's some Swahili. It means build. It's the imperative of the word. It's Cajenga is to build. And I gave it a Swahili name because I grew up in East Africa speaking Swahili. I thought if I gave it a name that had no meaning to anybody who didn't speak Swahili,

there was a chance, one day, if you said the word Jenga, people would just think of the game that I just put on the market. It's lucky that Swahili word for build was quite a short word and easy for people who don't speak Swahili to pronounce. Well, you'd think it would be easy to pronounce. I have had people telling me categorically that the game is called Yenga. Well, why would you know how you're actually... Yeah, of course.

That's the thing. I did put on the market myself, originally, Hasbro sort of took it on in the States. They said they loved the game, but they absolutely hated the name. And so we had a little bit of battle on our hands, and I really was almost a sort of deal breaker. I just said please because they were saying this is going to be difficult enough to sell something that nobody's ever come across anything like this and then

to have a name that's meaning this. They wanted to give you some idea of how the game was what was involved in playing the game. Like, build a stack of blocks. Yes, exactly. It's snappy little ones. Or tumbled down, I think they wanted to call it at one point, or Timber. And I was going, no, no, please don't do. I was just talking to work. But you stuck to your guns?

I did. And what the funny thing is now is that I think they've got very selective memories. We'll all talk about how, you know, what a great name it is. How clever they were to have stuck to that name. Difficult. Yeah.

Presumably, the blocks are easy enough to rip off, but are the rip off jenga sets allowed to be called jenga? No, no. If you come up with a name that is too descriptive, and you won't necessarily be able to trademark it, there was another side to, I think, called it Jenga, as I could trademark that name, as a consequence of that, you can't call any old stack of blocks Jenga,

although that doesn't seem to stop people doing it. You can't officially, and Hasbro would definitely be down on you like a ton of bricks if you were selling something, calling it like a ton of bricks. I hadn't realized I'd just... So, that's it. Leslie Scott is the founder of Oxford Games, which you can find at oxfordgames.co.uk.

I'll be playing Excliberus with some friends this weekend. I will probably be losing Excliberus to my friends this weekend, but it'll be playing X-Libris with some friends this weekend. I will probably be losing X-Libris to my friends this weekend. But it'll be fun nonetheless. Before we go our separate ways, your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is... Imagineere! Now! A person who devises a highly imaginative concept or technology, especially the attractions in Walt Disney theme parks, try using it in an email today, perhaps to Oxford dictionaries

asking when they started doing product placement. This episode was produced by me, Helen Zoltzman, thanks to Martin Orstrick for providing music and editorial advice. If you have invented any word games, I would love you to tell me about them. It's been so interesting to hear your responses to the last episode about step-family terms. Some of you have come up with some very good suggestions, I think, for alternative terms to step bonus,

like the Danes and the Swedes use, or near-parent, or someone came up with Meta, Meta Mother. Pretty cool. Anyway, keep in touch at Twitter and Facebook slash Allusionist Show and at the Allusionist.org. That's your little taste of the Allusionist. Now go subscribe for yourself and every two weeks in your life will be better. That's 99% of visible for this week.

We are Sam Greenspan, Katie Mingle, Avery Troubleman, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of ArcSund, an architecture in interiors firm, a beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Thanks to MailChimp the Night Foundation and people just like you, we created Radio Topia from PRX, home to the illusionist and many other fine podcasts. Get to know them all at radiotopia.fm and if you have a company or project and you want to underwrite us, which is a good idea, I highly recommend it. Email sponsor at radiotopia.fm.

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