Hundisburg, Germany Internship

Early on rough elevation sketches

My professor, classmate, and I arrived in Germany on the 29th of May and got started the very next day on finding out the historic value of Hundisburg Castle and its surrounding area. We were given the idea to design a ruined structure that looked historic, yet at the same time conveyed that it was a modern construct as to not conuse the general public. We came up with rough sketches to present to Dr. Blanke, the head landscape architect of the property.

Early plan sketch of ruin and future surrounding paths

After several changes were made, later in the week we were visited by a memeber of the historic monuments foundation to view our designs and approve them, with some minor changes. A small media conferance was held so that the locals could get a sense of what it is we are doing, through a small newspaper and a local T.V network.

Our designs got us on the front page of the local newspaper

We visited the site where the ruin will be built with the HMF rep. and several reporters to really flesh out what it is we are creating, and to help others visualize the final product. We did some minor excavation around the site to get a good idea of the original footprint but were only able to discern one wall at just under 7 meters long.

The work site, with excavated original wall remnants

 We made final drawings after visiting the site several more times to establish from what directions the ruin would be best viewed, and then adjusted how we designed it accordingly. It was an interesting part of the project, because we had to design something that, reallly, no one truly knew how it was before. Most of our designs are based off of local architecture elemements and buildings of similar use to what would have been here. It took a lot of imagination and conceptual thinking to get to the point of having a final idea, but when we did, everyone was pleased with our results.

 A lot of layout lines were needed as in most drawings, to get the full shape of the ruin, but as the drawing progressed it became a struggle between erasing layout lines and filling it with rough detail to fully express the run down look of the place. The administration of the castle approved our final designs and we began to work in ernest.

We set to work on putting together the stones for the windows. We had found broken pieces of stone from what used to be a window. With one the break lined up perfectly and will be bonded together with mortar during install. With the other the break was not aligned and so we carved flat a small joint that would help the stones interlock.
















After several weeks of cutting and hand tooling we had both windows completed and stored for later install. With this stage done we moved on to producing the cornerstones needed for the ruin. These were slightly tricky to get a hang of. We were to give the stones a punched finished with a 1 inch band of fine tooling around the edges. By this time we were midway through the summer so we still had time to work at a steady pace. As we refined our technique on the cornerstones we began to think about the doorway and getting those stones down to shape as well. Below are some of the stones carved flat for stacking within the doorframe.

As Charles continued work on the brownstone side of the doorway I moved to the limestone side where all the pieces needed to be resized. The bottom left stone in particular was the only stone to not have a matching counterpart and so once all the other stones fit the measurements I set out to replicate the stone you see on the right.

 I found a stone with the dimensions of what I needed fitting inside of it. So I carved off all of the top profile that was extruded and flattened down a decorative band. Once I had the template made and I scribed on the profile needed, I first carved the angle at which the cyma reversa sat. Then I added the wavy tooling to the stone which was especially challenging at first, having been my first ever quite strange tooling style.

 I then went and carved the cyme reversa and its double return with a 1 inch band to finish it off with a rough pitched surface on the backside to sit in the wall.