Flag Fen Archaeology Park boss 'heartened' after roundhouse attack
'Bigger and better'
"However, we are very much seeing this as a 'phoenix from the ashes' situation," she said. Ms Mooney told the BBC there had been "fantastic" offers of help and donations already from contractors and local people. "We've already got people on site helping us repair one of our old roundhouses so it can take the temporary place of our Iron Age one," she said. "We are so heartened by the support we've felt from the people of Peterborough and surrounding areas, who are going to help us build a new roundhouse that will be bigger and better."Cambridgeshire Fire Service has said the cause of the blaze was thought to be deliberate.
Flag Fen is an important historical landscape which dates back to the Bronze Age and is the site of many archaeological finds. The park had two replica roundhouses – one representing the Bronze Age (2,500 BC - 800 BC) and the other reflecting the Iron Age (800 BC - AD50).Flag Fen was also planning to construct a third. The burnt out replica was based on an Iron Age roundhouse discovered at Cats Water, next to Flag Fen, and featured log seating and a fire pit to replicate how our ancestors lived.Ms Mooney estimated the total rebuild cost would be about £50,000, with the last one also funded by charitable donations. About 10,000 school children visit annually and she said she wanted them to be able to resume enjoying their "magical" trips to the site's Iron Age roundhouse as soon as possible.
She said the staff had previously dealt with a similar situation when arsonists destroyed its education room in 2020. Ms Mooney said while it had to go without the facility for two years, it was eventually rebuilt "bigger and better" and she hoped it would be the same case for the replacement roundhouse.Donations were now being asked for and Flag Fen also needed to source water reed and other materials for the rebuilding project, but it also required people to volunteer their time and skills."If people have ever wanted to build a roundhouse, now is the time to help," said Ms Mooney.
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The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘A cipher for crazy self-projection': why are architects so obsessed with Solomon's Temple?
No legendary building has ever inspired more conjecture about what it might have looked like than Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. It is said to have been built in c.950BC, on the mound where God created Adam, and was destroyed 400 years later by marauding Babylonians. But, beyond some inconsistent descriptions in the Bible written centuries after the temple was razed, there is no archaeological evidence that this palatial edifice ever existed. And yet, for more than two millennia, generations of architects, archaeologists and ideologues have bickered over the building's appearance. They have debated its exact height and width, speculated on the design of its columns, and battled over the precise nature of its porch. The mythic building, also known as the First Temple, has inspired everything from a Renaissance royal palace in Spain to a recent megachurch in Brazil, to the interiors of masonic lodges around the world – all built on a fantasy. 'It really draws out the batshit crazy,' says Argentinian artist Pablo Bronstein, standing in front of his monumental new drawings of what Solomon's Temple, and its contents, might have looked like. 'It has been used as a cipher for pretty much every crazy projection of power and self-delusion for 2,500 years. I find it totally fascinating – particularly as the whole thing is entirely fabricated.' Bronstein's work has long played with the provocative power of architectural image-making. He has poked fun at Britain's pseudo-Georgian housing and given us orgiastic depictions of hell, which he imagined as a showcase city strewn with garish monuments worthy of the most tasteless dictator. But the subject matter, location and (incidental) timing of his latest mischievous outing couldn't be more charged. Bronstein's speculative drawings of the holiest site in Judaism are now on display in Waddesdon Manor, an inflated French chateau built in Buckinghamshire in the 1890s as the weekend party pad of the Rothschilds – an immensely wealthy Jewish banking family who were instrumental in the creation of Israel. Baron Edmond de Rothschild – the French cousin of Baron Ferdinand, who built Waddesdon – financed a number of early settlements in Palestine and founded the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association in 1924, run by his son James, who inherited the manor. When the Balfour Declaration was written in 1917, declaring the British government's support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, it was addressed to Ferdinand's nephew, Walter Rothschild, an eccentric zoologist who liked to pose astride giant tortoises, ride a carriage drawn by zebras andwho was also a prominent Zionist leader. 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Marvel at the spiralling Solomonic columns at the entrance, sampled from Bernini's baldacchino at St Peter's in Rome, and the illusionistic domes that hover above the Ark, influenced by Alessandro Antonelli's Mole Antonelliana in Turin, which was originally conceived as a synagogue. 'It's the temple as a sort of gin palace,' says Bronstein – an architecturally virtuosic one, nonetheless. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion On the opposite wall is a more restrained version of the temple, with interior wooden panelling that recalls the kind of synagogue you might find in Golders Green, north London – not far from where Bronstein grew up in Neasden. There are also notes of Henri Labrouste's Bibliothèque de Saint Geneviève in Paris, as well as dazzling blue lapis lazuli walls, representing the celestial realm in a medieval manner, along the lines of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the 'arch-reconstructor of historic architecture', a caption tells us. It's a heady cocktail, made no less so by the fruity facade, which depicts the heads of Moses, David and Solomon as blue-bearded gargoyles above the entrance, and a relief of God, flanked by sphinxes. 'There's a good amount of scholarship about what a temple would have actually looked like if it was built in the 10th century BC,' says Bronstein. 'And it's got nothing to do with monotheism.' He thinks it's much more likely that, had the temple been built at the time the Bible alleges, it is highly likely that it would have been a pantheistic riot, full of different representations of the divine – as is the case with a comparable structure that has survived in Ain Dara in Syria, built in 1300BC, 'which is just full of goblins, basically.' If all this wasn't enough, Bronstein has also drawn the Ark of the Covenant – depicted as a gilded medieval reliquary casket, topped with a cushion, where God is said to have rested his feet – and the temple's menorah, imagined as a twirly rococo candelabrum, whose branches emerge from a chinoiserie-style grotto. Drawings from the Waddesdon archive in a following room help to set the project in context, and show that Bronstein's flamboyant fantasies aren't so far from what was being designed by the 19th-century architects from whom he took inspiration. 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BBC News
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BBC News
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