Today we visited the town of Kutna Hora, a city East of Prague known for it’s Medieval mining history and the beautiful St. Barbara’s Cathedral. The cathedral is a UNESCO world heritage site and was a major symbol of wealth and independence for the town. Some possible engineering challenges that I could see occurring while erecting the cathedral are an unstable surface (mineshafts everywhere), and the flying buttresses (which had to be properly aligned and supported during construction, something that in my opinion sounds easy to go wrong).
After checking out the cathedral, we toured one of the old mineshafts. It was very narrow and compressed in addition to being wet. There were also massive spiders on the “ceiling” which sucked because this was inches from everyone’s heads. At one point, the guide turned all the lights off, and not being able to see my hand millimeters from my face was not a great feeling and really put into perspective what it could have been like working down there with a dim candle prone to breaking.
Swanson School of Engineering 