Castles

Yes it looks like a great place to live.

 

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Okay you got me, I do like what they did with the place.

 

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Oh yeah . Fire place building is a dieing trade . I had to gather information for the fucking engineer the last one I built . My Mason was the same Mason Andy McDowell used on her place up Nine Mile Road . ( Ground Hog Day, Rose ) He learned from an Old man when he was young. I was a hod carrier when I was nine for an old Mason in Sacramento and that was my first exposure to the wonderful world of masonry. The old kind of hod carrying. It was a stick like a shovel handle and it had this shoe shaped scoop that was open on one end . The top was open too and it was made to carry on your shoulder sticking in the air so when you climb the scaffold you could dump it on the mud pallet above your head . Not for the week of heart let Me tell you .

 

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Very colorful and very nice country setting, yes I do like it.

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I lived in Sacramento area for four year about 20 years ago. Custom built a house at Rancho Marietta Country Club. But the only stone work I ever did was to piece together about 3 pallets of Arizona Red and Black Slate flag stones into a great looking lawn boarder for the back yard. I had to use a weeks vacation time to do it.

 

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Blarney Castle, near Cork in Ireland.

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It has been said that kissing the Blarney Stone will bestow the gift of eloquence. As though any who post here are short on that attribute....

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blarney_Castle

 

That is a nice area . Foot hills right ? East of Rancho Cordova. I worked around there many years ago . I didn't know you were so Hooty Tooty Klown . If I am remembering right some of those houses had there own air plane hangers. You would have the Home Owners Association come down on you if your garage door was up . Yeah Sacramento . I moved a little over 20 years ago from there . Arden way by Cal-Expo is Me home base . Encina High School Be my Alumni. In Fact I was going to Sacramento Joiner College the day Skeeky pulled the pistol on Ford . It was the first day I missed class due to a job my brother got Me working in West Sac . So I was not there but I would have been walking right by the incident if I was . I was like Fuck can you believe that " when it came on the news that evening . Nimbus Damn watching the salmon climb the ladder. Love that stuff . Fishing for chad in the American river . Oh what fun that is . Trout fishing the Rubicon above Auburn . Man 24 inch brown trout galore . I still love Sacramento cause you can get to the high country and the ocean in a heart beat . Bodego Bay. Now that was the shit . Take the charter boats out fishing . We was doing that before The movie the Birds came out so when it did it had that special little feel of familiarity to it . Don't throw no seagulls any fish , or if you do you know what I mean. Bad as Canadian Geese

 

Three views of Hemji Castle, very different from European castles. I spent two weeks in Japan about 30 years ago and visited 3 different castles. The doorways are to small, I kept bumping my head.

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Rancho Marietta Country Club had two 18 hole golf courses, about 30 miles east of downtown just off Hwy 50 if I remember correctly. But I do remember some place I drove by a few times that had small planes in their garages and small runway where a street would normally be. I worked in a building next to the levy. The last year I was there it almost over flowed. They were prepared to dynamite the side opposite the city side, just in case.

 

I have to say the Japanese castle looks more livable.
I have fancy-someday dreams of building an dirtbag/bottle-construction house...and...I have visions of copying at least the look of Hemji Castle...
Using just surface stone over dirtbag and bottle, build a ground-level that has huge thermal mass and have all the living areas upstairs, just a workshop downstairs...and design it to naturallly pull air from below to upstairs for passive cooling.

Where would I get all that dirt? Well, a minature Japanese castle surely needs a Koi pond

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http://www.earthbagbuilding.com/

 

Some of them do, and areas for sand art and the gardens are spectacular. I dare say nobody does gardens better than the Japanese.

 

The Matsumoto castle is very interesting, mostly surrounded by water.

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Castello Torrechiara, Italia

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Interesting castle, mostly square lines and corners. Not any rounded or curved corners.​

 

As weapons evolved, so did castles. Firearms, over a long period, forced the castles to begin to morph into what we call "star forts". This was largely done to create zones of crossfire and eliminate blind spots that gunners could not target (created by the rounded shapes of earlier castles. The "star" like parts of star forts came because they started filling in the blind spots at the bases of turrets with stone. Curves became obsolete and increasingly elaborate angles proved superior given the improving range and accuracy of later medieval firearms and cannon.

In that case the changes were concurrent with changes in the military, so that they started to be professional forces and not led by nobles who gained their rank by birth, so castles retained their military functions, but lost their role as royal and noble residences.

 

The original use of the word 'castle' has changed over time and now encompasses a much broader range of architecture, design and purpose. I have been posting castles in keeping with the original definition of the word.

Bodiam Castle is a 14th-century moated castle near Robertsbridge in East Sussex, England. It was built in 1385 by Sir Edward Dalyngrigge, a former knight of Edward III.

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This one comes with a floor plan.

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The advent of gunpowder triggered a change in design of the castle and as the need for greater fortification arose, the comfort level declined.

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Krak des Chevaliers in Syria. It is an 11th century castle and was used in the Crusades. It was one of the first castles to use concentric fortification, ie: concentric rings of defence that could all operate at the same time. It has two curtain walls and sits on a promontory.

 

That's one heck of a defensive position, there...

I could build my house with a little moat, miniversion...maybe use it for freshwater plant aquaculture.

 

A little hill top castle Alcazar Segovia Spain. kind of cute isn' it?

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Where's the wicked queen? where's Snow White?