Cities by Wolfsauge

KD: This was posted by @Wolfsauge as a comment. Figured it was interesting enough to be a stand alone article.

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I have something and I don't really know where to put it in this blog. Maybe you can give me a hint or move it to a better place. The scope is so massive, because it exceeds simple usual architectural considerations. Because of the look of the Thun castle and the Zähringer heraldic symbol I put it here, but actually I think it might need its own category in "Architecture": "Cities".

It is the 15 year work project of Klaus Humpert, who died October 10 2020, without his work results being recognized. He was a german architect and city planner.

During a hike in his hometown in the 1990s, he discovered a road network, which he identified to be ancient and which is nowadays attributed to romans.

Further research on this road network lead him to regularities in the layout of the city of Freiburg, which were previosly unknown. These regularities are based on circles and a unit length of 37.4 meters.

The origin is marked still today inside the church, and the rest of the city is constructed from there entirely.

The results of his further research indicates the city of Freiburg was not just appearing bit by bit, randomly out of nowhere over a long period of time, but was planned from the start for a specific size and torn out of the ground in one big planning and building project, which was mainly coordinated by the House of Zähringen, a dynasty of Swabian nobility.

With the research work it is shown that the common idea of the grown medieval city is wrong. The medieval planners could not only precisely measure and build monastery complexes and churches, but would also have measured large concepts in the great epoch of city foundations from 1100 to 1350 (approx. 3000 new foundations in the German-speaking region). (Wikipedia)

In addition to Freiburg he then analyzed layouts of the cities Villingen, Offenburg, Rottweil, Esslingen am Neckar, München, Lübeck, Wismar, Speyer, Basel, Bern, Breisach, the Campo of Siena, Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, Abensberg, Bräunlingen and Deggendorf, just to find the same cookie cutter patterns.
The centerpiece of of a monument to Zähringen power is Thun Castle, in the city of Thun, in the Swiss canton of Bern. It was built in the 12th century (Links and image from Wikipedia).

This is a drawing of the seal of Berthold IV, Duke of Zähringen (r. 1152–1186). According to Wikipedia, the symbol is a heraldic eagle (I keep seeeing a lion).

Mr. Humpert's statements are made very well accessible in a 50 min YouTube video, which is a documentary made by a European public service TV channel promoting cultural programming.

It also shows footage of the large field tests, in which Mr Humpert verified his own claims about the medieval working technique, with regard to successfully reproducing the layout of an existing city (Wismar) and measuring the accuracy achieved when doing so on an empty plot, using only the tools and methods he researched to be the old tools and methods of the Zähringer time, about 900 years ago.

The documentary also features interviews with a guy from the "established history" department, author of standard literature which is, in main parts, proven wrong by Humpert's research results, who has obvious troubles refuting the obviousness and accuracy of Mr Humpert's findings and who is actually flaming up quite a bit during the interview. It is a feast to watch and it works quite well with the auto-generated english subtitles. I hope you like it, maybe it's worth a more in-depth look and a separate posting in the future. I just don't know in which category?

YouTube: Die Entdeckung der mittelalterlichen Stadtplanung, a film by Dominik Wessely in cooperation with SWR / ARTE © 2004, filmtank hamburg / SWR.

 

[Jinxy]

Mayas
Aarch sorry.
Mayas also have this roads and I keep thinking about Holloways
too.
(My phone is acting strange, sorry)
I start wondering if the previous people were able to look from above in earth, somehow.
*on earth

 

[calebans]

start wondering if the previous people were able to look from above in earth, somehow

not sure of all the words , and would certainly expect that observing from above could - and should - happen .

before all that , what is a star-t ?

 

[Wolfsauge]

At first, Humpert thought these ancient roman roads would have been determining the shape of the Freiburg city layout, but he found repeating patterns in the layout, which suggest something else instead. This post is about the something else.

Which is the layout of more than fifteen different german medieval cities, that already exist for several hundred years and how they came to be.

The official (hi)story tells these cities grew randomly and organically and were especially not planned, not following any plans. Only extensions to said medieval cities were sometimes "planned" with the coming of the Renaissance.

Cities in Europe from the 9th to 14th centuries, often grew organically and sometimes chaotically. But in the following centuries with the coming of the Renaissance many new cities were enlarged with newly planned extensions. (Wikipedia on Urban Planning)

Wikipedia does not explain why this is the official opinion. The reason for this opinion is the alleged lack of evidence to the contrary, that is absence of any evidence for plans or urban planning taking place.

Humpert found such evidence.

This evidence implies a significant number of the german medieval cities were instead planned from the beginning and then built according to the plan.

This cannot be explained by assuming an organic and sometimes chaotic or otherwise unordered, random growth.

To find this evidence, he used the standard measure which is built into the Freiburg Minster, a big old church said to be built in 1200 together with the medieval city center of Freiburg.

This standard measure looks like this:

With this standard measure a few simple geometric figures can be constructed like this:

People familiar with basic geometry will recognize two equilateral triangles with sides 600 feet long (made from the standard measure above) and a circumscribed circle with a radius of 600 standard measures.

This is a considered a simple and straightforward elementary geometric construction, because it can be replicated easily with compass and straightedge - not even a ruler is needed.

This geometric construction figure is then overlaid on the actual land register map of Freiburg.

The land register map is a work of today, completed in the modern times, done by geodesists, who are engineers with modern, precision tools, who measure the exact sizes, lengths and angles of actual buildings, roads, elevations and other landmarks and then create maps, which they verify to be precise.

The following image shows the overlaying of the previous geometric construction with the land register map, which is the act of critically comparing the imagination (the construction) against reality (land register map):

The blue lane is the location of two curved roads in Freiburg: the Salzstrasse (salt road) is the part of the lane eastern to the center, while the Bertoldstrasse is the western part of the blue lane.

In reality the curving of these roads looks like this today:

The patterns Humpert found are not just present in the land register map of Freiburg, but can be found in most of the medieval cities he investigated, please see the list of these cities in the first post.

One of the patterns was found to be present in all of the medieval cities he investigated: the 2000 unit radius, which is not shown in the screenshots of this post.

In Freiburg the error margin between construction and reality is much less than 0.5%, that is the deviations between construction and reality are less than 50 cm across several hundreds of meters of medieval roads and buildings.

Fact is, no known evidence in the sense of "original historic sources" exist, no plans, no recordings of tools and methods.

In my understanding, still considering the growth and layout of these cities to be random and chaotic is denying the obvious.

@Jinxy and @calebans These roman road networks shown at the beginning of the post only gave the initial spark for Humpert's investigation and are not subject of the post. I don't understand the questions about "star-t", "sacbe" and "sunken lanes". Also I don't see any connection to geometric constructions with the mason tools. To be honest I don't see any connection, except trivial ones like "sacbes are roads too" and "sunken lanes are found in Germany" - am I missing anything obvious?

Edit: typos

 

[calebans]

am I missing anything obvious?

I don't think so, so hopefully that brings some cheer ... do not dismay

my learning has been that towns , cities and architecture mirrors the heavens (constellations and star locations) ... what I haven't seen to date is a coherent overlay of the ground with some of the patterns . my thinking is that if a constellation element might be an earth sign a city is built to mark that star or constellation while another city might be built to represent or reflect another star in the constellation ... or perhaps help to represent a shape of the element that a constellation is said to be empowered with . there are myriad reasons for doing this that I am not well versed in

we have heard before "as above , so below" and my guess is any of the free mason chapters may have had some influence in the region you are looking at . that said , I fully expect that like with artists or writers and their muses , this can happen completely without prior understanding of what they are geolocating . also , if people here represent stars in the current / past heavens perhaps they saw things on the ground on the way to manifesting physically and it is in an unconscious or intuitive memory store

btw , star-t would be star-crossed if using the word and symbol hyphen separated

 

[Sonofabor]

That video is very revealing-- especially the ignorance of the academic. It is rather obvious he has never worked on any building project and probably doesn't know anyone who has. Instead, he refers to master builders and churches officials, as if these towns could spring organically from the mind of the administrative machine. Wouldn't it be helpful to interview contemporary construction workers to get their take on how such project could possibly unfold? (Of course, cultural programming does not know how to address the knowledge of those not schooled in the university system.) Even the architect is left one degree removed from construction itself-- drawing lines and measuring stone. He never asks: Who could do this? And how?

Some very big Romans (@ about 26:00)?

Or, later, @36:OO or so, gods....

 

[Jinxy]

"sacbe" and "sunken lanes".

Ok let me clarify.

A sacbe (Beh) is a mayan road that connects places of worship:
Ethnographers working the lowlands have noted that it means "more than the road you see with your eyes." The term Beh refers to "the road of life"

So I figured that if the mayans already gave more meaning to a road than just "a road", then why not the Romans?

I think that the mayans, egyptians and romans were not so separate folks as they want us to believe, so indeed, for what reason did they make the cities just like that?

Maya map:

His book cover:

Sunken lanes are also told that they "just happend accidently because of a lot of horses and carriages".

Here is an interview (German) with this nice man mr. Humpert and he mentions the Roman sunken lanes too. (and a photo)

star-t

Interviewer: "So you can sum up, until motorized traffic, most of the streets were very old?"

Mr Humpert: "Yes, they are all very old and all stars"

Honestly, I misunderstood star-t in the first place, in that sense that I thought Sonafabor meant that start (beginning) etymology comes from star.

More info on this subject city planning:

"As a starting point to this discussion, we will focus on a famous passage from Leon Battista Alberti’s architectural treatise De re aedificatoria (1452), in which he describes the advantages of winding streets as compared to straight streets"
[...]
"In book IV, On public works, Alberti wrote the following discussion on the streets within the city:
“When the [military] road reaches a city, and that city is renowned and powerful, the streets are
better straight and very wide, to add to its dignity and majesty. But with a settlement or a fortified
town [...] it is better when the roads are not straight, but meandering gently like a river flowing now here, now there, from one bank to the other. For apart from the fact that the longer the roads seem, the greater the apparent size of the town, no doubt it will be of great benefit in terms
of appearance and practical convenience, while catering to the requirements of changing circumstances.
And it is no trifle that visitors at every step meet yet another facade, or that the
entrance to and view from every house should face directly onto the street; and while elsewhere too much openness will be disagreeable and unhealthy, here the large scale is welcome.
[…]
Although elsewhere the shade may grow harsh in the narrow streets, here this does not happen; the sun always shines down on the street, even in winter. [...]
Furthermore, if the enemy gains access, he will risk injury, his front and flank being as much exposed as his back.
So much for military roads.
Nonmilitary roads will be similar, except perhaps in this respect: if built in straight lines, they will make a better match with the corners of the walls and the parts of
the buildings.
But I notice that the ancients preferred to give some of their roads within the city awkward exits, and others blind alleys, so that any aggressor or criminal who entered would [...] soon find himself in danger.
It is also convenient to have even narrower roads of no great length, ending at the first crossroad: these serve not so much to provide a public thoroughfare as to give access to the interlying houses, which will be of benefit both to the houses, by increasing the amount of light
they receive, and also to the town, by impeding any hostile element seeking to escape."

• Source

By the way, the first picture I find when I google Alberti the city planner:

Source​

 

[NickWeech]

KD: This was posted by @Wolfsauge as a comment. Figured it was interesting enough to be a stand alone article.

---

I have something and I don't really know where to put it in this blog. Maybe you can give me a hint or move it to a better place. The scope is so massive, because it exceeds simple usual architectural considerations. Because of the look of the Thun castle and the Zähringer heraldic symbol I put it here, but actually I think it might need its own category in "Architecture": "Cities".

It is the 15 year work project of Klaus Humpert, who died October 10 2020, without his work results being recognized. He was a german architect and city planner.

During a hike in his hometown in the 1990s, he discovered a road network, which he identified to be ancient and which is nowadays attributed to romans.

View attachment 12028​

Further research on this road network lead him to regularities in the layout of the city of Freiburg, which were previosly unknown. These regularities are based on circles and a unit length of 37.4 meters.

The origin is marked still today inside the church, and the rest of the city is constructed from there entirely.

The results of his further research indicates the city of Freiburg was not just appearing bit by bit, randomly out of nowhere over a long period of time, but was planned from the start for a specific size and torn out of the ground in one big planning and building project, which was mainly coordinated by the House of Zähringen, a dynasty of Swabian nobility.

In addition to Freiburg he then analyzed layouts of the cities Villingen, Offenburg, Rottweil, Esslingen am Neckar, München, Lübeck, Wismar, Speyer, Basel, Bern, Breisach, the Campo of Siena, Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, Abensberg, Bräunlingen and Deggendorf, just to find the same cookie cutter patterns.
The centerpiece of of a monument to Zähringen power is Thun Castle, in the city of Thun, in the Swiss canton of Bern. It was built in the 12th century (Links and image from Wikipedia).

View attachment 12029​

This is a drawing of the seal of Berthold IV, Duke of Zähringen (r. 1152–1186). According to Wikipedia, the symbol is a heraldic eagle (I keep seeeing a lion).

View attachment 12030​

Mr. Humpert's statements are made very well accessible in a 50 min YouTube video, which is a documentary made by a European public service TV channel promoting cultural programming.

It also shows footage of the large field tests, in which Mr Humpert verified his own claims about the medieval working technique, with regard to successfully reproducing the layout of an existing city (Wismar) and measuring the accuracy achieved when doing so on an empty plot, using only the tools and methods he researched to be the old tools and methods of the Zähringer time, about 900 years ago.

The documentary also features interviews with a guy from the "established history" department, author of standard literature which is, in main parts, proven wrong by Humpert's research results, who has obvious troubles refuting the obviousness and accuracy of Mr Humpert's findings and who is actually flaming up quite a bit during the interview. It is a feast to watch and it works quite well with the auto-generated english subtitles. I hope you like it, maybe it's worth a more in-depth look and a separate posting in the future. I just don't know in which category?

YouTube: Die Entdeckung der mittelalterlichen Stadtplanung, a film by Dominik Wessely in cooperation with SWR / ARTE © 2004, filmtank hamburg / SWR.

Very interesting. Parallels in other parts of Europe ...? Thanks for posting this.

 

[Wolfsauge]

[..] I think that the mayans, egyptians and romans were not so separate folks as they want us to believe, so indeed, for what reason did they make the cities just like that? [..]

Alright, I understand better now. Also, thanks for the material, I still need to go through it. Never heard of Sacbe before.

Btw. there are also geoglyphs in North America, Australia, Asia and Africa. As far as they can still be seen on Google Maps, some of the Australian ones look pretty pre-cataclysmic to me, because notable land- and seascapes, which don't look man-made otherwise, are interrupting the lines in large areas, but without wiping the entirety of their remaining appearance.

Understanding it is possible to also mention associations, which might see far-fetched to some, now I am wondering if you have seen the movie Aluna by Alan Ereira, about the colombian Kogi tribe (our Elder brother), who is doing something quite interesting with 400 kilometres (250 miles) of gold thread.

Given that environmentalism has become both a profitable business and a commodity, I didn't think much more about this film after seeing it, until now. It is certainly superficial in some ways. I think the Kogi have managed to teach me something that sticks to my mind with their demonstration - but it is not about environmentalism. 400 km of gold thread..

 

[Right Arm]

This reminds me of when looking for star forts in Portugal that although most of the villages look organic they often turn out to be too much of the same to be so.

Here is a very quick sample of a couple of smaller outlying villages with a larger fort type town at it's center.

38° 1'1.84"N 7°51'54.82"W

Sorry for the wiki but it explains it sufficiently enough.

In the 20th century, A. H. Church studied the patterns of phyllotaxis in his 1904 book. In 1917, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson published On Growth and Form; his description of phyllotaxis and the Fibonacci sequence, the mathematical relationships in the spiral growth patterns of plants showed that simple equations could describe the spiral growth patterns of animal horns and mollusc shells. In 1952, Alan Turing (1912–1954), better known for his work on computing and codebreaking, wrote The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, an analysis of the mechanisms that would be needed to create patterns in living organisms, in the process called morphogenesis. He predicted oscillating chemical reactions, in particular the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction. These activator-inhibitor mechanisms can, Turing suggested, generate patterns (dubbed "Turing patterns") of stripes and spots in animals, and contribute to the spiral patterns seen in plant phyllotaxis. In 1968, the Hungarian theoretical biologist Aristid Lindenmayer (1925–1989) developed the L-system, a formal grammar which can be used to model plant growth patterns in the style of fractals. L-systems have an alphabet of symbols that can be combined using production rules to build larger strings of symbols, and a mechanism for translating the generated strings into geometric structures. In 1975, after centuries of slow development of the mathematics of patterns by Gottfried Leibniz, Georg Cantor, Helge von Koch, Wacław Sierpiński and others, Benoît Mandelbrot wrote a famous paper, How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension, crystallising mathematical thought into the concept of the fractal.

• Patterns in nature

I guess I am trying to say is that these things are not natural and require a much more intimate understanding of our realm than we are educated to think we have, it is almost like art that has the design principles of life emended into bricks and mortar.

Kind of like how cars used to look really funny and then when the designers started using golden ratio curves and other principles, they became infinitely more appealing, to the eye at least, because this is just the way we are wired.

It could be considered an ancient form of biohacking, this applies to all of the wonders of the world that we seemed to be programmed to try to forget, yet when we set an eye upon them it triggers that part of us that is seeking meaning in this barren life we call the future.