![]() The Browns took part in the workshop, and on the flight back to Boston, Rick sat next to PBS “Nova” producer Michael Barnes, who asked Rick if he thought he could recruit timber framers from the workshop to help assemble more weapons for a “Nova” program, “ Secrets of Lost Empires.” The show culminated with participants raising two full-sized trebuchets next to a castle on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland. In 1998, Grigg Mullen Jr., a civil engineer and retired professor at the Virginia Military Institute who has worked with the Browns since their earliest projects, put out a call for volunteers to recreate a full-sized medieval trebuchet, a kind of catapult and the period’s most fearsome weapon. Fascinated by New England’s architectural history, they joined the Timber Framers Guild, a 1,400-member group devoted to the old-fashioned craft of building structures with beams and joints held together by wooden pegs. After graduating, they bounced around the country and academia, eventually settling in Boston. The couple met while studying sculpture at the University of Georgia in the early 1970s. Rick and Laura Brown during a brief respite from overseeing the reconstruction. “You don’t understand it until you reverse-engineer it and experience the process.” “The object itself is loaded with information,” Rick says. Their main goal is education-teaching their students at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design to recreate age-old monuments and more. ![]() The Browns are at the forefront of a field called experimental archaeology-recreating ancient objects using the tools and techniques of those eras. Notre-Dame de Paris, before and during the April 2019 inferno that brought down the grand spire. ![]() ![]() “Let us think on it,” Rick replied, which usually means yes. “This sounds like a project for you,” she said. The roof of Notre-Dame de Paris was still burning in April 2019 when Rick and Laura Brown got a call from their daughter Rian, a documentary filmmaker and professor at Oberlin College. ![]()
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