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Hello, everybody~
Today's topic is "Castle". Well, although it's kind of embarrassing, I still have to admit that at the first place, my dream topic was the "Castle and love story ", because of a medieval romantic love story my friend told me once. Unfortunately, it's hard to find a proper article for Obstacle, so, little revision comes to the orginal topic.
Only two articles are in today's exercise, first one is a list and brief introduction of romantic castles around the world. As for Obstacle part, the passage is about a specific castle.
Today's post is not that difficult, so have fun~
Part 1 Speaker [Rephrase1]
Crying men
[dialog: 6'08]
MP3:
Transcript:
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/general/sixminute/2013/06/130613_6min_crying_men.shtml
Part 2 Speed
Article 1(Check the title later)
Architectural Love Story: 10 Real Castles Built for Love
Article by Angie
[TIME2]
Architecture is influenced by Eros, Greek god of sexual love and beauty, also known as Roman counterpart Cupid. Architecture can be beautiful and a thing to love. But there are some castles built specifically for love as loving tributes, gifts, or even erected for love lost. Nothing is more powerful than love and expressing love in architecture is divinely romantic. However, love and tragedy are reoccurring themes to these castles. For Valentine’s Day, here are 10 castles built for love.
Boldt Castle on Heart Island, New York
Valentine’s Day 1905 was to be the day that George Boldt gave his wife the five-acre Boldt Castle estate in the Thousand Islands. He had this medieval and Victorian architectural styled castle built as a testimonial of his love for his wife, Louise. Boldt Castle was to be an eleven-building complex, the most grand in the Thousand Islands. Among many amazing architectural landmarks, there was the Yacht House, a gigantic playhouse Alster Tower, the Power House, and a fairytale version 120-room home modeled after a Rhineland Castle. One year before Boldt Castle was to be completed, Louise, aged 41, died. Brokenhearted, George Boldt stopped the construction and never returned to the island. After more tragedy of vandals set free on the island, there is a bit of a happy ending. Drawn by the romance of the place, now couples come to be wed at Boldt Castle.
[Words: 233]
[TIME3]
Taj Mahal in Agra, India
The Taj Mahal was built for love, but tragically as a mausoleum and in memory of love lost. After the death of his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, Emperor Shah Jahan began building a tomb that would be the most resplendent monument ever built by man for a woman. While the dome of the mausoleum and its four standing minarets are built out of white marble, all the outlying buildings within the Taj Mahal complex are primarily built out of red sandstone, combining Persian, Indian, and Islamic architectural styles. The central focus of the complex is the tomb and you can tour it virtually here.
Swallow’s Nest Castle: “Castle of Love” in Crimean, Ukraine
Built in 1912 near Yalta in the South of Crimea, the Swallow’s Nest is one of the most romantic castles of Neo-Gothic style. The Swallow’s Nest Castle was originally named “The Castle of Love.” However, the romantically named “Love Castle” started with humble beginnings as a wooden cottage. There is little proof that this “Castle of Love” was built for a great love . . . more like a lover’s nest. Perhaps not constructed for true love but built for the purpose of making love. In 1927, an earthquake measuring 6-7 on the Richter scale, cracked the 130 ft Aurora Cliff. The huge crack closed the castle for the next 40 years. The cliff and castle have since been fortified and restored. The public flocks to Swallow’s Nest Castle to look over Ai–Todor Cape, the Black Sea, and to dine in the restaurant now within the castle’s walls.
Kellie’s Castle in Batu Gajah, Malaysia
Kellie’s Castle is Malaysia’s oldest castle and built for love by Scottish planter William Kellie Smith for his wife Agnes Smith. She missed home tremendously and had also blessed him with a son. Construction began in 1915, combining three architectural styles – Greco-Roman, Moorish, and Indian. A Spanish flu epidemic killed most of the 70 Indian construction workers. Kellie Smith built a Hindu temple near the castle to please the Indians and to restart construction. Kellie Smith left for England to fetch a lift for the castle tower, but he died shortly thereafter from pneumonia. Construction on the castle built for love was left uncompleted. The castle ruins are rumored to be haunted.
[Words: 388]
[TIME4]
Dobroyd Castle in Todmorden, England
Dobroyd Castle at Todmorden started as a promise of love and turned into a honeymoon home. John Fielden, the son of a wealthy industrialist, fell in love with a local weaver girl, Ruth Stansfield. Fielden proposed to her, but she said she would marry him if he would promise to build her a castle on a hill. When completed, Dobroyd Castle had 66 luxurious rooms, a stable for 17 horses, boasted four small turrets and a main tower. The initials of John and Ruth were engraved in a dozen places, the monograms JFR carved into the Devon marble and Caen stone, as a testimony to their love. However, in a social climb to “immortalise the name of Fielden,” John sent his wife to finishing school in Switzerland to improve her education and learn social etiquette. Distance apart did not make the heart grow fonder, alienating the couple. When she died, he remarried. But John was crippled after being kicked by a horse and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Love and tragedy.
Stratford Castle in Durban, South Africa
Stratford Castle in Durban, South Africa, now is placed within Camelot Residential and Golf Estate, but it too started off as a kiss of inspiration from true love. The Castle’s cornerstone on the North wing is engraved with Sir Walter Raleigh’s immortal words: “But true love is a durable fire, In the mind ever burning; Never sick, never old, never dead; From itself never turning.” The castle was built upon the spirit of those lovely words. Do you wish you could build a castle for your true love? How about buy one? Stratford Castle is for sale to the tune of $365,000,000 and equipped with, among many things, a golf course within Camelot (and neighbors).
[Words: 301]
[TIME5]
Mystery Castle in Phoenix, Arizona
Mystery Castle is a castle built for a princess. Sounds like a magical love story, but it started on a sad note of despair. Boyce Gulley left from his home in Seattle, sick at heart after being diagnosis with tuberculosis. He slipped away from his wife and daughter, who he did not want to watch him die, and began one of the most beautiful yet odd love stories every recorded. With his last few pennies, he purchased a mining claim of 80 acres in the foothills of South Mountain. He then spent the next 16 years building a castle by hand while waiting to die. He used natural materials and old abandoned artifacts. With the memories of his daughter when the two of them built sand castles on the Pacific beaches, memories of the times when she cried as the tide washed them back into the sea, he built the Castle Made From Love. His Mystery Castle would never wash away and she would have it forever. After Boyce died, his daughter, Mary Lou Gulley, discovered her inheritance and received the love offering of Mystery Castle.
Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida
In the early 1920′s, a man named Ed Leedskalnin was left by his fiancé the day before their wedding. Heartbroken, yet intending to leave the mark his undying love, Leedskalnin worked for 28 years on his tribute to his lost love. Working only at night, managing to move tons of stone, he built his lost beloved “Sweet Sixteen” an intricate and stunning castle made of coral. Mystery surrounds Coral Castle, starting at the gate which is a piece of nine ton coral. Leedskalnin claimed to know the secrets of the great pyramids. Yet neither his knowledge nor his devotion to his lost love brought her back to him. It has, however, brought untold thousands of visitors to Coral Castle.
[Words: 320]
[TIME6]
Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California
This California “Castle” is a story of love and of tragedy, built less in an effort to remember her beloved husband and more for the love of her own life. Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William Winchester, believed that her life was endangered and that she was haunted by the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles. Her master building plan was only to keep continuous construction so she would be safe and perhaps live forever, or for as long as the house was being built. Her “castle” was an architectural reflection of her psyche, built for 38 years without ceasing, into a maze-like mansion “full of twists, turns, and dead ends, so that the spirits would get lost and never be able to find her.” There are about 160 rooms, 47 fireplaces, 10,000 window panes, two basements and three elevators. Before the 1906 earthquake, the house had been seven stories tall, but is now only four stories. The Winchester Mystery House is allegedly haunted yet open for tourists. Love comes in all shapes, sizes, and colors as does tragedy.
Prasat Hin Phimai in Phimai, Thailand
The Legend of Pajitt and Orapima begins with a prince named Pajitt. The king wanted his son to take a wife, so Prince Pajitt traveled the countryside for months until he spotted a pregnant light-skinned woman. He considered her his soulmate, but he could not marry a widow. Instead, Pajitt planned to marry the unborn child when she, Orapima, reached the age of 16. As she grew, they fell wildly in love. Before he could marry Orapima, he returned to the King for the wedding payment to her mother. Orapima was kidnapped, but Pajitt rescued her. While they rested in the forest, a woodsman killed Pajitt with an axe and stole Orapima. She killed the woodsman and returned to Phimai where she built a sanctuary, Prasat Hin Phimai. Heartbroken, she prayed for her true love and the reincaration of Pajitt’s spirit. Prasat Hin Phimai was built, painted, and sculpted on the inside with scenes from her life with Pajitt. One day, a young man saw her handiwork and was brought before her. She recogonized Pajitt’s spirit and they lived happily ever after. Today, in the small town of Phimai, lies one Thailand’s most extensively restored Khmer temple complexes as seen above . . . the sanctuary and “castle of love” Orapima had constructed as she waited on her beloved Pajitt’s reincarnation.
[Words: 416]
http://weburbanist.com/2010/02/10/architectural-love-story-10-castles-built-for-love/
Part 3 Obstacle
Article2 (Check the title later)
The Story Behind Smithsonian Castle’s Red Sandstone
April 9, 2013
[Paraphase7]
The red sandstone façade of the Smithsonian Castle makes it one of the most striking buildings in Washington, DC. The stone for the building was cut less than 30 miles away at the Seneca Quarry along the Potomac River in Maryland and shipped to the city in the 1850s when the building was first under construction. But the quarry’s story is a complicated one, involving death, floods, bankruptcy and presidential embarrassment. DC author and historian Garrett Peck recently set about telling its tales in his new book, The Smithsonian Castle and the Seneca Quarry, out now via The History Press. We chatted with Peck via e-mail about the Castle’s construction, the importance of preserving the stone’s history and the quarry’s “boom-bust ride” of fortune and ruin.
What makes Seneca redstone so special?
Seneca redstone is unique for its color and durability. It is a rusty red color, caused by iron oxide that leached into the sandstone (yes, it literally rusted the stone). The stone was easy to carve from the cliffs near Seneca Creek, Maryland, but it hardened over the course of a year, making it a durable building material. Thus you see Seneca redstone in hundreds of 19th-century buildings around Washington, especially around the basement levels. The stone was considered waterproof.
Why was Seneca redstone chosen for the Castle?
Fifteen quarries from across the Mid-Atlantic bid on the Smithsonian Castle project in 1846, and the Castle could have ended up any number of different colors: granite, marble, white or yellow sandstone—or redstone. The Seneca quarry owner, John P.C. Peter, underbid the competition by such a staggering amount that it drew the attention of the Castle’s Building Committee. It was almost too good to be true, so they dispatched architect James Renwick and geologist David Dale Owen to investigate. They returned with good news: there was more than enough stone to build the Castle. Renwick wrote the Building Committee: “The stone is of excellent quality, of even color, being of a warm gray, a lilac tint resembling that known as ashes of rose, and can, from all indications, be found in sufficient quantities to supply all the face work for the Institution.”
What was the Seneca Quarry like at the height of its production?
The Seneca quarry must have been a bustling and noisy place to work, what with the constant hammering away at the cliffside, the din of workers carving and polishing the stone, and the braying of mules who pulled the C&O Canal boats to Washington. We don’t know how much redstone was removed, but it was extensive: there were about a dozen quarries stretching along the one-mile stretch of the Potomac River west of Seneca Creek. The workforce included many immigrants from England, Ireland and Wales, as well as African Americans. Slaves most likely worked at the quarry before the Civil War—and freedmen certainly worked there until the quarry closed in 1901.
Your book says the quarry’s history was a “boom-bust ride.” What was some of the drama surrounding the quarry and the Castle’s construction?
The Seneca quarry had four different owners: the Peter family, who owned it from 1781 to 1866, then sold it after their fortunes declined because of the Civil War. Three different companies then owned the quarry until it closed—two of them going bankrupt. The Seneca Sandstone Company (1866-1876) was horribly managed financially. It was involved in a national scandal that embarrassed the Ulysses S. Grant presidency and helped bring down the Freedman’s Bank. The quarry’s last owner shut down operations in 1901 once it became clear that redstone was no longer in fashion. It had had a good five decade run while Victorian architecture reigned.
What is the Seneca quarry like today?
The Seneca quarry sits right along the C&O Canal about 20 miles upriver from Washington, DC in Montgomery County, Maryland. But it’s so overgrown with trees and brush that most people have no idea that it exists—even though hundreds of people bike or walk right past it everyday along the canal towpath. Luckily the land is entirely protected in parkland, so it can never be developed. I have a dream that we can create a visitor park in the quarry so people can explore its history year-round.
We so rarely ever make the connection between our building materials and the places where we live and work. Yet every brick, sheetrock, splotch of paint and wooden doorway came from somewhere, didn’t it? The Seneca quarry is one of those forgotten places—but fortunately it isn’t lost to us.
What is your personal connection to the story of Seneca Quarry?
I discovered the Seneca quarry while researching my previous book, The Potomac River: A History and Guide. It was the one major historical site that I found along the Potomac that no one knows about—there isn’t so much as a sign to indicate that it’s there. It is such a fascinating site, like discovering something lost from ancient Rome (even though it only closed in 1901). There has never been a book about the quarry’s history written before, and I also soon discovered that there were no quarry records. It was a story that I had to piece together by searching through archives. Happily I found a treasure trove of historic photos showing the Seneca quarry in action—many populated with the African American workers who worked there.
[Words: 901]
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2013/04/the-story-behind-smithsonian-castles-red-sandstone/
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发表于 2013-11-10 21:48:03
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