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Clearly yes if we go by the Bible. Then we should be happy to get away with just gold and labor and not our children like Isaac.

> But to me, despite all of this, there was a lot of sadness in that experience - because you know how desperately poor common folks were, how instead of building such status mega symbol they could have done some proper good.

Have you considered the idea that these could be considered jobs programs? It took a lot of masons, carpenters, ox/horse handlers, rope makers, quarrymen, etc, to run the supply chain for building this over the course of many, many decades. Just moving the obelisk to its current location took hundreds of men:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_obelisk#History

Further, now, even centuries later, all of this architecture and art is helping the local with a fairly vibrant tourism industry.

Beauty, in addition to being a good in itself:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentals

also has practical benefits.

> But not for church of that era, it was busy fighting for power and money of that world and trying to show how above everybody else they were.

The other option was to be rolled over by secular powers (princes, kings, emperors). If you think politics is nasty now, it was a (often literal) blood sport back in the day.

You have it all wrong. These buildings were built a) to glorify God, and b) because humans love to have beautiful things. And we are all much, much better off for it. These old, beautiful buildings are one of the great treasures that our ancestors left us. We should be thanking them, not criticizing them.

> But not for church of that era, it was busy fighting for power and money of that world and trying to show how above everybody else they were.

Kind of like the church in America today.

> you know how desperately poor common folks were, how instead of building such status mega symbol they could have done some proper good. But not for church of that era, it was busy fighting for power and money of that world and trying to show how above everybody else they were.

This is a tired caricature. We live in comfortable times. Materially, in many way, we are much more comfortable today than kings were back then. The world was different then, and it is irresponsible to project anachronistic categories onto a period of history that operated differently. And that somehow there exists a conflict between building magnificent churches and dealing with poverty is simply nonsense (indeed, poverty was dealt with through tithing and donations and by convents and monasteries with that charism; the first hospitals, for example, were founded by nuns, hence why in many languages the word for nurse is still "sister"). You can do both, hence the corporal works of mercy and spiritual works of mercy. Magnificent churches were not somehow the private property of some caricaturish class of clerical villains (who had no heirs, legitimate ones, anyway). They were the common patrimony of the Church. They were often constructed over long periods of time by the people in the community. They gave everyone, especially the poor, the possibility of witnessing and experiencing beautiful art and architecture that might otherwise only be accessible to the very richest of the magnates (and I challenge you to find a magnate who owned anything as spectacular as St. Peter's).

(Even today, you hear people ask the silly question "why doesn't the Church sell all its artwork and give the money to the poor?". If you allow that question to sink in for a moment, it becomes clear how preposterously silly it is to ask it. So you sell it. Then what? Now, these artworks are the property of private collectors or state institutions. Is that what you want? And the money: you think that will somehow "end poverty"? After food is digested, one's hunger returns. Far greater sums have been expended on the poor. The poor will always be with us. It is something we must continuously deal with. Robbing them of access to beautiful artwork, and depriving the Catholic faithful of their patrimony, is a pretty shitty solution, if it can even be called that.)

Frankly, what I find shameful is that we are richer than we're ever been, and yet we can't seem to produce anything that approaches the beauty of these old cathedrals. We have monks in Wyoming who are using CNC stone carving to build a gothic monastery[0], for crying out loud! We've never been in a better position to build beautiful things and cheaply at scale. And that's kind of the message of these buildings. It's not the material wealth per se, but the magnanimity of spirit that made this beauty possible and the spiritual awe it continues to inspire to this day. It's a condemnation of our vulgarity, of our consumerism. Even the churches we build today usually look like shit. If that's not cultural decadence, I don't know what is.

[0] https://carmelitegothic.com/cnc-stone-carving/

True, although most of the snazzy NeRF and Gaussian Splatting papers still rely on good old COLMAP on the backend lol

I agree having worked directly with it (long personal project). Photogrammetry is so error prone (get a sign wrong in your sensor fusion/SLAM code and you're cooked for 2 weeks) and I got into it right in the last years before models that could compete were introduced (reactions from PhDs who spent years working on photogrammetry were not nice as you can imagine). Once the models came out they were set to take over, I remember being blown away from the quality of depth maps alone.

It’s frustrating to see that the US added architectural copyrights in 1990. There’s an explicit exemption for photographs, but not models.

What problem did this actually solve? If there is one, we managed to live with it for the prior two centuries.

probably start with finding out who owns / manages the building you want to use (public record, company reports)

if they like your project and see some value in it for themselves, they might even give you the contact of the designer / architect to get files

In fairness, the Catholic church is not the sect building strip mall churches.