A construction site from 1676

[Micael]

There’s a private palace in Sweden called Skoklosters Slott. It is the largest such ever built in Sweden and is generally considered an unusually grand private baroque palace (though I think the exterior style is a bit so-so):


But it’s neither the exterior nor some (admittedly stylish) interiors that makes the palace interesting to me:


You see the palace was commissioned by Count, Field Marshal, and Lord High Constable Carl Gustaf Wrangel. Wrangel was in fairly poor health during the construction works, and he died on Rügen in Germany before it had been fully completed.

At the time work was underway on what was intended to become the Great Hall of the palace, where banquets and balls could be held. The workers received word from Germany that Wrangel had died, and being unsure over whether they would continue to get paid simply put down their tools and walked away. Incredibly the work was never resumed, ever.

As such we still have a snapshot of a palatial construction site essentially frozen in time since 1676:








We have a lot of examples of finished palaces and castles from the era of course, in various states of preservation. But I don’t know of any other examples where you have a snapshot of the work in progress preserved like this, not a museum recreation but the real deal with the actual tools used and so on. Makes it quite special in a way I think.

[jemhouston]

Thank you

[Sukhoiman]

Wow, very interesting stuff. Thx for sharing!

[Belushi TD]

That is magnificent!

Thanks for posting.

Belushi TD

[kdahm]

Thank you, I had no idea about that. But someone must have been keeping it up, or it would have been trashed by now.

The strange thing is that they left all of the tools. Those would generally belong to the craftsmen, and would be valuable personal effects that they carry from job to job. The builder who hired the craftsmen may have had some of their own, but again those would have been carried to the next job.

Or sometime in the past 349 years, the lord of the manor decided that it looked incomplete without tools and added them.

[Micael]

Thank you, I had no idea about that. But someone must have been keeping it up, or it would have been trashed by now.

The strange thing is that they left all of the tools. Those would generally belong to the craftsmen, and would be valuable personal effects that they carry from job to job. The builder who hired the craftsmen may have had some of their own, but again those would have been carried to the next job.

Or sometime in the past 349 years, the lord of the manor decided that it looked incomplete without tools and added them.

The successive owners since have preserved it. As I understand it the tools in question did in this case belong to the property and the workers were either honest people or they didn’t want to get hunted down the daughter who was the beneficiary of the will. It appears that they were a part of a large lot of tools acquired by Wrangel in Amsterdam in 1664. Their existence have been documented since the start and there’s no indication that they’re anything but the original ones. The daughter, Juliana, created a so-called fideikommiss which was a common legal structure among the wealthy in Sweden at the time but which have mostly been phased out during the last 50 years. This means that the property with all its contents was passed down by inheritance as a whole, and nothing belonging to it could legally be sold, discarded, or split between multiple heirs. Items could only be added, nothing removed, including tools such as these. This remained in place until it was bought by the government in 1967. Other items belonging to the palace include four large arms collections, a 30,000 volume library, 1,000 paintings and numerous other collections.

[kdahm]

Okay, so they do have a provenance. That's not the usual way things were done, to the best of my knowledge, but it was an unusual situation. It makes this all the more special.

[jemhouston]

The fact the family knew they had something special and took steps to preserve it does them credit.