building The Trojan Horse /
In the fall of 2015, Rick and Laura put up a poster for a new class at MassArt—the objective—to research, design and build large scale wooden models of the Trojan Horse based on text, historic images and interpretation of the mythic narrative of the Trojan War. The drawings and working models generated from the class will hopefully be used as studies for the future full scale wooden horse to be exhibited in the NEW International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.
The Making/History: The Trojan Horse Project will take the team far from their starting point in the classroom at MassArt in Boston. At the archaeological site of Troy in Turkey, the students will measure the walls and gates of the old city in order to find the size—and thus the human capacity—of the Horse.
Be part of a national project to make one thousand clay horses!
Learn how to participate / HERE
View 3 short films about the MASSART classes / HERE
Students in the Trojan Horse class at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design built replicas of ancient votive offerings of the kind placed in shrines and used in burials by the Bronze Age Mycenaeans in Ancient Greece.
For the Mycenaeans, the horse symbolized Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and war
Watch the Trojan Horse story and share with us at #hhtrojanhorse
Trillium Studios is filming a television documentary about the Trojan Horse Project. View trailer below —
MASSART students have been building models from wood, clay and styrofoam. Each has a personality of it's own / VIEW THEIR WORK
"We've been trying to understand how the Greeks built the horse—if they actually did because nobody knows if it's a fact," said Sarah Nault, 20, a junior at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.
"They didn't have today's tools, so I'm definitely thankful for what we have now," she added.
Nault and her 9 classmates have become history detectives—reading Greek literature, looking at centuries of Greek clay/bronze/stone artifacts, and surveying archeological ruins. – Except from Lowell Sun
Read PRESS about the students working on the Trojan Horse Project / HERE
On the shores of Greece, Rick and Laura are researching sites for the project…
where students will see how the Ancient Greeks bent their boats with fire and rope. Using all of this information, the Browns’ team will recreate the full-scale Horse at a site in Greece, using the traditional tools and techniques of the time, and in the style of the original makers.
Each day they build, they discover some facet of Greek history, culture, technology, ecology, and religious beliefs that would have shaped the thinking of the original builders of the Horse.
Watch the ABC film, Inside the Spy Museum's Secret Collection to hear about the Trojan Horse Project — start about 2:39 minutes into the film.
Trojan Horse Project Press
The Trojan Horse Project Brochure PDF
A Brief HIstory of the Trojan War
The Trojan War: Is There Truth Behind the Legend? (American School of Oriental Research, Sept 2002)
The Wooden Horse: Narratives of the Trojan Horse story in literature from Homer 800 BC to John Tzetzes 1100 AD. PDF