For all the means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and exchange we’ve estab­lished between the cul­tures of the world, no mat­ter how dis­tant they may be from one anoth­er, we still have no tru­ly uni­ver­sal sin­gle human lan­guage. The rea­son could date back to antiq­ui­ty, when we first attempt­ed a grand col­lec­tive project: that of build­ing a tow­er that would reach the heav­ens. Deter­mined to pun­ish our effron­tery, God not only destroyed the work in progress, but ren­dered our lan­guages mutu­al­ly unin­tel­li­gi­ble in order to hin­der any fur­ther attempts to do it again. Or at least that’s how one sto­ry goes.

You may not sub­scribe to a lit­er­al read­ing of the account of the Tow­er of Babel as it appears in the Bible’s Book of Gen­e­sis, but accord­ing to the Hochela­ga video above, the struc­ture does have a fair­ly plau­si­ble basis in his­to­ry.

It could be a leg­endary ver­sion of Ete­me­nan­ki, a Mesopotami­an zig­gu­rat built to hon­or the god Mar­duk at such a scale that it inspired tall tales, as it were, spread far and wide in the ancient world, such as the rumor that its con­struc­tion required mobi­liz­ing the man­pow­er of all human­i­ty. But it real­ly did exist, as evi­denced by its ruins dis­cov­ered at the site of the ancient city of Baby­lon — which, in Hebrew, was called Babel.

A cuneiform-cov­ered tablet con­ve­nient­ly found at the same loca­tion describes a con­struc­tion project of Ete­me­nanki’s size as using mate­ri­als like bitu­men and baked brick, which aligns with bib­li­cal details of the Tow­er of Babel, as do the Greek his­to­ri­an Herodotus’s ref­er­ences to its lay­out and struc­ture. Also rel­e­vant is the Baby­lo­ni­ans’ 587 BC inva­sion of Jerusalem, which brought cap­tives to the cap­i­tal. It’s hard­ly impos­si­ble that some of those dis­placed Jews would have the loom­ing Ete­me­nan­ki in mind when they went on to write the his­to­ries that would ulti­mate­ly find their way into the Hebrew Bible. They may have had no hope of return­ing to their home­land, but they must, at least, have felt rea­son­ably cer­tain that Mar­duk’s days were num­bered.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Map of All the Coun­tries Men­tioned in the Bible: What The Coun­tries Were Called Then, and Now

Lit­er­ary Crit­ic Northrop Frye Teach­es “The Bible and Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture”: All 25 Lec­tures Free Online

A Sur­vival Guide to the Bib­li­cal Apoc­a­lypse

Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Wit­ty, Eru­dite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

Did Psy­che­del­ic Mush­rooms Appear in Medieval Chris­t­ian Art?: A Video Essay

Vis­it the Online Library of Babel: New Web Site Turns Borges’ “Library of Babel” Into a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Cur­rent­ly, the tallest build­ings in New York City are One World Trade Cen­ter, Cen­tral Park Tow­er, and 111 West 57th Street. All of them were com­plet­ed in the twen­ty-twen­ties, and all of them have attract­ed com­ment, some­times admir­ing, some­times bewil­dered. But none of them, fair to say, yet exude the romance of the Wool­worth Build­ing, the Chrysler Build­ing, and the Empire State Build­ing, all of which opened before World War II, and each of which once had its day as the tallest build­ing in the world. Here to explain these endur­ing “big stars of the New York City sky­line” is archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Tony Robins, who in the half-hour video above tells the sto­ry of all their impor­tant details, inside and out.

In fact, this video comes as the pilot episode of “Obses­sion to Detail,” a new series from Dai­ly Mail Busi­ness YouTube chan­nel. The Mail may not come right to mind as a source of archi­tec­tur­al com­men­tary, but in this case, they’ve found the right man for the job.

He knows that the Wool­worth Build­ing’s lob­by con­tains gar­goyle-like car­i­ca­tures of its archi­tect and client; that the Chrysler Build­ing once had a pri­vate club on its 66th, 67th, and 68th floors whose bar had both a paint­ing of the New York sky­line and a view of the real thing; that the 86-sto­ry Empire State Build­ing is pro­mot­ed as hav­ing 102 sto­ries only by includ­ing its unused diri­gi­ble moor­ing mast and sub-base­ments; and that what we now call Art Deco was, in its day, referred to as “the ver­ti­cal style,” in ref­er­ence to the pro­por­tions its build­ings were rapid­ly gain­ing.

An expe­ri­enced New York tour guide, Robins would be remiss if he did­n’t tell you all these facts and many more besides. It’s pre­sum­ably also part of his job to frame the process­es that gave rise (or indeed, high rise) to these sky­scrap­ers as in keep­ing with the cease­less one-upman­ship and self-pro­mo­tion that is the spir­it of his city. A par­tic­u­lar­ly illus­tra­tive episode occurred when Minoru Yamasak­i’s orig­i­nal World Trade Cen­ter went up in the ear­ly sev­en­ties, which pro­voked a response from the Empire State Build­ing in the form of a rec­tan­gu­lar addi­tion on top that would pre­serve its sta­tus as the world’s tallest build­ing. Robins has been in the game long enough to have had the chance to ask the archi­tect who designed that pro­pos­al if he was seri­ous. “Of course not,” came the reply. “This was all for pub­lic rela­tions. This is New York. This is who we are. This is what we do.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Archi­tect Demys­ti­fies the Art Deco Design of the Icon­ic Chrysler Build­ing (1930)

The Sto­ry of the Flat­iron Build­ing, “New York’s Strangest Tow­er”

An Immer­sive, Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of New York City’s Icon­ic Grand Cen­tral Ter­mi­nal

Watch the Build­ing of the Empire State Build­ing in Col­or: The Cre­ation of the Icon­ic 1930s Sky­scraper From Start to Fin­ish

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

How the World Trade Cen­ter Was Rebuilt: A Visu­al Explo­ration of a 20-Year Project

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Set­ting aside just one day for the Lou­vre is a clas­sic first-time Paris vis­i­tor’s mis­take. The place is sim­ply too big to com­pre­hend on one vis­it, or indeed on ten vis­its. To grow so vast has tak­en eight cen­turies, a process explained in under three min­utes by the offi­cial video ani­mat­ed above. First con­struct­ed around the turn of the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry as a defen­sive fortress, it was con­vert­ed into a roy­al res­i­dence a cen­tu­ry and a half lat­er. It gained its first mod­ern wing in 1559, under Hen­ri II; lat­er, his wid­ow Cather­ine de’ Medici com­mis­sioned the Tui­leries palace and gar­dens, which Hen­ri IV had joined up to the Lou­vre with the Grande Galerie in 1610.

In the sev­en­teen-tens, Louis XVI com­plet­ed the Cour Car­rée, the Lou­vre’s main court­yard, before decamp­ing to Ver­sailles. It was only dur­ing the French Rev­o­lu­tion, toward the end of that cen­tu­ry, that the Nation­al Assem­bly declared it a muse­um.

The project of unit­ing it into an archi­tec­tur­al whole con­tin­ued under Napoleon I and III, the lat­ter of whom final­ly com­plet­ed it (and in the process dou­bled its size). The Tui­leries Palace was torched dur­ing the unpleas­ant­ness over the Paris Com­mune, but the rest of the Lou­vre sur­vived. Since then, its most notable alter­ation has been the addi­tion of I. M. Pei’s glass pyra­mid in 1989.

The pyra­mid may still have an air of con­tro­ver­sy these three and a half decades lat­er, but you can hard­ly deny that it at least improves upon the Cour Car­rée’s years as a park­ing lot. It stands, in any case, as just one of the count­less fea­tures that make the Lou­vre an archi­tec­tur­al palimpsest of French his­to­ry prac­ti­cal­ly as com­pelling as the col­lec­tion of art it con­tains. (Fran­coph­o­nes can learn much more about it from the longer-form doc­u­men­taries post­ed by Des Racines et des Ailes and Notre His­toire.) And how did I approach this most famous of all French insti­tu­tions on my own first trip to Paris, you ask? By not going at all. On my next trip to Paris, how­ev­er, I plan to go nowhere else.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Louvre’s Entire Col­lec­tion Goes Online: View and Down­load 480,00 Works of Art

A 3D Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Paris: Take a Visu­al Jour­ney from Ancient Times to 1900

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

Take Immer­sive Vir­tu­al Tours of the World’s Great Muse­ums: The Lou­vre, Her­mitage, Van Gogh Muse­um & Much More

Japan­ese Guid­ed Tours of the Lou­vre, Ver­sailles, the Marais & Oth­er Famous French Places (Eng­lish Sub­ti­tles Includ­ed)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Frank Lloyd Wright is unlike­ly to be dis­placed as the arche­type of the genius archi­tect any­time soon, at least in Amer­i­ca, but even he had to start some­where. At nine years old, as archi­tec­ture YouTu­ber Stew­art Hicks explains in the video above, Wright received a set of blocks from his moth­er, who hoped that “her son would grow up to become a great archi­tect, and she thought the cre­ativ­i­ty unlocked and prac­ticed with these blocks could kick-start his jour­ney.” Evi­dent­ly, she was­n’t wrong: “by the time Wright attempt­ed to design his first build­ing years lat­er, he spent count­less hours arrang­ing the blocks,” famil­iar as he was with “pro­por­tion, sym­me­try, bal­ance, and oth­er prin­ci­ples of design well before he ever picked up a pen­cil.”

Of course, most of us played with blocks in child­hood, and few of us now bear much com­par­i­son to the man who designed Falling­wa­ter and the Guggen­heim. But his moth­er’s toy selec­tion was just one of many fac­tors that influ­enced the archi­tec­tur­al devel­op­ment that con­tin­ued through­out Wright’s long life.

In fif­teen min­utes, Hicks explains as many of them as pos­si­ble: his ear­ly oppor­tu­ni­ty to work on “shin­gle-style” homes, whose cru­ci­form lay­out he would adapt into his own designs; his arrival in a Chica­go that was still rebuild­ing after its great fire of 1871, when there were vast sky­scraper inte­ri­ors to be cre­at­ed; the new Mid­west­ern man­u­fac­tur­ing mon­ey pre­pared to com­mis­sion homes from him; and his inspir­ing encoun­ters with Japan­ese aes­thet­ics, both at home and in Japan itself.

After return­ing from a 1905 Japan trip, Wright got to work on Uni­ty Tem­ple in Oak Park, Illi­nois. He had it built with the rel­a­tive­ly new mate­r­i­al of rein­forced con­crete, thus get­ting “in on the ground floor of a tech­nol­o­gy that could com­plete­ly trans­form what build­ings could do,” mak­ing pos­si­ble “soar­ing can­tilevers, grace­ful curves,” and oth­er ele­ments that would become part of his archi­tec­tur­al sig­na­ture. A few decades lat­er, the Unit­ed States’ sub­urb-build­ing boom made Wright’s rur­al-urban “Uson­ian” homes and “Broad­acre City” plan look pre­scient; indeed, “almost every sin­gle house inside of a post­war sub­urb bears his trace.” His will­ing­ness to appear in print and on film, radio, and tele­vi­sion kept him in the Amer­i­can pub­lic con­scious­ness, and he made sure to instill his prin­ci­ples into gen­er­a­tions of stu­dents. Frank Lloyd Wright may be long gone, but he made sure that his vision of Amer­i­ca would live on.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Beau­ti­ful Visu­al Tour of Tir­ran­na, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Remark­able, Final Cre­ations

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusu­al Win­dows Tell Us About His Archi­tec­tur­al Genius

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Lost Japan­ese Mas­ter­piece, the Impe­r­i­al Hotel in Tokyo

What It’s Like to Work in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Icon­ic Office Build­ing

Frank Lloyd Wright Reflects on Cre­ativ­i­ty, Nature and Reli­gion in Rare 1957 Audio

Frank Lloyd Wright Cre­ates a List of the 10 Traits Every Aspir­ing Artist Needs

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invent­ed Lin­coln Logs, “America’s Nation­al Toy” (1916)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Pub­lic-tran­sit projects are the reli­gious build­ing endeav­ors of twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca, less because they’re moti­vat­ed by the belief in any par­tic­u­lar deity than by how much time and mon­ey they now require to com­plete. Take New York’s Sec­ond Avenue sub­way, whose less than two-mile-long first phase opened in 2017: its con­struc­tion had cost $4.45 bil­lion, and the line itself had first been pro­posed 97 years ear­li­er. That’s noth­ing by ancient stan­dards: the Tem­ple of Apol­lo at Didy­ma took six cen­turies; the Tem­ple of Olympian Zeus at Athens lagged a full 650 years behind sched­ule; and the Heraion of Samos end­ed up pass­ing the 800-year mark.

These facts come from the new Told in Stone video above on “the longest con­struc­tion project in his­to­ry.” Some of the struc­tures cov­ered will be famil­iar to Open Cul­ture read­ers: for instance, Notre-Dame de Paris, which took near­ly 200 years to build (and which reopened just this month after five years of fire-dam­age repair and restora­tion), or Sagra­da Família, which broke ground in 1882 and is sched­uled for com­ple­tion in 2026 — if you don’t count dec­o­rat­ing its exte­ri­or, which could go on until 2034. Orna­men­ta­tion is impor­tant in archi­tec­ture of this kind: it’s why the Duo­mo di Milano, whose con­struc­tion began in 1386, was­n’t tru­ly com­plete until 1965.

The dec­o­ra­tion process was also pro­longed in the case of the Basil­i­ca Papale di San Pietro in Cit­tà di Vat­i­cano, or Saint Peter’s Basil­i­ca, which took 120 years to build, span­ning the ear­ly six­teenth and sev­en­teenth cen­turies. As the time­line goes for such an ambi­tious project in that era, it could have been worse; that par­tic­u­lar High Renais­sance church owes its noto­ri­ety to its sheer cost, which works out to “tens of bil­lions” of dol­lars today. This video, being Microsoft-spon­sored, leads up to that soft­ware giant’s 3D, AI-assist­ed repli­ca of Saint Peter’s Basil­i­ca, which we fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture when it was released this past fall. Per­haps behold­ing its glo­ry will give New York­ers a lit­tle more faith that the Sec­ond Avenue Sub­way will reach 125th Street in their life­times.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of Sagra­da Família, Antoni Gaudí’s Auda­cious Church That’s Been Under Con­struc­tion for 142 Years

The Cre­ation & Restora­tion of Notre-Dame Cathe­dral, Ani­mat­ed

Explore the World’s First 3D Repli­ca of St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca, Made with AI

The Beau­ty & Inge­nu­ity of the Pan­theon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Pre­served Mon­u­ment: An Intro­duc­tion

How the World’s Biggest Dome Was Built: The Sto­ry of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi and the Duo­mo in Flo­rence

How Design­ing Build­ings Upside-Down Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture, Mak­ing Pos­si­ble St. Paul’s Cathe­dral, Sagra­da Família & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.