On January 13, 1931, the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects held a ball at the Hotel Astor in New York City. According to an advertisement for the event, anyone who paid $15 per ticket (big money during the Depression) could see a “hilarious modern art exhibition” and things “modernistic, futuristic, cubistic, altruistic, mystic, architistic and feministic.” Attendees also got to witness more than 20 famous architects dressed as buildings they had designed—buildings that would become fixtures of the New York City skyline.
A 2006 article in The New York Times notes that the event, now considered “one of the most spectacular parties of the last century,” was covered by WABC radio. A few photographs remain, like the one above. As does a tantalizing short bit of video.
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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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Between 711 and 1492, much of the Iberian Peninsula, including modern-day Spain, was under Muslim rule. Not that it was easy to hold on to the place for that length of time: after the fall of Toledo in 1085, Al-Andalus, as the territory was called, continued to lose cities over the subsequent centuries. Córdoba and Seville were reconquered practically one right after the other, in 1236 and 1248, respectively, and you can see the invasion of the first city animated in the opening scene of the Primal Space video above. “All over the land, Muslim cities were being conquered and taken over by the Christians,” says the companion article at Primal Nebula. “But amidst all of this, one city remained unconquered, Granada.”
“Thanks to its strategic position and the enormous Alhambra Palace, the city was protected,” and there the Alhambra remains today. A “thirteenth-century palatial complex that’s one of the world’s most iconic examples of Moorish architecture,” writes BBC.com’s Esme Fox, it’s also a landmark feat of engineering, boasting “one of the most sophisticated hydraulic networks in the world, able to defy gravity and raise water from the river nearly a kilometer below.”
The jewel in the crown of these elaborate waterworks is a white marble fountain that “consists of a large dish held up by twelve white mythical lions. Each beast spurts water from its mouth, feeding four channels in the patio’s marble floor that represent the four rivers of paradise, and then running throughout the palace to cool the rooms.”
The fuente de los Leones also tells time: the number of lions currently indicates the hour. This works thanks to an ingenious design explained both verbally and visually in the video. Anyone visiting the Alhambra today can admire this and other examples of medieval opulence, but travelers with an engineer’s cast of mind will appreciate even more how the palace’s builders got the water there at all. “The hill was around 200 meters above Granada’s main river,” says the narrator, which entailed an ambitious project of damming and redirection, to say nothing of the pool above the palace designed to keep the whole hydraulic system pressurized. The Alhambra’s heated baths and well-irrigated gardens represent the luxurious height of Moorish civilization, but they also remind us that, then as now, beneath every luxury lies an impressive feat of technology.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
In the trailer below for the world’s first 3D replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Yves Ubelmann speaks of using “AI for Good,” which isn’t just an ideal, but also the name of a lab at Microsoft. Microsoft and Ubelman’s digital-preservation company Iconem were two of the participants in that ambitious project, along with the Vatican itself. Pope Francis, writes AP’s Nicole Winfield, “has called for the ethical use of AI and used his annual World Message of Peace this year to urge an international treaty to regulate it, arguing that technology lacking human values of compassion, mercy, morality and forgiveness were too great.”
What better show of good faith in the technology than to allow AI to be used to bring the center of the faith Pope Francis represents to the world? In the nearly 400 years since its completion, of course, the world has always come to the current St. Peter’s Basilica, and will continue to do so.
The 3D-replica project “has been launched ahead of the Vatican’s 2025 Jubilee, a holy year in which more than 30 million pilgrims are expected to pass through the basilica’s Holy Door, on top of the 50,000 who visit on a normal day,” Winfield writes. But no matter where in the world you happen to be, you can virtually enter St. Peter’s Basilica right now, and spend as long as you like, admiring the basilica itself, the cupola, Bernini’s St. Peter’s Baldachin, and Michelangelo’s Pietà, among other features.
However important (and attention-drawing) artificial intelligence was as a tool in the creation of this ultra-precise “digital twin” of St. Peter’s Basilica, the four-week process of capturing every detail of the real structure that could be captured also necessitated the use of drones, lasers, and cameras taking more than 400,000 digital photos. The “AI for Good Lab contributed advanced tools that refined the digital twin with millimeter-level accuracy, and used AI to help detect and map structural vulnerabilities like cracks and missing mosaic tiles,” says Microsoft’s site. “The Vatican oversaw the collaboration, ensuring the preservation of the Basilica as a cultural, spiritual, and historically significant site for years to come.”
It makes a certain sense to apply the highest technology of our time for the benefit of a building known as the greatest architectural marvel of its time. But in order to better appreciate the kind of knowledge that will be revealed by the 22 petabytes of information that went into the digital model (which offers its own guided tour) we’d do well to immerse ourselves first in what was already known about St. Peter’s Basilica. For a brief introduction to the conception and evolution of this grand church as it stands today, we could do much worse than architecture-and-history YouTuber Manuel Bravo’s video “St Peter’s Basilica Explained.” If you watch it, don’t be surprised if you find yourself tempted to engage in prolonged exploration of the model — or indeed, to book a visit to the real thing. Enter the digital St. Peter’s here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Burj Al Babas might have been constructed expressly to attract the attention of the internet. “Sitting near the Black Sea, the town is full of half-finished, fully abandoned mini castles — 587 of them to be exact,” write Architectural Digest’s Katherine McLaughlin and Jessica Cherner. Originally “planned as a luxurious, stately urban development offering the look of royal living for anyone willing to shell out anywhere from $370,000 to $500,000 for their own little palace,” it now stands as an unfinished ghost town. And though the project only broke ground a decade ago, it’s already settled into a veritably eerie — and highly photographable — state of decay.
This, of course, more than suits the sensibilities of an adventure-oriented YouTube channel like Fearless & Far. Its exploration of Burj Al Babas — one of severalsuchvideos currently available — offers on-the-ground views of what we can only call the town’s ruins. “This fantasy paradise land didn’t sell,” says its host. “Some blame the Turkish real estate crisis; some blame the kitschiness of it all. It’s all so strange. It’s all so fake.”
Indeed, write McLaughlin and Cherner, “as building the town got underway, locals became enraged with both the aesthetic of the homes and the business practices of the developers,” who subsequently declared bankruptcy, leaving the development in limbo.
Those who know their Middle Eastern languages will recognize the very name Burj Al Babas as a “nonsensical mashup of Arabic and Turkish,” as Ruth Michaelson and Beril Eski put it in an in-depth Guardian piece last month. Though located in Turkey, with an intent to take advantage of local hot springs, it was financed with money from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Since its construction “abruptly stopped in 2016, the project has become a bizarre white elephant,” causing scandal, lawsuits, an attempted suicide, “and even a minor diplomatic incident between Turkey and Kuwait.” Anyone who’s seen Burj Al Babas up-close will have their doubts about its prospects for completion — but if they’ve got a YouTube channel of their own, they’ll hardly want demolition to start before they can pay it a visit themselves.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
For 142 years now, Sagrada Família has been growing toward the sky. Or at least that’s what it seems to be doing, as its ongoing construction realizes ever more fully a host of forms that look and feel not quite of this earth. It makes a kind of sense to learn that, in designing the cathedral that would remain a work in progress nearly a century after his death, Antoni Gaudí built a model upside-down, making use of gravity in the opposite way to which we normally think of it as acting on a building. But as architecture YouTuber Stewart Hicks explains in the video above, Gaudí was hardly the first to use that technique.
Take St. Paul’s Cathedral, which Christopher Wren decided to make the tallest building in London in 1685. It included what would be the highest dome ever built, at 365 feet off the ground. “For a traditional dome design to reach this height, it would have to span an opening that’s 160 feet or 49 meters wide, but this made it much too heavy for the walls below,” says Hicks. “Existing techniques for building this just couldn’t work.” Enter scientist-engineer Robert Hooke, who’d already been figuring out ways to model forces like this by hanging chains from the ceiling.
“Hooke’s genius was that he realized that the chain in his experiments was calculating the perfect shape for it to remain in tension, since that’s all it can do.” He explained domes as, physically, “the exact opposite of the chains. His famous line was, ‘As hangs the flexile line, so but inverted will stand the rigid arch.’ ” In other words, “if you flip the shape of Hooke’s chain experiments upside down, the forces flip, and this shape is the perfect compression system.” Hence the distinctively elongated-looking shape of the dome on the completed St. Paul’s Cathedral, a departure from all architectural precedent.
The shape upon which Wren and Hooke settled turned out to be very similar to what architecture now knows as a catenary curve, a concept important indeed to Gaudí, who was “famously enamored with what some call organic forms.” He made detailed models to guide the construction of his projects, but after those he’d left behind for Sagrada Família were destroyed by anarchists in 1936, the builders had nothing to go on. Only in 1979 did the young architect Mark Burry “imagine the models upside-down,” which brought about a new understanding of the building’s complex, landscape-like forms. It was a similar physical insight that made possible such dramatic mid-century buildings as Annibale Vitellozzi and Pier Nervi’s Palazzetto dello Sport and Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center: pure Space Age, but rooted in the Enlightenment.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
You can’t go on a walk with a serious enthusiast of New York history without hearing the stories behind at least a few notable, beautiful, or downright strange buildings. Yet most longtime New Yorkers, famed for tuning out their surroundings to better strive for their goals of the day, tend not even to acknowledge the structures liable to catch the attention of out-of-towners. Take 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights: “From the outside, it looks like your typical townhouse,” says urban explorer Cash Jordan in his video above — but then you notice its blacked-out windows, bunker-like metal cladding, and apparently un-openable door.
Though it was indeed a townhouse when first built in 1847, 58 Joralemon Street was hollowed out and converted into one subway-system vent back in 1907. But the buildings right on either side remain residences, one of which, as Jordan finds, sold not long ago for $6 million.
In a completely different, more isolated context stands the Strecker Memorial Laboratory on Roosevelt Island. Built in 1892 as a laboratory for City Hospital, it opened as “the first institution in the nation for pathological and bacteriological research,” an activity it makes sense to keep apart from a dense urban environment. Abandoned in the nineteen-fifties, it later became another subway facility, specifically a power conversion substation.
Jordan also visits a fake building well out on Pier 34, and one that also provides a function essential to New York transit: ventilating the smoke and exhaust out of the Holland Tunnel. Owned and operated by public agencies, these structures perform well-documented and entirely non-secret functions. The same can’t be said of the last and most striking fake building Jordan introduces, a windowless Brutalist tower constructed in 1969 at 33 Thomas Street in Lower Manhattan. Owned by AT&T, it seems once to have been a telephone switching station, but has lately been rumored to be a “huge doomsday bunker.” That’s one theory, anyway, and the building’s sinister appearance could inspire countless others. Not that many locals are imagining them, obeying as they do one of the central commandments of Manhattan: don’t look up.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
There are more than a few of us who’d enjoy the opportunity to live in a house that appears in Blade Runner; there are rather few of us who would value that opportunity at $23 million, the asking price given in the 2019 Architectural Digest video on Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1924 Ennis House above. Yet even beyond the Wright pedigree and the Blade Runner prestige, the house has also appeared in a host of other films, a screen résumé that begins nine years after its construction, when it made its screen debut as the mansion of a lady auto tycoon in Michael Curtiz’s Female.
In the decades that followed, it went on to provide settings for pictures — usually genre pictures — like The House on Haunted Hill, The Day of the Locust, The Replacement Killers, and Rush Hour. “The Ennis house apparently transcends space and time,” says the narration of Thom Andersen’s documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself. ” It could be fictionally located in Washington or Osaka. It could play an ancient villa, a nineteenth-century haunted house, a contemporary mansion, a twenty-first-century apartment building, or a twenty-sixth-century science lab where Klaus Kinski invents time travel.”
The Ennis House soon became visual shorthand for the home of wealthy, flamboyantly sinister B‑movie villains. That makes all the more notable its use in Blade Runner (a film that made several clichéd Los Angeles locations fresh again), which turns it into the tower where Deckard lives. Even the set-built interior of his apartment uses the same Mayan-motif tiles as the house’s famous concrete-block exterior. But the real rooms of the Ennis House have also received plenty of screen time, not just in the movies but also on television — and even television-within-television, in the case of Twin Peaks’ fictional soap opera Invitation to Love.
As the last of Wright’s Mayan Revival houses, the Ennis House marks the end of his attempt to break into southern California. The architect himself later admitted that it had exceeded reasonable scale: “That’s what you do, you know, after you get going, and get going so far, that you get out of bounds,” he said. “I think the Ennis House was out of bounds for a concrete-block house.” Like much of Wright’s work, it also proved better to photograph than inhabit; despite its most recent and ambitious renovation being completed just a few years earlier, it ended up selling for $5 million below asking price. I appreciate Blade Runner as much as anyone, but $18 million is still more than I’d pay for a 40-minute walk to the subway.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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