The work in question, a two-sided sketch featuring designs for a monumental altar or facade, thought to be San Silvestro in Capite, Rome, arrived in sad condition.
The 16th-century linen and flax paper on which the precious renderings were made was stained with mold, and badly creased due to a poorly repaired tear and two long-ago attempts to mount it for easier viewing, one by the artist’s blind nephew and another by collector and biographer Filippo Baldinucci.
Like many restoration experts, Shelley exhibits extraordinary patience and nerves of steel. Identifying the damage and its cause is just the beginning. The hands-on portion of her work involves introducing solvents and moisture, both of which have the potential to further damage the delicate drawing. Even though she chooses the least invasive of tools—a tiny brush—to loosen the 500-year-old adhesive, one slip could spell disaster. It’s not just the drawing that’s of historical import. The well-intended mountings are also part of the narrative, and must be preserved as such.
Few tourists making their first trip to France go home without having seen Versailles. But why do so many want to see Versailles in the first place? Yes, its history goes all the way back to the 1620s, with its comparatively modest beginnings as a hunting lodge built for King Louis XIII, but much in Europe goes back quite a bit further. It did house the French royal family for generations, but absolute monarchy hasn’t been a favored institution in France for quite some time. Only the most jaded visitors could come away unimpressed by the palace’s sheer grandness, but those in need of a hit of ostentation can always get it on certain shopping streets in Paris. The appeal of Versailles, and of Versailles alone, must have more do with the way it physically embodies centuries of French history.
You can watch that history unfold through the construction of Versailles, both exterior and interior, in these two videos from the official Versailles Youtube channel. The first begins with Louis XIII’s hunting lodge, which, when the “Sun King” Louis XIV inherited its site, had been replaced by a small stone-and-brick chateau. There Louis XIV launched an ambitious building campaign, and the half-century-long project ultimately produced the largest chateau in all Europe.
The Sun King moved his government and court there, and of course continued making additions and refinements all the while, extending the complex outward with more and more new buildings. Louis XIV’s successor Louis XV put his own architectural stamp on the palace as well, subdividing its spaces into smaller apartments and adding an opera house.
But when the French Revolution came in 1789, the royal family had to vacate Versailles tout de suite. Then came the removal of the absolutism-symbolizing “royal railings” out front, the taking of its paintings that hung on its walls to the Louvre (the third most popular tourist attraction in France, incidentally, two spots ahead of Versailles), and the auctioning off of its furniture. While the anti-monarchical fervor of the period immediately following the revolution wasn’t particularly good to Versailles, later rulers implemented restorations, and the current Fifth Republic may well have spent more on the place than even Louis XIV did. And so we have one more reason six million people want to visit Versailles each and every year: they want to see whether France is getting its money worth.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you’ve heard of Buckminster Fuller, you’ve almost certainly heard the word “Dymaxion.” Despite its strong pre-Space Age redolence, the term has somehow remained compelling into the 21st century. But what does it mean? When Fuller, a self-described “comprehensive, anticipatory design scientist,” first invented a house meant practically to reinvent domestic living, Chicago’s Marshall Field and Company department store put a model on display. The company “wanted a catchy label, so it hired a consultant, who fashioned ‘dymaxion’ out of bits of ‘dynamic,’ ‘maximum,’ and ‘ion,’ ” writes TheNew Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert in a piece on Fuller’s legacy. “Fuller was so taken with the word, which had no known meaning, that he adopted it as a sort of brand name.” After the Dymaxion House came the Dymaxion Vehicle, the Dymaxion Map, and even the two-hour-a-day Dymaxion Sleep Plan.
“As a child, Fuller had assembled scrapbooks of letters and newspaper articles on subjects that interested him,” Kolbert writes. “When, later, he decided to keep a more systematic record of his life, including everything from his correspondence to his dry-cleaning bills, it became the Dymaxion Chronofile.” The Dymaxion Chronofile now resides in the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection at Stanford University, a place that has merited the attention of no less a guide to the fascinating corners of the world than Atlas Obscura.
“The files go back to when he was four-years-old, but he only seriously started the archive in 1917,” writes that site’s Allison C. Meier. “From then until his death in 1983 he collected everything from each day, with ingoing and outgoing correspondence, newspaper clippings, drawings, blueprints, models, and even the mundane ephemera like dry cleaning bills.” Fuller added to the Dymaxion Chronofile not just every day but, from the year 1920 until his death in 1983, every fifteen minutes.
In 1962 Fuller described the Dymaxion Chronofile as what would happen “if somebody kept a very accurate record of a human being, going through the era from the Gay ’90s, from a very different kind of world through the turn of the century — as far into the twentieth century as you might live.” Using himself as the case subject for the project (as he did for many projects, which led him to nickname himself “Guinea Pig B”) meant that “I could not be judge of what was valid to put in or not. I must put everything in, so I started a very rigorous record.” Open Culture’s own Ted Mills has written elsewhere about the rigors of storing and maintaining that record in archive form over the decades since Fuller’s death, and now, as with so much Fuller did, the Dymaxion Chronofile stands as both a compelling oddity and proof of real, if askew, prescience. After all, how many of us have taken to documenting our own lives online with nearly equal intensity — and how many of us do it even more often than every fifteen minutes?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
As we know from conversations in subway tunnels or singing in the shower, different kinds of spaces and building materials alter the quality of a sound. It’s a subject near and dear to architects, musicians, and composers. The relationship between space and sound also centrally occupies the field of “Acoustic Archeology.” But here, an unusual problem presents itself. How can we know how music, voice, and environmental sound behaves in spaces that no longer exist?
More specifically, writes EurekAltert!, the question that faced researchers at the University of Seville was “how did words or the rain sound inside the Mosque of Cordoba in the time of Abd al-Rahman I?” The founder of an Iberian Muslim dynasty began construction on the Mosque of Cordoba in the 780s. In the hundreds of years since, it underwent several expansions and, later, major renovations after it became the Cathedral of Cordoba in the 13th century.
The architecture of the 8th century building is lost to history, and so, it would seem, is its careful sound design. “Unlike fragments of tools or shards of pottery,” Atlas Obscura’s Jessica Leigh Hester notes, “sounds don’t lodge themselves in the soil.” Archeo-acousticians do not have recourse to the material artifacts archeologists rely on in their reconstructions of the past. But, given the technological developments in reverb simulation and audio software, these scientists can nonetheless approximate the sounds of ancient spaces.
In this case, University of Seville’s Rafael Suárez and his collaborators in the research group “Architecture, Heritage and Sustainability” collected impulse responses—recordings of reverberation—from the current cathedral. “From there, they used software to reconstruct the internal architecture of the mosque during four different phases of construction and renovation.… Next, they produced auralizations, or sound files replicating what worshippers would have heard.”
To hear what late-8th century Spanish Muslims would have, “researchers used software to model how the architecture would change the same snippet of a recorded salat, or daily prayer. In the first configuration, the prayer sounds full-bodied and sonorous; in the model that reflects the mosque’s last renovation, the same prayer echoes as though it was recited deep inside a cave.” All of those renovations, in other words, destroyed the sonic engineering of the mosque.
As the authors write in a paper recently published in Applied Acoustics, “the enlargement interventions failed to take the functional aspect of the mosque and gave the highest priority to mainly the aesthetic aspect.” In the simulation of the mosque as it sounded in the 780s, sound was intelligible all over the building. Later construction added what the researchers call “acoustic shadow zones” where little can be heard but echo.
Unlike Hagia Sofia, the Byzantine cathedral-turned-mosque, which retained its basic design over the course of almost 1500 years, and thus its basic sound design, the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba was so altered architecturally that a “significant deterioration of the acoustic conditions” resulted, the authors claim. The mosque’s many remaining visual elements would be familiar to 8th century attendees, writes Hester, including “gilt calligraphy and intricate tiles… and hundreds of columns—made from jasper, onyx, marble, and other stones salvaged from Roman ruins.” But the “acoustic landscape” of the space would be unrecognizable.
The specific sounds of a space are essential to making “a place feel like itself.” Something to consider the next time you’re planning a major home renovation.
Maybe you, too, were a Latin geek who loved sword and sandal flicks from the golden age of the Hollywood epic? Quo Vadis, The Fall of the Roman Empire, The Robe, Demetrius and the Gladiators, and, of course, Spartacus…. Never mind all the heavy religious pretext, context, subtext, or hammer over the head that suffused these films, or any pretense toward historical accuracy. What thrilled me was seeing ancient Rome come alive, bustling with togas and tunics, centurions and chariots. The center of the ancient world for hundreds of years, the city, naturally, retains only traces of what it once was—enormous monuments that might as well be tombs.
The incredibly detailed 3D animations here don’t quite have the same rousing effect, granted, as the “I am Spartacus!” scene. They don’t star Charlton Heston, Sophia Loren, or Kirk Douglas. They appeal to different sensibilities, it’s true. But if you love the idea of visiting Rome during one of its peak periods, you might find them as satisfying, in their way, as Peter Ustinov’s Nero speeches.
Dating not from the time of Mark Antony or even Jesus, the painstakingly-rendered tours of ancient Rome depict the city as it would have looked—sans humans and their activity—during its “architectural peak,” as Realm of History notes, under Constantine, “circa 320 AD.”
The VR trailer at the top from History in 3D, developed by Danila Loginov and Lasha Tskhondia, depicts, in Loginov’s words, “the Forums area, and also Palatine and Capitolium hills.” The two additional trailers for the project show the “baths of Trajan and Titus, the statue of Colossus Solis, arches of Titus and Constantine, Ludus Magnus, the temple of Divine Claudius. Our team spent some time and recreated this area along with all minor buildings as a complex and added it to the model which has been already done.” This means, he says, “we have now almost the entire center of ancient imperial Rome already recreated!”
We glide gently over the city with a low-flying-bird’s eye view, taking in its realistic skyline, tree-lined streets, and gurgling fountains. The lack of any human presence makes the experience a little chilly, but if you’re moved by classical architecture, it also presents a refreshing lack of distraction—an impossible request in a visit to modern Rome. Another project, Rome Reborn, which we’ve previously featured here, takes a different approach to the same imperial city of 320 AD. The trailers for their VR app don’t provide the seamless flight experience, but they do contain equally epic music. (They also have a few people in them, blockily-rendered gawking tourists rather than ancient Romans.)
Instead, these clips give us fascinating glimpses of the interiors of such splendid structures as the Basilica of Maxentius—tiled floors, domed ceilings, columned walls—from a number of different perspectives. We also get to fly above the city, drone-style, or hot air balloon-style, as it were. In the clip below, we cruise over Rome in that vehicle, with be****************@gm***.com
“The ambitious undertaking,” of the Rome Reborn app, writes Meilan Solly at Smithsonian, “painstakingly built by a team of 50 academics and computer experts over a 22-year period, recreates 7,000 buildings and monuments scattered across a 5.5 square mile stretch of the famed Italian city.” The three modules of the Rome Reborn app demoed here are all available at their website. Geeks—and historians of ancient Roman architecture and city planning—rejoice.
Offer a cutting-edge security system, and you’ll suffer no shortage of customers who want it installed. But before our age of concealed cameras, motion sensors, retinal scanners, and all the other advanced and often unsettling technologies known only to industry insiders, how did owners of large, expensive, and even royalty-housing properties buy peace of mind? We find one particularly ingenious answer by looking back about 400 years ago, to the wooden castles and temples of 17th-century Japan.
“For centuries, Japan has taken pride in the talents of its craftsmen, carpenters and woodworkers included,” writes Sora News 24’s Casey Baseel. “Because of that, you might be surprised to find that some Japanese castles have extremely creaky wooden floors that screech and groan with each step. How could such slipshod construction have been considered acceptable for some of the most powerful figures in Japanese history? The answer is that the sounds weren’t just tolerated, but desired, as the noise-producing floors functioned as Japan’s earliest automated intruder alarm.”
In these specially engineered floors, “planks of wood are placed atop a framework of supporting beams, securely enough that they won’t dislodge, but still loosely enough that there’s a little bit of play when they’re stepped on.” And when they are stepped on, “their clamps rub against nails attached to the beams, creating a shrill chirping noise,” rendering stealthy movement nearly impossible and thus making for an effective “countermeasure against spies, thieves, and assassins.”
According to Zen-Garden.org, you can still find — and walk on — four such uguisubari, or “nightingale floors,” in Kyoto: at Daikaku-ji temple, Chio-in temple, Toji-in temple, and Ninomura Palace.
If you can’t make it out to Kyoto any time soon, you can have a look and a listen to a couple of those nightingale floors in the shortclips above. Then you’ll understand just how difficult it would have been to cross one without alerting anyone to your presence. This sort of thing sends our imaginations straight to visions of highly trained ninjas skillfully outwitting palace guards, but in their day these deliberately squeaky floors floors also carried more pleasant associations than that of imminent assassination. As this poem on Zen-Garden.org’s uguisubari page says says:
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Two of the books that most shaped American culture both happened to bear the nickname “The Big Book.” While the second of these, the A.A. Manual, published in 1939, changed the country with 12-Step recovery groups, the first of these, the Sears Catalog, transformed America with mass consumption, offering customers in every part of the country access to modern conveniences and retail goods of all kinds at unheard of prices. Beginning in 1908, Sears started selling entire houses, in approximately 25-ton kits transported by railroad, consisting of 30,000 pre-cut parts, plumbing and electrical fixtures, and up to 750 pounds of nails.
“In an era before commercial aviation and long-haul trucking,” Curbed marvels, “Sears, Roebuck & Co. set up an operation that would package and ship more than 400 different types of homes and buildings to anybody who had the cash and access to a catalog.”
They started small, and just as they didn’t come up with the concept of the mail order catalog, Sears didn’t invent the kit house, though they suggest as much in their telling of the story. Instead they may have taken the idea from another company called Aladdin. Aladdin houses have been forgotten, however, and even Sears’ main competitor, Montgomery Ward, didn’t catch up until 1921 and only lasted ten years in the kit house business.
Sears houses, on the other hand, are celebrated and sought out as models of the early 20th century American home, and for good reason. Between 1908 and 1939, Sears sold 70–75,000 houses in 447 different styles all over the country. “From Craftsman to Cape Cods, they offered a custom home at budgets and sizes that could accommodate any size family,” writes Popular Mechanics.
These Sears homes weren’t cheap low-end houses. Many of them were built using the finest quality building materials available during that time. It’s not uncommon to find Sears homes today with oak floors, cypress siding, and cedar shingles.
What’s even more extraordinary is that 50% of these were built by the homeowners themselves, usually, as in a barn-raising, with the generous help of family, friends, and neighbors. The other half sold were built professionally. “Often,” writes Messy Nessy, “local builders and carpentry companies purchased homes from Sears to build as model homes and market their services to potential customers.”
These houses could have a significant effect on the character of a neighborhood. Not only could potential buyers see firsthand, and participate in, the construction. They could order the same or a similar model, customize it, and even—as the company tells us in its own short history of the “Sears Modern Home”—design their own homes and “submit the blueprints to Sears, which would then ship off the appropriate precut and fitted materials.”
Sears sounds modest about its impact. The company writes it was not “an innovative home designer” but instead “a very able follower of popular home designs but with the added advantage of modifying houses and hardware according to buyer tastes.” Yet Sears houses aren’t beloved for their forward-looking designs, but for their sturdiness and variety, as well as for their impact on “the emotional lives of rural folk,” as Messy Nessy puts it.
“The Sears mail-order catalogues were sitting on kitchen countertops inside millions of American homes, allowing potential homeowners to both visualize their new home and purchase it as easily as they might have bought a new toaster.” Building a house required a little more investment than plugging in a toaster, and required a 75-page instruction book, but that’s another part of why Sears house hunters are such a dedicated bunch, awestruck at each still-standing model they’re able to photograph and match up with its catalog illustrations and floor plans.
In its first year of production, 1908, Sears sold only one model, number 125, an Eight-Room Bungalow Style House for $945, advertised as “the finest cottage ever constructed at a price less than $1500.” In 1918, the company moved from a numbering system to named models, most of which sound like the names of cozy small towns and bedroom communities: Adeline, Belmont, Maplewood, Avalon, Kilbourne, Del Ray, Stone Ridge…. (See a full list of these models at The Arts & Crafts Society website.)
In the years Sears sold houses, between 54 and 44 percent of Americans lived in rural areas, and these constituted Sears’ most loyal customers, given that the catalog allowed them to purchase things they could buy nowhere else, including ten room colonial mansions like The Magnolia, available from 1913 to 1922 for $6,488, or roughly $88,000—a steal if you can put in the work. This was the largest and most expensive model the company offered, “a three-story, eight room neo-Georgian with a two-story columned portico, porte-cochere, and sleeping porches.” (Mint juleps and servants’ quarters not included.)
Sears eventually offered three build qualities, Honor Bilt, Standard Built, and Simplex Sectional. At the lowest end of the price and build spectrum, the company notes, “Simplex houses were frequently only a couple of rooms and were ideal for summer cottages.” Many of its low-end and early models did not include bathrooms, and the company sold outhouses separately. But due to innovative construction methods, even the least expensive houses held up well.
Because the company lost most of the records after its kit house business folded, it can be difficult to identify a Sears house. And because even the “youngest of Sears homes,” Popular Mechanics points out, is now going on eight decades old, they all require a significant amount of care.” The blog Kit House Hunters has found over 10,000 Sears Houses still standing across the country, most of them in the Northeast and Midwest, where they sold best. (One community in Elgin, IL has over 200 verified Sears homes.)
In the video at the top, you can see a few of those well-built Sears houses still lived in today. The short How to Architect short video above points out that “Sears had a massive impact on the business of home-building, and… the business of pre-fabrication, is alive and well today.” For a look at the variety and intricacy of the Sears Modern Home designs, see this Flickr gallery with over 80 images of catalog pages, illustrated homes, and floor plans. And if you think you might be living in one of these houses, many of which have been granted historic status, find out with this handy 9‑step guide for identifying a Sears Kit Home.
In addition to his formidable body of work in architecture, design, and theory of the kind the world had never known before, Buckminster Fuller also knew how to promote himself. Sometimes this meant appearing on late-night new-age talk shows, but at its core it meant coming up with ideas that would immediately “read” as revolutionary to anyone who saw them in action. But how to put them before the eyes of someone who hasn’t had the chance to see a geodesic dome, a Dymaxion House and Car, or even a Geodome 4 tent in real life?
The ascent of graphic design in the 20th century, a century Fuller saw begin and lived through most of, provided one promising answer: posters. The ones you see here show off “Fuller’s most famous inventions, with line drawings from his patents superimposed over a photograph of the thing itself,” writes Fast Company’s Katharine Schwab.
“While they look like something Fuller aficionados might have created after the man’s death to celebrate his work, Fuller actually created them in partnership with the gallerist Carl Solway near the end of his career.”
These posters, “striking with their two-layer design, are Fuller’s visual homage to his own genius — and an attempt to bring what he believed were world-changing utopian concepts to the masses.” They’re also now on display at the Edward Cella Art + Architecture in Los Angeles, whose exhibition “R. Buckminster Fuller: Inventions and Models” runs until November 2nd. “Fuller’s objects and prints function not only as models of the mathematical and geometric properties underlying their construction but also as elegant works of art,” says the gallery’s site. “As such, the works represent the hybridity of Fuller’s practice, and his legacy across the fields of art, design, science, and engineering.”
You can see more of Fuller’s posters, which depict and visually explain the structures of such inventions as the geodesic dome and Dymaxion Car, of course, but also lesser-known creations like a “Fly’s Eye” dome covered in bubble windows (individually swappable for solar panels), a submersible for offshore drilling, and a rowboat with a body reduced to two thin “needles,” at Designboom. Edward Cella Art + Architecture has also made the posters available for purchase at $7,000 apiece. That price might seem in contradiction with Fuller’s utopian ideals about universal accessibility through sheer low cost, but then, who could look at these and call them anything but works of art?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
