We live in an age, we’re often told, when our ability to conjure up an image is limited only by our imagination. These days, this notion tends to refer to artificial intelligence-powered systems that generate visual material from text prompts, like DALL‑E and the many others that have proliferated in its wake. But however technologically impressive they are, they also reveal that our imagination has its limits, giving form only to what we can put into words. To be inspired properly again, we must explore farther afield, in the visual realms of other times and places, which we can easily do on a site like Public.work.
Jason Kottke describes Public.work as “an image search engine that boasts 100,000 ‘copyright-free’ images from institutions like the NYPL, the Met, etc. It’s fast with a relatively simple interface and uses AI to auto-categorize and suggest possibly related images (both visually and content-wise). And it’s fun to just visually click around on related images.”
These journeys can take you from vintage magazine covers to foreign children’s books, lifelike foreign landscapes to elaborate world maps, Japanese woodblock prints to roadside Americana — or such has been my experience, at any rate.
“On the downside,” Kottke adds, “their sourcing and attribution isn’t great — especially when compared to something like Flickr Commons.” According to librarian Jessamyn West, Public.work isn’t exactly a search engine, but an interface for a site called Cosmos, which describes itself as “a Pinterest alternative for creatives” meant to create “a more mindful internet.”
Getting the full story behind any particular images you find there will require you to put a bit of energy into research, or at least to locate the fruits of research done elsewhere on the internet. As for what you do with them, that will, of course, depend on your own creative instincts. Enter Public.work 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 or on Facebook.
In 2017, we brought you news of a world map purportedly more accurate than any to date, designed by Japanese architect and artist Hajime Narukawa. The map, called the AuthaGraph, updates a centuries-old method of turning the globe into a flat surface by first converting it to a cylinder. Winner of Japan’s Good Design Grand Award, it serves as both a brilliant design solution and an update to our outmoded conceptions of world geography.
But as some readers have pointed out, the AuthaGraph also seems to draw quite heavily on an earlier map made by one of the most visionary of theorists and designers, Buckminster Fuller, who in 1943 applied his Dymaxion trademark to the map you see above, which will likely remind you of his most recognizable invention, the Geodesic Dome, “house of the future.”
Whether Narukawa has acknowledged Fuller as an inspiration I cannot say. In any case, 73 years before the AuthaGraph, the Dymaxion Map achieved a similar feat, with similar motivations. As the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) points out, “The Fuller Projection Map is [or was] the only flat map of the entire surface of the Earth which reveals our planet as one island in the ocean, without any visually obvious distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the land areas, and without splitting any continents.”
Fuller published his map in Life magazine, as a corrective, he said, “for the layman, engrossed in belated, war-taught lessons in geography…. The Dymaxion World map is a means by which he can see the whole world fairly at once.” Fuller, notes Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan at Gizmodo, “intended the Dymaxion World map to serve as a tool for communication and collaboration between nations.”
Fuller believed, writes BFI, that “given a way to visualize the whole planet with greater accuracy, we humans will be better equipped to address challenges as we face our common future aboard Spaceship Earth.” Was he naïve or ahead of his time?
We may have had a good laugh at a recent replica of Fuller’s nearly undrivable, “scary as hell,” 1930 Dymaxion Car, one of his first inventions. Many of Fuller’s contemporaries also found his work bizarre and impractical. Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker sums up the reception he often received for his “schemes,” which “had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals).” The commentary seems unfair.
Fuller’s influence on architecture, design, and systems theory has been broad and deep, though many of his designs only resonated long after their debut. He thought of himself as an “anticipatory design scientist,” rather than an inventor, and remarked, “if you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.” In this sense, we must agree that the Dymaxion map was an unqualified success as an inspiration for innovative map design.
In addition to its possibly indirect influence on the AuthaGraph, Fuller’s map has many prominent imitators and sparked “a revolution in mapping,” writes Campbell-Dollaghan. She points us to, among others, the Cryosphere, further up, a Fuller map “arranged based on ice, snow, glaciers, permafrost and ice sheets”; to Dubai-based Emirates airline’s map showing flight routes; and to the “Googlespiel,” an interactive Dymaxion map built by Rehabstudio for Google Developer Day, 2011.
And, just above, we see the Dymaxion Woodocean World map by Nicole Santucci, winner of 2013’s DYMAX REDUX, an “open call to create a new and inspiring interpretation of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map.” You’ll find a handful of other unique submissions at BFI, including the runner-up, Clouds Dymaxion Map, below, by Anne-Gaelle Amiot, an “absolutely beautiful hand-drawn depiction of a reality that is almost always edited from our maps: cloud patterns circling above Earth.”
The compelling but less-than-straightforward question of how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids has inspired all manner of theory and speculation, grounded to varying degrees in physical reality. Sheer manpower must have played a large part, and it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that various simple machines were involved. But in certain cases, could the machines have been less simple than we imagine today? Such is the proposal advanced in a paper recently published in PLOS ONE, “On the Possible Use of Hydraulic Force to Assist with Building the Step Pyramid of Saqqara.”
“The Step Pyramid was built around 2680 BCE, part of a funerary complex for the Third Dynasty pharaoh Djoser,” writes Ars Technica’s Jennifer Ouellette. “It’s located in the Saqqara necropolis and was the first pyramid to be built, almost a ‘proto-pyramid’ that originally stood some 205 feet high,” as against the more widely known Great Pyramid of Giza, which reached 481 feet.
According to the paper’s first author Xavier Landreau, head of the French research institute Paleotechnic, his team’s intensive research on “the watersheds to the west of the Saqqara plateau” led to “the discovery of “structures they believe constituted a dam, a water treatment facility, and a possible internal hydraulic lift system within the pyramid,” which could have been used to move heavy limestone.
Not every Egypt expert is convinced. As the University of Cambridge’s Judith Bunbury puts it to Ouellette, “there is evidence that Egyptians used other kinds of hydraulic technologies around that time, but there is no evidence of any kind of hydraulic lift system.” At Smithsonian.com, Will Sullivan rounds up other skeptical reactions, including that of University of Toronto archaeologist Oren Siegel, who “tells Science News that the proposed dam could not have held enough water from occasional rain to maintain a hydraulic system.” Clearly, the view of the Step Pyramid taken by Landreau and his researchers will require more concrete support, as it were, before being accepted into the mainstream. But it’s still a good deal more plausible than, say, the somehow persistent notion that members of an advanced spacefaring civilization came to give the ancient Egyptians a hand.
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.
In 2013, the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “selfie” had been deemed their Word of The Year. The term, whose first recorded use as an Instagram hashtag occurred on January 27, 2011, was actually invented in 2002, when an Australian chap posted a picture of himself on an internet forum and called it a “selfie”. While devices for taking photos of oneself have been available for many years prior to the proliferation of the smartphones responsible for this phenomenon, the history of the selfie dates back to the origins of photography itself.
As the Public Domain Review notes, the first recorded instance of the selfie harkens back to what may have been the first photographic portrait. In 1839, a young Philadelphia chemist named Robert Cornelius stepped out of his family’s store and took a photograph of himself:
He took the image by removing the lens cap and then running [into the] frame where he sat for a minute before covering up the lens again. On the back he wrote “The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.”
Cornelius’ striking self-portrait was, apparently, indicative of his knack for photography; an entry in Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1840 reads:
… As a Daguerreotypist his specimens are the best that have yet been seen in this country, and we speak this with a full knowledge of the specimens shown here by Mr. Gouraud, purporting to be, and no doubt truly, by Daguerre himself. We have seen many specimens by young Cornelius, and we pronounce them unsurpassable—they must be seen to be appreciated.
As a final consolatory note to those linguistic stalwarts whose blood boils at this bit of Australian slang entering the lexicon, have no fear—the Oxford Dictionaries Online is very, very different than the Oxford English Dictionary.
At this time of the year, the Swedish island of Gotland puts on Medeltidsveckan, or “Medieval Week,” the country’s largest historical festival. According to its official About page, it offers its visitors the chance to “watch knights on horseback, drink something cold, take a crafting course, practice archery, listen to a concert or picnic along the beach, while waiting for some ruin show or performance in some moat!” If next year’s Medeltidsveckan incorporates electronic-music sessions as well, it will surely be thanks to inspiration from the EP-1320 sampler, or instrumentalis electronicum, just released by Swedish electronics company Teenage Engineering.
Billed as “the world’s first medieval electronic instrument,” the EP-1320 is modeled on Teenage Engineering’s successful EP-133 drum sampler/composer, but pre-loaded with a selection of playable musical instruments from the Middle Ages, from frame drums, battle toms, and coconut horse hooves to bagpipes, bowed harps, and, yes, hurdy-gurdies.
Users can also evoke a complete medieval world — or at least a certain idea of one, not untainted by fantasy — with swords, livestock, witches, “rowdy peasants,” and “actual dragons.” To get a sense of how it works, have a look at the video at the top of the post from B&H Photo Video Pro Audio, which offers a rundown of its many technical and aesthetic features.
“Even the design of the sampler and music composer looks medieval, from the font style all over the board” — often used to label buttons and other controls in Latin, or Latin of a kind — “to the color, presentation, packaging, and imagery,” writes Designboom’s Matthew Burgos. “The electronic instrument is portable too, and the design team includes a quilted hardcover case, t‑shirt, keychain, and a vinyl record featuring songs and samples.” Clearly, the EP-1320 isn’t just a piece of novelty studio gear, but a symbol of its owner’s appreciation for the transposition of all things medieval into our modern digital world. It’s worth considering as a Christmas gift for the electronic-music creator in your life; just imagine how they could use it to reinterpret the classic songs of the holiday season with not just lutes, trumpets, and citoles at their command, but “torture-chamber reverb” as well.
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.
Anyone who’s followed the late Michael Apted’s Up documentaries knows that becoming a London cab driver is no mean feat. Tony Walker, one of the series’ most memorable participants, was selected at the age of seven from an East End primary school, already distinguished as a character by his energetic manner, classic cockney accent, and enthusiastically expressed ambition to become a jockey. By 21 Up, however, he’d got off the horse and into a taxicab — or was aiming to do so, having immersed himself in the studies required for the necessary licensing exams. For many non-British viewers, this constituted an introduction to what’s known as “the Knowledge,” the formidable testing process licensed London taxicab drivers have undergone since 1865.
“It is without question a unique intellectual, psychological and physical ordeal, demanding unnumbered thousands of hours of immersive study.” For the Tony Walkers of the world, it has also long offered a route to stable, well-compensated, and even prestigious work: everyone, regardless of social class, acknowledges the expertise of London that the black-taxicab driver possesses.
In recent years, those classic black cabs have faced greatly intensified competition from rideshare and “minicab” services, whose drivers aren’t required to pass the Knowledge. Instead, they rely on the same thing the rest of us do: GPS-enabled devices that automatically compute the route between point A and point B. Though one would imagine this technology having long since rendered the Knowledge redundant, the flow of aspirants to the status of black-cab driver hasn’t dried up entirely. Take Tom the Taxi Driver, a full-fledged London cabbie who’s also millennial enough to have elaborate tattoos and his own Youtube channel, on which he explains not just the experience of driving a taxi in London, but also of taking the tests to do so, which involve plotting Point-A-to-Point‑B routes verbally, on the spot.
The question of whether the Knowledge beats the GPS is settled on the channel of another, similarly named English Youtuber: Tom Scott, who in the video above, drives one route through London using his mobile phone while Tom the Taxi Driver does another of the same length while consulting only his own mental map of the city. This modern-day John Henry showdown is less interesting for its outcome than for what we see along the way: Tom the Taxi Driver’s perception and experience of London differ considerably from that of Tom the non-taxi driver, and as neuroscientific research has suggested, that difference is probably reflected in the physical nature of his brain.
“The posterior hippocampus, the area of the brain known to be important for memory, is bigger in London taxi drivers than in most people, and that a successful Knowledge candidate’s posterior hippocampus enlarges as he progresses through the test,” writes Rosen. The applicants’ having to master fine-grained detail both geographic and historical (over a period of nearly three years on average) also underscores that “the Knowledge stands for, well, knowledge — for the Enlightenment ideal of encyclopedic learning, for the humanist notion that diligent intellectual endeavor is ennobling, an end in itself.” For any of us, habitually offloading the mental work of not just wayfinding but remembering, calculating, and much else besides onto apps may well induce a kind of mental obesity, one we can only fight off by mastering the Knowledge of our own pursuits, whatever those pursuits may be.
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.
If you were to come across an Olivetti Programma 101, you probably wouldn’t recognize it as a computer. With its 36 keys and its paper-strip printer, it might strike you as some kind of oversized adding machine, albeit an unusually handsome one. But then, you’d expect that quality from Olivetti, a company best remembered for its enormously successful typewriters that now occupy prime space in museums of twentieth-century design. Among its lesser-known products, at least outside its native Italy, are its computers, a line that began with mainframes in the mid-nineteen-fifties and ended with IBM PC clones in the nineties, reaching the height of its innovation with the Programma 101 in 1965.
The Programma 101 is also known as the P101 or the Perottina, a name derived from that of its inventor, engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto. “I dreamed of a friendly machine to which you could delegate all those menial tasks which are prone to errors,” he later said, “a machine that could quietly learn and perform tasks, that could store simple data and instructions, that could be used by anyone, that would be inexpensive and the size of other office products which people used.”
To realize that vision required not just a technical effort but also an aesthetic one, which fell to the young architect and industrial designer Mario Bellini, who had followed his colleague (and later Memphis Group founder) Ettore Sottsass into consulting work for Olivetti.
All this work took place at a time of crisis for the company. Following the death of its head Adriano Olivetti in 1960, writes Opinionated Designer, it “got into severe financial difficulties after buying the giant US Underwood company, and the electronics division was sold off to General Electric early in 1965.” Olivetti’s son Roberto had already “given the go-ahead in 1962 for the development of a small ‘desk-top’ computer.” In order “to avoid their project being swallowed up by GE, Perotto’s team changed some of the specifications of the 101 to make it appear to be a ‘calculator’ rather than a ‘computer’ which meant the project could stay with Olivetti.” Yet on a technical level, the Perottina remained very much a computer indeed.
In addition to subtraction, multiplication, and division, “it could also perform logical operations, conditional and unconditional jumps, and print the data stored in a register, all through a custom-made alphanumeric programming language,” writes Riccardo Bianchini at Inexhibit. In the video above, enthusiast Wladimir Zaniewski demonstrates its capabilities with a simple alphanumeric lunar-lander game: a historically apt project, since NASA bought ten of them for use in planning the Apollo 11 moon landing. Yet even more important was the device’s comparatively down-to-earth achievement of being, in Bianchini’s words, “an unintimidating object everyone could use, even at home. In that sense, there is no doubt that the Olivetti Programma 101 truly is the first personal computer in history.”
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.
Ernest Hemingway’s romantic adventure of man and marlin, The Old Man and the Sea, has perhaps spent more time on high school freshman English reading lists than any other work of fiction, which might lead one to think of the novel as young adult fiction. But beyond the book’s ability to communicate broad themes of perseverance, courage, and loss, it has an appeal that also reaches old, wizened men like Hemingway’s Santiago and young, imaginative boyish apprentices like his Manolin. The 1952 novella reinvigorated Hemingway’s career, won him a Pulitzer Prize, and eventually contributed to his Nobel win in 1954. And luckily for all those high school English students, Hemingway’s story has lent itself to some worthy screen adaptations, including the 1958 film starring Spencer Tracy as the indefatigable Spanish-Cuban fisherman and a 1990 version with the mighty Anthony Quinn in the role.
One adaptation that readers of Hemingway might miss is the animation above, a co-production with Canadian, Russian, and Japanese studios created by Russian animator Aleksander Petrov. Winner of a 2000 Academy Award for animated short, the film has as much appeal to a range of viewers young and old as Hemingway’s book, and for some of the same reasons—it’s captivatingly vivid depiction of life on the sea, with its long periods of inactivity and short bursts of extreme physical exertion and considerable risk.
Both states provide ample opportunities for complex character development and rich storytelling as well as exciting white-knuckle suspense. Petrov’s film illustrates them all, opening with images of Santiago’s stories of his seafaring boyhood off the coast of Africa and staging the dramatic contests between Santiago, his “brother” the marlin, and the sharks who devour his prize.
But the production here, unlike Hemingway’s spare prose, makes a dazzling display of its technique. For his The Old Man and the Sea, Petrov—only one of a handful of animators skilled in this art—handpainted over 29,000 frames on glass (with help from his son, Dmitri) using slow-drying oils. Petrov moved the paint with his fingers to capture the movement in the next shot, and while the magical effect resembles a moving painting, the shooting itself was very technologically advanced, involving a specially constructed motion-capture camera. Petrov and son began their painting in 1997 and finished two years later, taking to heart some of the lessons of the book, it seems. The film’s creators, however, fared better than The Old Man’s protagonist, richly rewarded for their struggle. In addition to an Oscar, the short won awards from BAFTA, the San Diego Film Festival, and a handful of other prestigious international bodies.
Taking a first glance at the Babylonian Map of the World, few of us could recognize it for what it is. But then again, few of us are anything like the British Museum Middle East department curator Irving Finkel, whose vast knowledge (and ability to share it compellingly) have made him a viewer favorite on the institution’s Youtube channel. In the Curator’s Corner video above, he offers an up-close view of the Babylonian Map of the World — or rather, the fragment of the clay tablet from the eighth or seventh century BC that he and other experts have determined contains a piece of the oldest map of the known world in existence.
“If you look carefully, you will see that the flat surface of the clay has a double circle,” Finkel says. Within the circle is cuneiform writing that describes the shape as the “bitter river” that surrounds the known world: ancient Mesopotamia, or modern-day Iraq.
Inside the circle lie representations of both the Euphrates River and the mighty city of Babylon; outside it lie a series of what scholars have determined were originally eight triangles. “Sometimes people say they are islands, sometimes people say they are districts, but in point of fact, they are almost certainly mountains,” which stand “far beyond the known world” and represent, to the ancient Babylonians, “places full of magic, and full of mystery.”
Coming up with a coherent explanation of the map itself hinged on the discovery, in the nineteen-nineties, of one of those triangles originally thought to have been lost. This owes to the enthusiasm of a non-professional, a student in Finkel’s cuneiform night classes named Edith Horsley. During one of her once-a-week volunteer shifts at the British Museum, she set aside a particularly intriguing clay fragment. As soon as Finkel saw it, he knew just the artifact to which it belonged. After the piece’s reattachment, much fell into place, not least that the map purported to show the distant location of the beached (or rather, mountained) ark built by “the Babylonian version of Noah” — the search for which continues these nine or so millennia later.
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.
Sometimes it can seem as though the more we think we know a historical figure, the less we actually do. Helen Keller? We’ve all seen (or think we’ve seen) some version of The Miracle Worker, right?—even if we haven’t actually read Keller’s autobiography. And Mark Twain? He can seem like an old family friend. But I find people are often surprised to learn that Keller was a radical socialist firebrand, in sympathy with workers’ movements worldwide. In a short article in praise of Lenin, for example, Keller once wrote, “I cry out against people who uphold the empire of gold…. I am perfectly sure that love will bring everything right in the end, but I cannot help sympathizing with the oppressed who feel driven to use force to gain the rights that belong to them.”
Twain took a more pessimistic, ironic approach, yet he thoroughly opposed religious dogma, slavery, and imperialism. “I am always on the side of the revolutionists,” he wrote, “because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.” While a great many people grow more conservative with age, Twain and Keller both grew more radical, which in part accounts for another little-known fact about these two nineteenth-century American celebrities: they formed a very close and lasting friendship that, at least in Keller’s case, may have been one of the most important relationships in either figure’s lives.
Twain’s importance to Keller, and hers to him, begins in 1895, when the two met at a lunch held for Keller in New York. According to the Mark Twain Library’s extensive documentary exhibit, Keller “seemed to feel more at ease with Twain than with any of the other guests.” She would later write, “He treated me not as a freak, but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties.”Twain was taken as well, surprised by “her quickness and intelligence.” After the meeting, he wrote to his benefactor Henry H. Rogers, asking Rogers to fund Keller’s education. Rogers, the Mark Twain Library tells us, “personally took charge of Helen Keller’s fortunes, and out of his own means made it possible for her to continue her education and to achieve for herself the enduring fame which Mark Twain had foreseen.”
Twain wrote to his wealthy friend, “It won’t do for America to allow this marvelous child to retire from her studies because of poverty. If she can go on with them she will make a fame that will endure in history for centuries.” Thereafter, the two would maintain a “special friendship,” sustained not only by their political sentiments, but also by a love of animals, travel, and other personal similarities. Both writers came to live in Fairfield County, Connecticut at the end of their lives, and she visited him at his Redding home, Stormfield, in 1909, the year before his death (see them there at the top of the post, and more photos here). Twain was especially impressed by Keller’s autobiography, writing to her, “I am charmed with your book—enchanted.” (See his endorsement in a 1903 advertisement, below.)
Twain also came to Keller’s defense, ten years later, after reading in her book about a plagiarism scandal that occurred in 1892 when, at only twelve years old, she was accused of lifting her short story “The Frost King” from Margaret Canby’s “Frost Fairies.” Though a tribunal acquitted Keller of the charges, the incident still piqued Twain, who called it “unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque” in a 1903 letter in which he also declared: “The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterance—is plagiarism.” What differs from work to work, he contends is “the phrasing of a story”; Keller’s accusers, he writes protectively, were “solemn donkeys breaking a little child’s heart.”
We also have Twain—not playwright William Gibson—to thank for the “miracle worker” title given to Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan. (See Keller, Sullivan, Twain, and Sullivan’s husband John Macy above at Twain’s home). As a tribute to Sullivan for her tireless work with Keller, he presented her with a postcard that read, “To Mrs. John Sullivan Macy with warm regard & with limitless admiration of the wonders she has performed as a ‘miracle-worker.’” In his 1903 letter to Keller, he called Sullivan “your other half… for it took the pair of you to make complete and perfect whole.”
Twain praised Sullivan effusively for “her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character, and the fine literary competencies of her pen.” But he reserved his highest praise for Keller herself. “You are a wonderful creature,” he wrote, “The most wonderful in the world.” Keller’s praise of her friend Twain was no less lofty. “I have been in Eden three days and I saw a King,” she wrote in his guestbook during her visit to Stormfield, “I knew he was a King the minute I touched him though I had never touched a King before.” The last words in Twain’s autobiography, the first volume anyway—which he only allowed to be published in 2010—are Keller’s; “You once told me you were a pessimist, Mr. Clemons,” he quotes her as saying, “but great men are usually mistaken about themselves. You are an optimist.”
Many of us have put off a visit to Venice for fear of the hordes of tourists who roam its streets and boat down its canals day in and day out. To judge by the most visible of its economic activity, the once-mighty city-state now exists almost solely as an Instagramming destination. It wasn’t always this way. “Despite having no roads, no land, and no fresh water, the Venetians managed to turn a muddy swamp into the most powerful and wealthiest city of its time,” says the narration of the Primal Space video above. Its “unique layout of canals and bridges woven through hundreds of islands made Venice incredibly accessible, and it became the epicenter of all business.”
Venice, in other words, was at its height what world capitals like London or New York would become in later eras. But on a physical level, it faced challenges unknown in those cities, challenges that demanded a variety of ingenious medieval engineering solutions, most of which still function today. First, the builders of Venice had to bring timber from the forests of Croatia and drive it into the soft soil, creating a platform sturdy enough to bear the weight of an entire urban built environment. Construction of the buildings on top proved to be a trial-and-error affair, which came around to using bricks with lime mortar to ensure flexibility on the slowly shifting ground.
“Instead of expanding outwards like most cities,” Venice’s islands “expanded into each other.” Eventually, they had to be connected, though “there were no bridges for the first 500 years of Venice’s existence,” not until the Doge offered a prize for the best design that could link the financial center of Rialto to the rest of the city. But what really mattered was the test of time, one long since passed by the Ponte di Rialto, which has stood fundamentally unaltered since it was rebuilt in stone in 1591. The combination of bridges and canals, with what we would now call their separation of traffic, did its part to make Venice “the most powerful and richest city in Europe” by the fifteenth century.
Even the richest and most powerful cities need water, and Venice had an abundance of only the “extremely salty and undrinkable” kind. To meet the needs of the city’s fast-growing population, engineers built wells surrounded by sand-and-stone filtration systems into Venice’s characteristic squares, turning the city into “an enormous funnel.” The related problem of waste management necessitated the construction of “a network of underground tunnels” directed into canals, flushed out by the motion of the tides. Venice’s plumbing has since been brought up to modern standards, among other ambitious engineering projects. But on the whole, the city still works as it did in the days of the Doge, and that fact alone makes it a sight worth seeing.
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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