Frank Lloyd Wright Thought About Making the Guggenheim Museum Pink

Image via The Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion Archives

Seen today, the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, seems to occu­py sev­er­al time peri­ods at once, look­ing both mod­ern and some­how ancient. The lat­ter qual­i­ty sure­ly has to do with its bright white col­or, which we asso­ciate (espe­cial­ly in such an insti­tu­tion­al con­text) with Greek and Roman stat­ues. But just like those stat­ues, the Guggen­heim was­n’t actu­al­ly white to begin with. “Few­er and few­er New York­ers may recall that the muse­um, in a then-grim­i­er city, used to be beige,” writes the New York Times’ Michael Kim­mel­man. “Robert Moses thought it looked like ‘jaun­diced skin.’ ” Hence, pre­sum­ably, the deci­sion dur­ing a 1992 expan­sion to paint over the earth­en hue of Wright’s choice.

Not that beige was the only con­tender in the design phase. Look at the archival draw­ings, Kim­mel­man writes, and you’ll find “a reminder that Wright had con­tem­plat­ed some pret­ty far-out col­ors — Chero­kee red, orange, pink.”

The very thought of that last “leads down a rab­bit hole of alter­na­tive New York his­to­ry,” and if you’re curi­ous to see what a pink Guggen­heim might have looked like from the street, David Romero at Hooked on the Past has cre­at­ed a few dig­i­tal­ly mod­i­fied pho­tos. The result hard­ly comes off as being in taste quite as poor as one might expect; in fact, it could have fit quite well into the Mem­phis-embrac­ing nine­teen-eight­ies, and even the post­mod­ern nineties. The image above, show­ing the Guggen­heim imag­ined in pink, comes from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion Archives.

But as it is, “closed off to the city around it, the building’s anti­sep­tic, spank­ing-white facade, today is in keep­ing with the neigh­bor­hood.” That itself is in keep­ing with Wright’s ideas for trans­form­ing the Amer­i­can city, which he kept on putting forth until the end of his life. Attempt­ing to solve “the prob­lem of the inner city,” he con­ceived “fan­tas­ti­cal megas­truc­tures for places like down­town Pitts­burgh, Bagh­dad, and Madi­son, Wis­con­sin,” all of them “city-based but anti-urban projects, divorced from the streets.” Even work­ing in the Unit­ed States’ dens­est metrop­o­lis, Wright expressed a long­ing for the splen­did iso­la­tion of the Amer­i­can coun­try­side, where a man — at least as the lore has it — can paint his house any col­or he pleas­es.

via Messy Nessy/Hooked on the Past

Relat­ed con­tent:

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Broad­acre City (1932)

The Unre­al­ized Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright Get Brought to Life with 3D Dig­i­tal Recon­struc­tions

When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Plan to Turn Ellis Island Into a Futur­is­tic Jules Verne-Esque City (1959)

Build Wood­en Mod­els of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Build­ing: The Guggen­heim, Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters & More

Behold Ancient Egypt­ian, Greek & Roman Sculp­tures in Their Orig­i­nal Col­or

The Guggen­heim Puts 109 Free Mod­ern Art Books Online

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

An Architect Breaks Down the 5 Most Common Styles of College Campus

Every now and again on social media, the obser­va­tion cir­cu­lates that Amer­i­cans look back so fond­ly on their col­lege years because nev­er again do they get to live in a well-designed walk­a­ble com­mu­ni­ty. The orga­ni­za­tion of col­lege cam­pus­es does much to shape that expe­ri­ence, but so do the build­ings them­selves. “Peo­ple often say that col­lege is the best four years of your life,” says archi­tect Michael Wyet­zn­er in the new Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, “but it was also like­ly that it was some of the best archi­tec­ture you’ve been around as well.” He goes on to iden­ti­fy, explain, and con­tex­tu­al­ize the five build­ing styles most com­mon­ly seen on Amer­i­can col­lege cam­pus­es: colo­nial, Col­le­giate Goth­ic, mod­ernism, bru­tal­ism, and post­mod­ernism.

For exam­ples of colo­nial cam­pus archi­tec­ture, look no fur­ther than the Ivy League, only one of whose schools was built after the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence — whose author, Thomas Jef­fer­son, lat­er designed the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia, draw­ing much inspi­ra­tion (if not always first-hand) from ancient Greece and Rome. “Iron­i­cal­ly, after the US declared inde­pen­dence, new­er schools want­ed to look old­er,” says Wyet­zn­er, a desire that spawned the endur­ing Col­le­giate Goth­ic style. Con­struct­ed out of mason­ry and brick, its ear­li­est build­ings tend to pick and choose fea­tures of gen­uine Goth­ic archi­tec­ture while mix­ing and match­ing them with the design lan­guages of oth­er times and places. More recent exam­ples have been stren­u­ous­ly faith­ful by com­par­i­son, incor­po­rat­ing gar­goyles and all.

When they arise, archi­tec­tur­al styles tend to align them­selves with the old or the new, and it was the lat­ter that over­took col­lege cam­pus­es after the Sec­ond World War. Take the Illi­nois Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, which was designed whole by no less a Bauhaus-cre­den­tialed mod­ernist than Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe. Mod­u­lar, flat-roofed, and built with plen­ty of exposed brick, glass, and steel, its build­ings proved influ­en­tial enough that “near­ly every high school in the Unit­ed States that was built in the fifties and six­ties” was designed in more or less the same way — albeit with­out the ear­ly utopi­an mod­ernist spir­it, which by that point had devolved into an indus­tri­al empha­sis on “ratio­nal­ism, func­tion­al­i­ty, and hygiene.”

After mod­ernism came bru­tal­ism, the style of the least-beloved build­ings on many a cam­pus today. Coined by Le Cor­busier, the style’s name comes from béton brut, or raw con­crete, vast quan­ti­ties of which were used to shape its hulk­ing and, depend­ing on how you feel about them, either drea­ry or awe-inspir­ing struc­tures. The aes­thet­i­cal­ly promis­cu­ous post­mod­ernist build­ings that began appear­ing in the six­ties and mul­ti­plied in the sev­en­ties and eight­ies were more play­ful and his­tor­i­cal­ly aware — or all too play­ful and his­tor­i­cal­ly aware, as their detrac­tors would put it. If you think back to your own col­lege days, you can prob­a­bly remem­ber spend­ing time in, or around, at least one exam­ple of each of these styles, because large US col­lege cam­pus­es have, over time, become rich antholo­gies of archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ry. Would that most Amer­i­cans could say the same about the places they live after grad­u­a­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Peo­ple Hate Bru­tal­ist Build­ings on Amer­i­can Col­lege Cam­pus­es

Archi­tect Breaks Down the Design Of Four Icon­ic New York City Muse­ums: the Met, MoMA, Guggen­heim & Frick

Ancient Egyptian Pyramids May Have Been Built with Water: A New Study Explore the Use of Hydraulic Lifts

Image by Charles Sharp, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

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.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Who Built the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids & How Did They Do It?: New Arche­o­log­i­cal Evi­dence Busts Ancient Myths

How Did They Build the Great Pyra­mid of Giza?: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

What the Great Pyra­mids of Giza Orig­i­nal­ly Looked Like

Isaac New­ton The­o­rized That the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Revealed the Tim­ing of the Apoc­a­lypse: See His Burnt Man­u­script from the 1680s

How Did Roman Aque­ducts Work?: The Most Impres­sive Achieve­ment of Ancient Rome’s Infra­struc­ture, Explained

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Buckminster Fuller Tells the World “Everything He Knows” in a 42-Hour Lecture Series (1975)

His­to­ry seems to have set­tled Buck­min­ster Fuller’s rep­u­ta­tion as a man ahead of his time. He inspires short, wit­ty pop­u­lar videos like YouTu­ber Joe Scott’s “The Man Who Saw The Future,” and the ongo­ing lega­cy of the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute (BFI), who note that “Fuller’s ideas and work con­tin­ue to influ­ence new gen­er­a­tions of design­ers, archi­tects, sci­en­tists and artists work­ing to cre­ate a sus­tain­able plan­et.”

Bril­liant futur­ist though he was, Fuller might also be called the man who saw the present and the past—as much as a sin­gle indi­vid­ual could seem­ing­ly hold in their mind at once. He was “a man who is intense­ly inter­est­ed in almost every­thing,” wrote Calvin Tomkins at The New York­er in 1965, the year of Fuller’s 70th birth­day. Fuller was as eager to pass on as much knowl­edge as he could col­lect in his long, pro­duc­tive career, span­ning his ear­ly epipha­nies in the 1920s to his final pub­lic talks in the ear­ly 80s.

“The some­what over­whelm­ing effect of a Fuller mono­logue,” wrote Tomkins, “is well known today in many parts of the world.” His lec­tures leapt from sub­ject to sub­ject, incor­po­rat­ing ancient and mod­ern his­to­ry, math­e­mat­ics, lin­guis­tics, archi­tec­ture, archae­ol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, reli­gion, and—in the exam­ple Tomkins gives—“irrefutable data on tides, pre­vail­ing winds,” and “boat design.” His dis­cours­es issue forth in wave after wave of infor­ma­tion.

Fuller could talk at length and with author­i­ty about vir­tu­al­ly anything—especially about him­self and his own work, in his own spe­cial jar­gon of “unique Bucky-isms: spe­cial phras­es, ter­mi­nol­o­gy, unusu­al sen­tence struc­tures, etc.,” writes BFI. He may not always have been par­tic­u­lar­ly hum­ble, yet he spoke and wrote with a lack of prej­u­dice and an open curios­i­ty and that is the oppo­site of arro­gance. Such is the impres­sion we get of Fuller in the series of talks he record­ed ten years after Tomkin’s New York­er por­trait.

Made in Jan­u­ary of 1975, Buck­min­ster Fuller: Every­thing I Know cap­tured Fuller’s “entire life’s work” in 42 hours of “think­ing out loud lec­tures [that exam­ine] in depth all of Fuller’s major inven­tions and dis­cov­er­ies from the 1927 Dymax­ion car, house, car and bath­room, through the Wichi­ta House, geo­des­ic domes, and tenseg­ri­ty struc­tures, as well as the con­tents of Syn­er­get­ics. Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal in parts, Fuller recounts his own per­son­al his­to­ry in the con­text of the his­to­ry of sci­ence and indus­tri­al­iza­tion.”

He begins, how­ev­er, in his first lec­ture at the top, not with him­self, but with his pri­ma­ry sub­ject of con­cern: “all human­i­ty,” a species that begins always in naked­ness and igno­rance and man­ages to fig­ure it out “entire­ly by tri­al and error,” he says. Fuller mar­vels at the advances of “ear­ly Hin­du and Chi­nese” civilizations—as he had at the Maori in Tomkin’s anec­dote, who “had been among the first peo­ples to dis­cov­er the prin­ci­ples of celes­tial nav­i­ga­tion” and “found a way of sail­ing around the world… at least ten thou­sand years ago.”

The leap from ancient civ­i­liza­tions to “what is called World War I” is “just a lit­tle jump in infor­ma­tion,” he says in his first lec­ture, but when Fuller comes to his own life­time, he shows how many “lit­tle jumps” one human being could wit­ness in a life­time in the 20th cen­tu­ry. “The year I was born Mar­coni invent­ed the wire­less,” says Fuller. “When I was 14 man did get to the North Pole, and when I was 16 he got to the South Pole.”

When Fuller was 7, “the Wright broth­ers sud­den­ly flew,” he says, “and my mem­o­ry is vivid enough of sev­en to remem­ber that for about a year the engi­neer­ing soci­eties were try­ing to prove it was a hoax because it was absolute­ly impos­si­ble for man to do that.” What it showed young Bucky Fuller was that “impos­si­bles are hap­pen­ing.” If Fuller was a vision­ary, he rede­fined the word—as a term for those with an expan­sive, infi­nite­ly curi­ous vision of a pos­si­ble world that already exists all around us.

See Fuller’s com­plete lec­ture series, Every­thing I Know, at the Inter­net Archive, and read edit­ed tran­scripts of his talks at the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute.

Every­thing I Know will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live and Learn More

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Buck­min­ster Fuller Doc­u­ment­ed His Life Every 15 Min­utes, from 1920 Until 1983

Buck­min­ster Fuller, Isaac Asi­mov & Oth­er Futur­ists Make Pre­dic­tions About the 21st Cen­tu­ry in 1967: What They Got Right & Wrong

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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You Can Buy Historic Italian Houses for €1 — But What’s the Catch?

From Abruz­zo to Verge­moli, small Ital­ian towns and vil­lages have recent­ly been mak­ing their his­toric homes avail­able for pur­chase for as low as €1. Giv­en the pic­turesque nature of many of these places, such offers have proven prac­ti­cal­ly irre­sistible to for­eign buy­ers who’ve made their mon­ey and are look­ing to escape the big-city rat race, or even those sim­ply prone to Under the Tus­can Sun-type fan­tasies. But this is, of course, more than just a mat­ter of wiring a sin­gle Euro and jet­ting off to a life of rus­tic beau­ty and sim­plic­i­ty. As shown in these videos from Explained with Dom and Insid­er News, you’ve got to put much more mon­ey into the acqui­si­tion and reha­bil­i­ta­tion of these hous­es, not to men­tion the sweat equi­ty involved.

“As young Ital­ians increas­ing­ly migrate to the city” — if not to oth­er coun­tries entire­ly — “and choose cos­mopoli­tan jobs over rur­al and com­mu­ni­ty voca­tions, many of Italy’s pret­ti­est remote vil­lages are becom­ing aban­doned, with tiny, age­ing pop­u­la­tions that are begin­ning to die off,” write the Inde­pen­dent’s Lucy Thack­ray.

“Some elder­ly Ital­ians have found them­selves with no one to leave their house to, bequeath­ing it instead to the local author­i­ties, who have to decide what to do with it, while some younger cit­i­zens have inher­it­ed prop­er­ties in areas they have no inten­tion of mov­ing to.” And so “around 25 Ital­ian munic­i­pal­i­ties are mak­ing prospec­tive home­own­ers an offer they can’t refuse,” though cer­tain con­di­tions do apply.

Old and less than immac­u­late­ly main­tained on the whole, these hous­es tend to require ren­o­va­tions “in the region of €20,000–50,000 depend­ing on the size of the prop­er­ty.” And the author­i­ties do make sure you’ll actu­al­ly per­form the work: “new own­ers are required to sub­mit details of a ren­o­va­tion project with­in two to 12 months of pur­chase (depend­ing on the loca­tion), start work with­in one year, and com­plete it with­in the next three.” Add on all the addi­tion­al (and often unex­pect­ed) fees, and even a best-case sce­nario starts to look pricey. Still, if you’re total­ly com­mit­ted to reha­bil­i­tat­ing a ven­er­a­ble Ital­ian home — and not just to rent it out to vaca­tion­ers, which some areas explic­it­ly pro­hib­it — it might sound like a fair enough deal.

One thing is cer­tain: any­one look­ing to buy into one of Italy’s cheap-house schemes (at a price of €1 or oth­er­wise) should go in with not just suf­fi­cient knowl­edge of domes­tic archi­tec­ture and remod­el­ing, but also a famil­iar­i­ty with Ital­ian ways of doing busi­ness — which have done their part to con­tribute to the so-called “Ital­ian dis­ease” that has sad­dled the coun­try with decades of eco­nom­ic stag­na­tion, but aren’t like­ly to change any time soon. And above all, it should go with­out say­ing that the first step of act­ing on a desire to play a part in bring­ing one of Italy’s “ghost towns” back to life is learn­ing the Ital­ian lan­guage — a task you can start right here on Open Cul­ture. Buona for­tu­na to you.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Explor­ing the Great­est of Italy’s 6,000 Ghost Towns: Take a Tour of Cra­co, Italy

Dis­cov­er the Ghost Towns of Japan — Where Scare­crows Replace Peo­ple, and a Man Lives in an Aban­doned Ele­men­tary School Gym

Behold 3D Recre­ations of Pompeii’s Lav­ish Homes–As They Exist­ed Before the Erup­tion of Mount Vesu­vius

High-Res­o­lu­tion Walk­ing Tours of Italy’s Most His­toric Places: The Colos­se­um, Pom­peii, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca & More

Venice Explained: Its Archi­tec­ture, Its Streets, Its Canals, and How Best to Expe­ri­ence Them All

Free Ital­ian Lessons

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Amazing Engineering of Roman Baths

Few depic­tions of ancient Roman life neglect to ref­er­ence all the time ancient Romans spent at the baths. One gets the impres­sion that their civ­i­liza­tion was obsessed with clean­li­ness, in con­trast to most of the soci­eties found around the world at the time, but that turns out hard­ly to be the case. In fact, bathing seems to have been a sec­ondary activ­i­ty at Roman baths, which were “places to meet friends, make con­nec­tions, per­haps even score a din­ner invi­ta­tion”; “places to buy a snack, have a mas­sage, or face the dread­ed tweez­ers of the hair remover”; “places to escape from a harsh and sta­tus-dri­ven world; “places to be Roman.”

So says Gar­rett Ryan, cre­ator of the ancient-his­to­ry Youtube chan­nel Told in Stone, in the new video above. He might have added that Roman baths were “third places.” Pop­u­lar­ized by the late soci­ol­o­gist Ray Old­en­burg with the 1989 book The Great Good Place, the con­cept of the third place stands in con­trast to our first and sec­ond places, home and work.

A book­store could be a third place, or a café, or any “hang­out” occu­py­ing that hard-to-define (and by the late twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry in Amer­i­ca, hard-to-find) realm between pub­lic and pri­vate. If it makes you feel con­nect­ed to the com­mu­ni­ty in which you live — indeed, if it makes you feel like you live in a com­mu­ni­ty at all — it may well be a third place.

Roman baths weren’t just impres­sive soci­o­log­i­cal­ly, but also tech­no­log­i­cal­ly. Ryan explains their archi­tec­ture, water sup­ply, heat­ing sys­tems, and clean­ing pro­ce­dures, such as they were. He quotes Mar­cus Aure­lius as describ­ing bath water as “a repul­sive blend of oil, sweat, and filth”; in all like­li­hood, it was “only changed when it became so cloudy that it repelled bathers.” San­i­ta­tion prac­tices appear much improved at Ham­mam Essal­i­hine in Alge­ria, one of the very few ancient Roman baths in con­tin­u­ous use since its con­struc­tion. Ryan doc­u­ments his trip there in the video just above from his oth­er chan­nel Scenic Routes to the Past. Though cap­ti­vat­ed by the sight of a real Roman bath func­tion­ing just as designed, he must have been too con­sumed by thoughts of antiq­ui­ty to remem­ber to pack that mod­ern neces­si­ty, a swim­suit.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Did Roman Aque­ducts Work?: The Most Impres­sive Achieve­ment of Ancient Rome’s Infra­struc­ture, Explained

The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved: Why Has Roman Con­crete Been So Durable?

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pom­peii

An Ani­mat­ed Recon­struc­tion of Ancient Rome: Take A 30-Minute Stroll Through the City’s Vir­tu­al­ly-Recre­at­ed Streets

Behold 3D Recre­ations of Pompeii’s Lav­ish Homes — As They Exist­ed Before the Erup­tion of Mount Vesu­vius

How Toi­lets Worked in Ancient Rome and Medieval Eng­land

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

What’s Under London? Discover London’s Forbidden Underworld

When the words Lon­don and under­ground come togeth­er, the first thing that comes to most of our minds, nat­u­ral­ly, is the Lon­don Under­ground. But though it may enjoy the hon­or­able dis­tinc­tion of the world’s first rail­way to run below the streets, the stal­wart Tube is hard­ly the only thing buried below the city — and far indeed from the old­est. The video above makes a jour­ney through var­i­ous sub­ter­ranean stra­ta, start­ing with the paving stone and con­tin­u­ing through the soil, elec­tric cables, and gas pipelines beneath. From there, things get Roman.

First comes the Billings­gate Roman House and Baths and the Roman amphithe­ater, two pre­served places from what was once called Lon­dini­um. Below that lev­el run sev­er­al now-under­ground rivers, just above the depth of Win­ston Churchill’s pri­vate bunker, which is now main­tained as a muse­um.

Far­ther down, at a depth of 66 feet, we find the remains of Lon­don’s tube sys­tem — not the Tube, but the pneu­mat­ic tube, a nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy that could fire encap­su­lat­ed let­ters from one part of the city to anoth­er. More effec­tive and longer lived was the lat­er, more deeply installed Lon­don Post Office Rail­way, which was used to make deliv­er­ies until 2003.

At 79 feet under­ground, we final­ly meet with the Under­ground — or at least the first and shal­low­est of its eleven lines. The Tube has long become an essen­tial part of the lives of most Lon­don­ers, but around the same depth exists anoth­er facil­i­ty known to rel­a­tive­ly few: the Cam­den cat­a­combs, a sys­tem of under­ground pas­sages once used to sta­ble the hors­es who worked on the rail­ways. Fur­ther down are the net­work of World War II-era “deep shel­ters,” one of which host­ed the plan­ning of D‑Day; below them is a still-func­tion­al facil­i­ty instru­men­tal to the defeat of dif­fer­ent ene­mies, typhus and cholera. That would be Lon­don’s sew­er sys­tem, for which we should spare a thought if we’ve ever walked along the Thames and appre­ci­at­ed the fact that it no longer stinks.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Lon­dini­um Became Lon­don, Lute­tia Became Paris, and Oth­er Roman Cities Got Their Mod­ern Names

The Lost Neigh­bor­hood Buried Under New York City’s Cen­tral Park

“The Won­der­ground Map of Lon­don Town,” the Icon­ic 1914 Map That Saved the World’s First Sub­way Sys­tem

Under­ci­ty: Explor­ing the Under­bel­ly of New York City

The Genius of Har­ry Beck’s 1933 Lon­don Tube Map–and How It Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Sub­way Map Design Every­where

Paris Under­ground

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Why Medieval Bologna Was Full of Tall Towers, and What Happened to Them

Image by Toni Pec­o­raro, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Go to prac­ti­cal­ly any major city today, and you’ll notice that the build­ings in cer­tain areas are much taller than in oth­ers. That may sound triv­ial­ly true, but what’s less obvi­ous is that the height of those build­ings tends to cor­re­spond to the val­ue of the land on which they stand, which itself reflects the poten­tial eco­nom­ic pro­duc­tiv­i­ty to be real­ized by using as much ver­ti­cal space as pos­si­ble. To put it crude­ly, the taller the build­ings in a part of town, the greater the wealth being gen­er­at­ed (or, at times, destroyed). This is a mod­ern phe­nom­e­non, but it also held true, in a dif­fer­ent way, in the Bologna of 800 years ago.

There exists a work of art, much cir­cu­lat­ed online, that depicts what looks like the cap­i­tal of Emil­ia-Romagna in the twelfth or thir­teenth cen­tu­ry. But the city bris­tles with what look like sky­scrap­ers, cre­at­ing an incon­gru­ous but enchant­i­ng medieval Blade Run­ner effect. Bologna real­ly does have tow­ers like that, but only about 22 of them still stand today. Whether it ever had the near­ly 180 depict­ed in this par­tic­u­lar image, and what hap­pened to them if it did, is the ques­tion Jochem Boodt inves­ti­gates in the Present Past video below.

In the era these tow­ers were built, Bologna had become “one of the largest cities in Europe. It’s a time of huge, ambi­tious projects. Cities built cathe­drals, town halls, and pub­lic squares — and some peo­ple built tow­ers.” Those peo­ple includ­ed noble fam­i­lies who held to aris­to­crat­ic tra­di­tions, not least vio­lent feud­ing. Giv­en that “the city is no place to build cas­tles,” they instead inhab­it­ed urban com­plex­es whose town­hous­es sur­round­ed tow­ers, which were “more like pan­ic rooms” than actu­al liv­ing spaces. Ref­er­ences to these promi­nent struc­tures appear in sub­se­quent works of art and lit­er­a­ture: Dante, for instance, wrote of a lean­ing “tow­er called Garisen­da.”

The etch­ing that set Boodt on this jour­ney to Bologna in the first place turns out to be the rel­a­tive­ly recent work of an Ital­ian artist called Toni Pec­o­raro, who height­ened — in every sense — images of a 1917 mod­el of the city by the shoe­mak­er and “strange self-taught artist-sci­en­tist” Ange­lo Finel­li. Finel­li, in turn, drew his inspi­ra­tion from a study by the nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry archae­ol­o­gist Gio­van­ni Goz­za­di­ni, him­self a scion of one of those very fam­i­lies who com­pet­ed to have the tallest tow­er, then got bored and pur­sued oth­er sta­tus sym­bols instead. Per­haps Bologna is no longer the cen­ter of aris­to­crat­ic and mer­can­tile intrigue it used to be, judg­ing by the sparse­ness of its cur­rent sky­line, but then, there’s some­thing to be said for not need­ing a for­ti­fied tow­er in which to hide at a momen­t’s notice.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Europe Has So Few Sky­scrap­ers

Why the Lean­ing Tow­er of Pisa Still Hasn’t Fall­en Over, Even After 650 Years

Venice Explained: Its Archi­tec­ture, Its Streets, Its Canals, and How Best to Expe­ri­ence Them All

A Guid­ed Tour of the Largest Hand­made Mod­el of Impe­r­i­al Rome: Dis­cov­er the 20x20 Meter Mod­el Cre­at­ed Dur­ing the 1930s

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

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