When we think of mod­ern archi­tec­ture, we often think first of what’s called the Inter­na­tion­al Style, whose min­i­mal­ist, rec­ti­lin­ear, dec­o­ra­tion-free forms were cham­pi­oned by the likes of Wal­ter Gropius, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Cor­busier. Though they did build projects all over the world, that isn’t exact­ly the rea­son for the name. In fact, the Inter­na­tion­al Style rep­re­sents an attempt to devel­op a cul­tur­al­ly neu­tral aes­thet­ic for all built envi­ron­ments, deploy­able equal­ly in Europe, Asia, the Amer­i­c­as, and every­where else besides. That pre­tense to uni­ver­sal­i­ty may count as the most utopi­an aspect of an avowed­ly utopi­an move­ment — and the one whose imprac­ti­cal­i­ty came soon­est to light.

Before he became Brazil’s most famous archi­tect, Oscar Niemey­er sub­scribed to the prin­ci­ples of the Inter­na­tion­al Style. But then, as an acolyte of Le Cor­busier, he could hard­ly have done oth­er­wise. When the great man came to Rio de Janeiro in 1936 to design the new Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion and Health, Niemey­er was hired to work on the project.

The expe­ri­ence seems to have done its part to con­vince him that the Inter­na­tion­al Style was­n’t as inter­na­tion­al as all that, and fur­ther­more, that its rigid dic­tates would have to be bent to suit his home­land. This bend­ing would, in a sense, be lit­er­al: like Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid after him, Niemey­er devot­ed his archi­tec­ture to the pur­suit of the curve, inspired by exam­ples seen in every­thing from the moun­tains of Brazil’s land­scape to the bod­ies of its women.

In 1956, the new­ly elect­ed pres­i­dent Jusceli­no Kubitschek imme­di­ate­ly real­ized the plan, writ­ten into the coun­try’s con­sti­tu­tion long before, of build­ing a new cen­tral city to relieve Rio of its sta­tus as the cap­i­tal. Chris­tened Brasília, it was to be con­struct­ed on a vast, emp­ty plateau entire­ly along ratio­nal, mod­ernist guide­lines, with defined dis­tricts orga­nized along a cru­ci­form city plan often likened to a bird or an air­plane and mon­u­men­tal struc­tures meant to project a for­ward-look­ing image. Niemey­er was select­ed to design those struc­tures, which imme­di­ate­ly became ele­ments of the city’s visu­al sig­na­ture upon its inau­gu­ra­tion in 1960: ever since, sel­dom has a pho­to­graph failed to include the twin tow­ers and domes of his Nation­al Con­gress or the Space-Age crown of thorns atop his Cathe­dral of Brasília.

The both admin­is­tra­tive and oth­er­world­ly form of cen­tral Brasília remains allur­ing, though the city itself began draw­ing crit­i­cism even before its com­ple­tion. “This is what you get when per­fect­ly decent, intel­li­gent and tal­ent­ed men start think­ing in terms of space, rather than place, and about sin­gle rather than mul­ti­ple mean­ings,” declared a frown­ing Robert Hugh­es in his 1980 TV series The Shock of the New. “It’s what you get when you design for polit­i­cal aspi­ra­tions and not real human needs. You get miles of jer­ry-built pla­ton­ic nowhere infest­ed with Volk­swa­gens.” Indeed, the dom­i­na­tion of car infra­struc­ture and strict sep­a­ra­tion of func­tions hard­ly proved con­ducive to the spon­ta­neous, con­vivial aspects of Brazil­ian life. But res­i­dents and vis­i­tors alike tend to report that Brasíli­a’s urban design has been improved as its pop­u­la­tion has grown, and mas­sive­ly, with com­men­su­rate improve­ments to its qual­i­ty of life over the decades. It may not inspire many bossa nova songs, but the cap­i­tal nev­er­the­less reflects a gen­uine facet of what Brazil is — and what it once dreamed of becom­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Designs the Ide­al City: See 3D Mod­els of His Rad­i­cal Design

Why Dutch & Japan­ese Cities Are Insane­ly Well Designed (and Amer­i­can Cities Are Ter­ri­bly Designed)

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

The World Accord­ing to Le Cor­busier: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Most Mod­ern of All Archi­tects

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Brazil’s Nation­al Muse­um & Its Arti­facts: Google Dig­i­tized the Museum’s Col­lec­tion Before the Fate­ful Fire

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Very few of us have ever set foot near a gen­uine medieval cas­tle, espe­cial­ly if we don’t hap­pen to live in Europe. Yet prac­ti­cal­ly all of us still, here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, refer with some fre­quen­cy to their com­po­nents in our every­day speech. When we invoke moats, draw­bridges, dun­geons, and even cat­a­pults, we almost always do so metaphor­i­cal­ly — assum­ing we’re not active mem­bers of a his­tor­i­cal re-cre­ation soci­ety — yet we also have no prob­lem see­ing them before our mind’s eye with what feels like per­fect clar­i­ty. The dif­fi­cul­ty comes if we attempt to inte­grate all of those images, absorbed hap­haz­ard­ly from folk tales and pop­u­lar cul­ture, into a func­tion­ing whole.

The fact of the mat­ter is that peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages real­ly did live and work in cas­tles, and occa­sion­al­ly had to defend them, or indeed attack them. Using a 3D-ren­dered repli­ca con­struct­ed to reflect how those struc­tures were built in the frag­ment­ed Europe of the eleventh through four­teenth cen­turies after the fall of the Car­olin­gian Empire, the Decon­struct­ed video above explains every­thing about how they worked in the span of about twen­ty min­utes.

This tour begins with the bar­bi­can: not the cel­e­brat­ed Bru­tal­ist com­plex in Lon­don, but the exte­ri­or for­ti­fied pas­sage “designed to expose attack­ers to defen­sive fire before they even reach the main gate.” And it only gets hard­er for would-be cas­tle cap­tors from there.

Para­pets with cutouts through which archers could fire their arrows, the moat that made under­min­ing (a term com­mon enough in mod­ern lan­guage that few now rec­og­nize its ori­gins) next to impos­si­ble, the draw­bridge that could be pulled up, the walls slant­ed to repel bat­ter­ing rams, the spiked portcullis­es that could be slammed down: these are just a few of the myr­i­ad defens­es that made invaders’ lives dif­fi­cult — and, in many cas­es, short, espe­cial­ly when “mur­der holes” were involved. (Now there’s a term just wait­ing for inclu­sion in our lex­i­con.) The exam­ple con­struct­ed here rep­re­sents the zenith of cas­tle design, the cul­mi­na­tion of an evo­lu­tion­ary process that began in the tenth cen­tu­ry with a struc­ture called the motte and bai­ley: a term that, if you don’t already know it from oth­er con­texts, you prob­a­bly just don’t do enough ver­bal bat­tle on the inter­net.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How To Build a 13th-Cen­tu­ry Cas­tle, Using Only Authen­tic Medieval Tools & Tech­niques

Behold a 21st-Cen­tu­ry Medieval Cas­tle Being Built with Only Tools & Mate­ri­als from the Mid­dle Ages

The Tech­nol­o­gy That Brought Down Medieval Cas­tles and Changed the Mid­dle Ages

How Medieval Cathe­drals Were Built With­out Sci­ence, or Even Math­e­mat­ics

The Roman Colos­se­um Decon­struct­ed: 3D Ani­ma­tion Reveals the Hid­den Tech­nol­o­gy That Pow­ered Rome’s Great Are­na

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The arti­fi­cial lan­guage of Esperan­to was con­ceived with high ideals in mind. In the eigh­teen-eight­ies, its cre­ator L. L. Zamen­hof envi­sioned it as the uni­ver­sal sec­ond lan­guage of human­i­ty, and if it has­n’t achieved that sta­tus by now, it at least remains the world’s most wide­ly spo­ken con­struct­ed aux­il­iary lan­guage. One fac­tor com­pli­cat­ing its spread is that no lan­guage, even one guid­ed by inter­na­tion­al­ism, can remain the same for long enough in two dif­fer­ent cul­tures. As in spo­ken and writ­ten lan­guages, so in the con­crete one of archi­tec­ture — and in the case of the style known as Bru­tal­ism, that would be lit­er­al con­crete. Meant to make human­i­ty whole again after the Sec­ond World War, its build­ings end­ed up being rather more par­tic­u­lar, and less utopi­an, than their archi­tects intend­ed.

Exam­ples aplen­ty appear in the new video above from Built Nar­ra­tive, which offers what amounts to a post­card tour of Bru­tal­ist (and Bru­tal­ism-adja­cent) build­ings from around the world. Named for its main mate­r­i­al béton brut, or raw con­crete, the style came into its own dur­ing the rebuild­ing of war-ruined sec­tions of British and con­ti­nen­tal Euro­pean cities — and, over in the U.S., the rapid pro­lif­er­a­tion and expan­sion of col­lege cam­pus­es — which had to be done quick­ly and under less-than-extrav­a­gant bud­gets.

Libraries, research facil­i­ties, city halls, admin­is­tra­tive build­ings, cour­t­hous­es, hous­ing projects: these are the sorts of struc­tures that most often took Bru­tal­ist form in the nine­teen-fifties, six­ties, and sev­en­ties, result­ing in the insti­tu­tion­al, bureau­crat­ic, and in some places total­i­tar­i­an asso­ci­a­tions it still has today.

Some pub­licly loathed Bru­tal­ist build­ings, like the Tri­corn Cen­tre in Portsmouth and the Third Church of Christ, Sci­en­tist in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. have been torn down, often after decades of neg­li­gent main­te­nance. Oth­ers, like the Bar­bi­can Estate in Lon­don or Habi­tat 67 in Mon­tre­al, are now beloved sites of pil­grim­age. Wide­ly acknowl­edged mas­ters of Bru­tal­ism include Le Cor­busier, who pio­neered it with build­ings like the Unité d’Habi­ta­tion in Mar­seille (not Berlin, con­tra the cap­tion in the video) and Ken­zo Tange (pro­nounced “tawn-gay,” not “tang” as the nar­ra­tor says it), whose work steered the Japan­ese ver­sion of the move­ment in its own sub­tle, some­times play­ful direc­tions. Now, thanks in part to the rapid dif­fu­sion of archi­tec­tur­al pho­tog­ra­phy made pos­si­ble by social media, a new enthu­si­ast of Bru­tal­ism seems to be born every minute. Even if they don’t believe that archi­tec­ture can bring a new world into being, they still feel the pull of a future that nev­er came — or, at any rate, has­n’t come yet.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About the Beau­ty of Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­ture: An Intro­duc­tion in Six Videos

Why Peo­ple Hate Bru­tal­ist Build­ings on Amer­i­can Col­lege Cam­pus­es

Why Do Peo­ple Hate Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture?: A Video Essay

Good­bye to the Nak­a­gin Cap­sule Tow­er, Tokyo’s Strangest and Most Utopi­an Apart­ment Build­ing

The World Accord­ing to Le Cor­busier: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Most Mod­ern of All Archi­tects

An Espres­so Mak­er Made in Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Style: Raw Con­crete on the Out­side, High-End Parts on the Inside

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Sci­ence and engi­neer­ing may be con­flat­ed to some degree in the pub­lic mind, but any­one who’s spent much time in an aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ment belong­ing to one or the oth­er of those branch­es of endeav­or knows how insis­tent­ly dis­tinc­tions can be drawn between them. Bill Ham­mack, a pro­fes­sor of engi­neer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois Urbana-Cham­paign who’s been there since he was a mas­ter’s stu­dent in 1986, sure­ly has his own thoughts on the sub­ject. The video above from his pop­u­lar YouTube chan­nel Engi­neer­guy explains how cathe­drals were designed in the Mid­dle Ages, using the exam­ple of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Specif­i­cal­ly, it gets into how such a build­ing’s arch­es and sup­port­ing walls could have been engi­neered with­out the aid of sci­ence at all, or even the use of math­e­mat­ics.

Com­pared to today, the scope of knowl­edge human­i­ty com­mand­ed back in medieval times may have been impos­si­bly nar­row — to say noth­ing of the knowl­edge pos­sessed by any giv­en human, espe­cial­ly out­side the lit­er­ate elite. Yet what was then known proved more than suf­fi­cient to build struc­tures that still stand, and indeed impress, many cen­turies (and in some cas­es, more than a mil­len­ni­um) lat­er.

Ham­mack explains that, in the place of mak­ing cal­cu­la­tions, their builders would per­form actions. For instance, a medieval mason would have made a life-size chalk draw­ing of the arch, laid a rope along its form, and cut the rope’s length to match that of the arch. He could then use the rope to deter­mine just how thick the wall would need to be, between a fourth and a fifth of the arch’s span, with­out a num­ber ever being involved.

Ham­mack notes that the Romans, too, under­stood this nec­es­sary pro­por­tion for arch con­struc­tion. “The pro­por­tion­al rule does­n’t come from some sci­en­tif­ic analy­sis of stone and its prop­er­ties,” he says. “It comes from cen­turies of expe­ri­ence, from tri­al and error.” Such heuris­tics, or rules of thumb, con­sti­tute “an impre­cise method used as a short­cut to find a solu­tion to a prob­lem, often by nar­row­ing the range of pos­si­ble solu­tions.” They’re also employed in the engi­neer­ing method to “cause the best change in a poor­ly under­stood sit­u­a­tion using avail­able resources.” Its thor­ough­go­ing prac­ti­cal­i­ty would seem to have lit­tle to do with the dif­fer­ent sort of rig­ors that apply in sci­ence, where estab­lish­ing truth, or at least the absence of false­ness, is all. Belief in the engi­neer­ing approach to prob­lems like this does­n’t require faith in the reli­gious sense, but if you like, you can find proof of its effec­tive­ness in hous­es of wor­ship from Sainte-Chapelle to the Pan­theon to Hagia Sophia — or at least in their arch­es.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Göbek­li Tepe: The 12,000-Year-Old Ruins That Rewrite the Sto­ry of Civ­i­liza­tion

The Cre­ation & Restora­tion of Notre-Dame Cathe­dral, Ani­mat­ed

An Ani­mat­ed Video Shows the Build­ing of a Medieval Bridge: 45 Years of Con­struc­tion in 3 Min­utes

Behold a 21st-Cen­tu­ry Medieval Cas­tle Being Built with Only Tools & Mate­ri­als from the Mid­dle Ages

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

The Longest Con­struc­tion Projects in His­to­ry: Why Sagra­da Família, the Milan Duo­mo, Greek Tem­ples & Oth­er Famous Struc­tures Took Gen­er­a­tions to Com­plete

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

We’ve all stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, though most of us have done so only in our minds, through such cul­tur­al arti­facts as Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” Bob Dylan’s “Sara,” Nico’s “Chelsea Girls,” Andy Warhol’s epony­mous film that includes the Nico song, or Pat­ti Smith’s Just Kids, which tells of the time she spent there with Robert Map­plethor­pe. Enthu­si­asts of the work of every­one from Janis Joplin to Arthur C. Clarke to Miloš For­man to Dylan Thomas to Mark Twain may not know that they, too, there­by enjoy an indi­rect con­nec­tion to that New York insti­tu­tion, which has stood on West 23rd Street since its con­struc­tion in 1884.

At that time, it also stood quite tall, loom­ing over every oth­er apart­ment build­ing in the city, and indeed over most of the rest of Man­hat­tan. Nowa­days, how­ev­er, the cul­tur­al pro­file of the Chelsea Hotel (offi­cial­ly, and less cool­ly, the Hotel Chelsea) is high­er than its phys­i­cal one ever was.

Its rep­u­ta­tion as a refuge for artists dates to the man­age­ment of Stan­ley Bard, who inher­it­ed the busi­ness from his father in 1964. Already, a degree of dilap­i­da­tion in the build­ing itself, as well as the sur­round­ing neigh­bor­hood, kept rents low enough to attract impe­cu­nious cre­ative types. Bard dis­played enough gen­eros­i­ty to artists that, before long, Andy Warhol’s fac­to­ry had more or less moved in.

The Chelsea’s lat­est trans­for­ma­tion began in the mid-two-thou­sands with a series of takeovers and ren­o­va­tions not nec­es­sar­i­ly wel­comed by the exist­ing long-term res­i­dents, who appre­ci­at­ed the hotel pre­cise­ly for its seem­ing imper­vi­ous­ness to gen­tri­fi­ca­tion. In the new Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, cur­rent own­er Sean MacPher­son gives a tour of the lux­u­ri­ous Chelsea of the twen­ty-twen­ties, all of whose spaces have been metic­u­lous­ly curat­ed to evoke its sto­ried past. In its bar (with cig­a­rette burns care­ful­ly pre­served) guests can order a cock­tail called the Two Dylans, named in homage to both Bob and Thomas; in the base­ment, they can choose from the largest selec­tion of Japan­ese whiskey at a new restau­rant named after for­mer res­i­dent Teruko Yokoi. The expe­ri­ence of a nine­teen-six­ties New York bohemi­an is now avail­able to all of us — or at least those of us who can come up with $500 per night.

If you want to revis­it the hotel dur­ing its pre-restora­tion hey­day, you can watch the 1981 doc­u­men­tary below. It will let you get glimpses of Andy Warhol, William S. Bur­roughs, Nico, and more.

Relat­ed con­tent:

New York’s Famous Chelsea Hotel and Its Cre­ative Res­i­dents Revis­it­ed in a 1981 Doc­u­men­tary

Vin­tage Footage Shows a Young, Unknown Pat­ti Smith & Robert Map­plethor­pe Liv­ing at the Famed Chelsea Hotel (1970)

Nico Sings “Chelsea Girls” in the Famous Chelsea Hotel

Thanks­giv­ing Menu at the Plaza Hotel in New York City (1899)

Watch Iggy Pop Per­form Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gen­tle Into That Good Night”

Archi­tect Breaks Down Five of the Most Icon­ic New York City Apart­ments

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Apart from a few bridges that still work, the infra­struc­tur­al achieve­ments of the Roman Empire exist, for us, most­ly as ruins. With a lit­tle imag­i­na­tion, those his­toric sites give us a clear enough sense of the empire’s sheer might, but if we want to go deep­er, we should then look into the numer­ous Roman con­struc­tions that haven’t sur­vived at all. In the video below from his chan­nel Told in Stone, ancient-his­to­ry YouTu­ber Gar­rett Ryan gives his per­son­al top sev­en “lost Roman won­ders,” begin­ning with Trajan’s Bridge, whose length of more than a kilo­me­ter across the Danube made it the longest bridge ever built at that time: a project of ambi­tions befit­ting a man that his­to­ry remem­bers as one of the “Five Good Emper­ors.”

No such sta­tus for Nero, though he did com­mis­sion the Subi­a­co Dams. Nec­es­sary to cre­ate a series of arti­fi­cial lakes beneath the infa­mous ruler’s vil­la, they were the high­est dams in exis­tence until the Mid­dle Ages. Hadri­an’s more pub­lic-mind­ed white-mar­ble tem­ple at Cyz­i­cus in mod­ern-day Turkey was known as unusu­al­ly splen­did even by the stan­dards of that genre of build­ing; now only its foun­da­tions remain, with archae­o­log­i­cal digs turn­ing up the occa­sion­al frag­ment.

In the for­mer Con­stan­tino­ple, the Church of the Holy Apos­tles is remem­bered as the sec­ond-most famous van­ished ear­ly Chris­t­ian church, after only the old St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca in Rome. Hagia Sophia may still be around, but the Col­umn of Jus­tin­ian that once stood between it and the Great Palace was melt­ed down for scrap long ago.

We only know of these lost struc­tures because we have his­tor­i­cal attes­ta­tions of their exis­tence, most vivid­ly in paint­ings: take the Pyra­mid of Romu­lus, a strik­ing tomb that appears near the Vat­i­can in The Vision of the Cross, which Raphael’s assis­tants pro­duced after his death. Oth­ers, like the Colos­sus of Nero from which the Colos­se­um takes its name, are rep­re­sent­ed on coins. In the video at the top, Ryan cov­ers three more “for­got­ten Roman megapro­jects”: Claudius’ tun­nel of record-mak­ing length through the moun­tain between the Riv­er Liris and the Fucine Lake, Tra­jan’s mil­i­tary high­way through the “Iron Gates” of the Danube, and Octa­vian’s secret har­bor at Lake Aver­nus. In our time, of course, there are no more emper­ors, Roman or oth­er­wise, and we’re sure­ly bet­ter off for it. But we can still admire — to use a twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry con­cept — the state capac­i­ty they com­mand­ed.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Advanced Tech­nol­o­gy of Ancient Rome: Auto­mat­ic Doors, Water Clocks, Vend­ing Machines & More

How the Ancient Romans Built Their Roads, the Life­lines of Their Vast Empire

The Genius Engi­neer­ing of Roman Aque­ducts

The Roman Colos­se­um Decon­struct­ed: 3D Ani­ma­tion Reveals the Hid­den Tech­nol­o­gy That Pow­ered Rome’s Great Are­na

The Amaz­ing Engi­neer­ing of Roman Baths

Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still With­stand the Weight of Mod­ern Cars & Trucks

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.