Last year we told you about the plan to install a retractable floor in the Colos­se­um, thus restor­ing a fea­ture it boast­ed in its ancient glo­ry days. Though the state pledged €10 mil­lion, the bud­get of an ambi­tious ren­o­va­tion will sure­ly come to many times that — but still, we may imag­ine, only a frac­tion of the mon­ey it took to build the Colos­se­um in the first place. In fact we have to imag­ine it, since we have no records of what that icon of Rome actu­al­ly cost. In the video above, his­to­ry Youtu­ber Gar­rett Ryan, cre­ator of the chan­nel Told in Stone, does so by not just mar­shal­ing all his knowl­edge of the ancient world but also crowd­sourc­ing oth­ers’ knowl­edge of mod­ern con­struc­tion tech­niques and expens­es.

First, Ryan must reck­on the cost of the Colos­se­um in ses­ter­tii, the “big brass coins” com­mon in Rome of the first cen­tu­ry AD. “At the time the Colos­se­um was built,” he says, “one ses­ter­tius could buy two loaves of bread, four cups of cheap wine, or a sin­gle cup of good wine.”

The aver­age unskilled labor­er could expect to earn around four ses­ter­tii per day, and this project need­ed thou­sands of such labor­ers to exca­vate its foun­da­tion trench alone. Then came the lay­ing of the foun­da­tion itself, fol­lowed by the build­ing of the super­struc­ture, which remains for­mi­da­ble even in the ruined state we know today. Its mate­ri­als includ­ed 100,000 cubic meters of traver­tine — “rough­ly one-fifti­eth, inci­den­tal­ly, of all traver­tine ever quar­ried by the Romans.”

A good deal of traver­tine also went into the Get­ty Cen­ter, per­haps the clos­est thing to a Colos­se­um-scale con­struc­tion project in mod­ern-day Amer­i­ca. The Get­ty’s total cost came to $733 mil­lion, a price tag befit­ting the wealth syn­ony­mous with its name. But it still came cheap­er than the Colos­se­um by Ryan’s esti­mate, or at least by most of the esti­mates at which he arrives. Con­sult­ing with sev­er­al of his view­ers expe­ri­enced in archi­tec­ture and con­struc­tion, he cal­cu­lates that build­ing an exact repli­ca of the Colos­se­um in today’s Unit­ed States — tak­ing into account the much greater effi­cien­cy of cur­rent tools, as well as the much greater cost of labor — rough­ly equiv­a­lent to $150,000,000 to more than $1 bil­lion. That amount of mon­ey obvi­ous­ly exists in our world; whether we pos­sess the nec­es­sary ambi­tion is less clear. Then again, ancient Rome did­n’t have Lego.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Build­ing The Colos­se­um: The Icon of Rome

When the Colos­se­um in Rome Became the Home of Hun­dreds of Exot­ic Plant Species

Rome’s Colos­se­um Will Get a New Retractable Floor by 2023 — Just as It Had in Ancient Times

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

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

The Roman Colos­se­um Has a Twin in Tunisia: Dis­cov­er the Amphithe­ater of El Jem, One of the Best-Pre­served Roman Ruins in the World

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The New York Pub­lic Library opened in 1911, an age of mag­nif­i­cence in Amer­i­can city-build­ing. Eigh­teen years before that, writes archi­tect-his­to­ri­an Witold Rybczyn­s­ki, “Chicago’s Columbian Expo­si­tion pro­vid­ed a real and well-pub­li­cized demon­stra­tion of how the unruly Amer­i­can down­town could be tamed though a part­ner­ship of clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture, urban land­scap­ing, and hero­ic pub­lic art.” Mod­eled after Europe’s urban civ­i­liza­tion, the “White City” built on the ground of the Columbian Expo­si­tion inspired a gen­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can archi­tects and plan­ners includ­ing John Nolen, Fred­er­ick Law Olm­st­ed, Jr., and John Car­rère, co-design­er of the New York Pub­lic Library.

Car­rère appears in the Archi­tec­tur­al Digest tour video of the NYPL build­ing above — or at least his bust does, promi­nent­ly placed as it is on the land­ing of one of the grand stair­cas­es lead­ing up from the main entrance. The stair­cas­es are mar­ble, as is much of else; when the NYPL opened after nine years of con­struc­tion, so the tour’s nar­ra­tion informs us, it did so as the largest mar­ble-clad struc­ture in the coun­try.

On the sound­track we have not just one guide, but three: NYPL vis­i­tor vol­un­teer pro­gram man­ag­er Kei­th Glut­ting, design his­to­ri­an Judith Gura, and archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Paul Ranoga­jec. Togeth­er they tell the sto­ry of this ven­er­a­ble Amer­i­can build­ing, and also point out the “hid­den details” that a vis­i­tor might not oth­er­wise notice.

Take the ter­race on which the whole build­ing stands, a fea­ture of the Euro­pean vil­la and palace tra­di­tion. Or the murals depict­ing the his­to­ry of the writ­ten word from Moses’ stone tablets on down. Or the pneu­mat­ic tubes, arti­facts of the ana­log infor­ma­tion-tech­nol­o­gy sys­tem in use before the NYPL com­put­er­ized in the nine­teen-sev­en­ties. Or the ren­der­ing of the world in the library’s for­mi­da­ble map room that mis­tak­en­ly depicts Cal­i­for­nia as an island (not that every New York­er would dis­agree). The video also includes oth­er, even less­er-seen won­ders both old and new, from a 1455 Guten­berg Bible — the first in the New World — to the auto­mat­ed trol­ley sys­tem that brings books out of the stacks. But it is the build­ing itself that inspires won­der, its extrav­a­gant solid­i­ty and detail that hark back to a time of con­sen­sus, how­ev­er brief, that noth­ing was too good for ordi­nary peo­ple.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Announces the Top 10 Checked-Out Books of All Time

Watch 52,000 Books Get­ting Reshelved at The New York Pub­lic Library in a Short, Time­lapse Film

The New York Pub­lic Library Pro­vides Free Online Access to Banned Books: Catch­er in the Rye, Stamped & More

The New York Pub­lic Library Unveils a Cut­ting-Edge Train That Deliv­ers Books

The “Weird Objects” in the New York Pub­lic Library’s Col­lec­tions: Vir­ginia Woolf’s Cane, Charles Dick­ens’ Let­ter Open­er, Walt Whitman’s Hair & More

The New York Pub­lic Library Cre­ates a List of 125 Books That They Love

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

When I lived in Los Ange­les, I enjoyed no break­fast spot more than Pan­n’s. The place had it all: not just sig­na­ture plates rang­ing from bis­cuits and gravy to chick­en and waf­fles, but trop­i­cal land­scap­ing, stone walls, a slant­ed roof, ban­quettes in bur­gundy and counter seats in cream, and as the pièce de résis­tance, a neon sign that lit up one let­ter at a time. Built in 1958, Pan­n’s stands today as quite pos­si­bly the most immac­u­late sur­viv­ing exam­ple of Goo­gie, a mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry aes­thet­ic that takes its name from anoth­er Los Ange­les cof­fee shop opened near­ly a decade ear­li­er. Though designed by no less seri­ous a mod­ern archi­tect than Frank Lloyd Wright pro­tégé John Laut­ner, Goo­gie’s gave rise to per­haps the least seri­ous of all archi­tec­tur­al move­ments.

“It’s a style built on exag­ger­a­tion; on dra­mat­ic angles; on plas­tic and steel and neon and wide-eyed tech­no­log­i­cal opti­mism,” writes Matt Novak at Smith­son­ian mag­a­zine. “It draws inspi­ra­tion from Space Age ideals and rock­et­ship dreams. We find Goo­gie at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the Space Nee­dle in Seat­tle, the mid-cen­tu­ry design of Disneyland’s Tomor­row­land, in Arthur Rade­baugh‘s post­war illus­tra­tions, and in count­less cof­fee shops and motels across the U.S.”

But the acknowl­edged cra­dle of Goo­gie is Los Ange­les, whose explo­sive devel­op­ment along­side that of mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can “car cul­ture” encour­aged the ultra-com­mer­cial archi­tec­tur­al exper­i­men­ta­tion whose first pri­or­i­ty was to catch the eye of the motorist — and ide­al­ly, the hun­gry motorist.

You can hear the his­to­ry of Goo­gie told in the Ched­dar Explain video “How Los Ange­les Got Its Icon­ic Archi­tec­ture Style,” which adapts Novak’s Smith­son­ian piece. In “Goo­gie Archi­tec­ture: From Din­ers to Donuts,” pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ahok Sin­ha goes into more detail about how the style turned “archi­tec­ture into a form of adver­tis­ing.” Like all the most effec­tive adver­tis­ing, Goo­gie drew from the zeit­geist, incor­po­rat­ing the strik­ing shapes and advanced mate­ri­als con­nect­ed in the pub­lic mind with notions of speed and tech­nol­o­gy embod­ied not just by auto­mo­biles but even more so by rock­ets. For Goo­gie was the archi­tec­ture of the Space Race: it’s no acci­dent that the cre­ators of The Jet­sons, which aired in 1962 and 1963, ren­dered all the show’s set­tings in the same style.

It could fair­ly be said that no one archi­tect invent­ed Goo­gie, that it emerged almost spon­ta­neous­ly as a prod­uct of Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture. But “for some rea­son, we got stuck with the name,” says archi­tect Vic­tor Newlove, of Armet Davis Newlove and Asso­ciates, in the inter­view clip above. For good rea­son, per­haps: to that fir­m’s cred­it are sev­er­al loca­tions of the din­er chains Bob’s Big Boy (where for years David Lynch’s took his dai­ly milk­shake) and Norms, both of which are still in busi­ness in Los Ange­les today. Its archi­tects Eldon Davis and Helen Liu Fong also designed Pan­n’s, which for many Goo­gie enthu­si­asts remains an unsur­pass­able achieve­ment — and one whose com­pe­ti­tion, since the moon land­ing and the end it put to not just the Space Race but the sen­si­bil­i­ty it inspired, has been dwin­dling one demo­li­tion at a time.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

1,300 Pho­tos of Famous Mod­ern Amer­i­can Homes Now Online, Cour­tesy of USC

How David Lynch Got Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion? By Drink­ing a Milk­shake at Bob’s Big Boy, Every Sin­gle Day, for Sev­en Straight Years

How Insu­lat­ed Glass Changed Archi­tec­ture: An Intro­duc­tion to the Tech­no­log­i­cal Break­through That Changed How We Live and How Our Build­ings Work

That Far Cor­ner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Ange­les – A Free Online Doc­u­men­tary

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

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.