Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling­wa­ter is a “house muse­um,” first designed as a res­i­dence, and now open to the pub­lic. In fact, as the insti­tu­tion’s direc­tor Justin Gun­ther explains in the Open Space video above, it’s “the first house of the mod­ern move­ment to open as a pub­lic site,” hav­ing begun offer­ing tours in 1964. The open­ness of Falling­wa­ter owes a great deal to the efforts of Edgar Kauf­mann Jr., the son of the Pitts­burgh depart­ment-store mag­nate who com­mis­sioned the house in the first place. The fam­i­ly hap­pened to own a piece of land in south­ern Penn­syl­va­nia that was once an employ­ee retreat, and Kauf­mann fils, high on a read­ing of Wright’s recent­ly pub­lished auto­bi­og­ra­phy, knew just who should design a week­end home for the site.

Not that it was a sim­ple process, even for the son of a tycoon. But luck­i­ly, “Frank Lloyd Wright had just estab­lished an appren­tice­ship pro­gram at Tal­iesin.” The young Kauf­mann applied, “and of course, Frank Lloyd Wright, know­ing who the Kauf­manns were, could sniff out a good poten­tial client.”

Soon accept­ed, Kauf­mann spent about six months study­ing under Wright, dur­ing which time his vis­it­ing par­ents also became “enam­ored with Wright’s ideas of organ­ic archi­tec­ture.” No oth­er liv­ing archi­tect, per­haps, could deliv­er on the promise of a house ful­ly inspired by its nat­ur­al con­text, which in this case includ­ed a water­fall. Still, one won­ders if even his most eager clients under­stood just what they were get­ting into.

“The Kauf­manns thought that they were going to have a house that was look­ing at the falls, and then, of course, Wright had dif­fer­ent ideas. He thought that if you put the most dra­mat­ic part of a land­scape in your view con­stant­ly, it would become some­thing that’s tire­some. You would just become used to it.” But “if you were forced out into the land­scape to see it, then it would always have an impact.” Built atop the water­fall instead, by local labor­ers and using stone quar­ried right there at the site, the house makes a unique impres­sion, and one that makes per­fect aes­thet­ic sense: as Gun­ther puts it, “the water­fall can’t live with­out the house, and the house can’t live with­out the water­fall.” Nor, these near­ly nine decades after the main build­ing’s com­ple­tion, is the course of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture quite imag­in­able with­out Falling­wa­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Intro­duc­tion

130+ Pho­tographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mas­ter­piece Falling­wa­ter

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

An Ani­mat­ed Tour of Falling­wa­ter, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Finest Cre­ations

Inside the Beau­ti­ful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)

A Beau­ti­ful Visu­al Tour of Tir­ran­na, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Remark­able, Final Cre­ations

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Most tourists in Rome put the Colos­se­um at the top of their to-see list. (My own sis­ter-in-law, soon to head out on her Ital­ian hon­ey­moon, plans to head to that sto­ried ruin more or less straight from the air­port.) Even those with no par­tic­u­lar inter­est in ancient Roman civ­i­liza­tion, step­ping into the space that was once the are­na — from the Latin hare­na, refer­ring to the sand laid down to absorb blood shed in com­bat — fills the imag­i­na­tion with images of glad­i­a­tors, lions, sen­a­tors glow­er­ing from their court­side seats, and the bay­ing mass­es behind them. But their visions may not include oth­er such true-to-his­to­ry details as trap doors, staged naval bat­tles, and a sub­ter­ranean sys­tem of tun­nels and ele­va­tors, all of which are explained in the new Decon­struct­ed video above.

Even casu­al Rome enthu­si­asts all know that com­peti­tors and oth­er per­form­ers, both human and ani­mal, made their offi­cial Colos­se­um entrances through the floor. (Announce­ments were made some years ago to the effect that the mech­a­nized floor that made such the­atrics pos­si­ble would be rebuilt by 2023 — a project that seems not to have made much progress as yet, though whether it will end up being put off as long as the Strait of Messi­na Bridge remains to be seen.)

But only the most obses­sive already have a clear under­stand­ing of exact­ly how it worked, which this video clear­ly explains in both words and 3D ren­der­ings, restor­ing ele­ments of not just the build­ing itself but also its imme­di­ate urban con­text that have long since been lost to time.

Take the velar­i­um, a retractable awning con­sist­ing of “long strips of fab­ric wound around drums, which were mount­ed on a wood­en frame and sup­port­ed by 240 masts fixed into sock­ets along the amphithe­ater’s upper cor­nice.” With each of its 240 strips oper­at­ed by a sep­a­rate winch, it required at least as many human oper­a­tors to deploy or retract at speed — a greater speed, per­haps, than the oper­a­tion of some of the retractable roofs incor­po­rat­ed into sports facil­i­ties today. Not “just a feat of engi­neer­ing, but also a pre­cur­sor for mod­ern sta­di­um design,” the velar­i­um addressed a prob­lem that will hard­ly escape the notice of mod­ern tourists today — espe­cial­ly those who vis­it the Colos­se­um in the mid­dle of a sum­mer day.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Build­ing the Colos­se­um: The Icon of Rome

What Hap­pened to the Miss­ing Half of the Roman Colos­se­um?

How Much Would It Cost to Build the Colos­se­um Today?

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

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

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

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

For all the means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and exchange we’ve estab­lished between the cul­tures of the world, no mat­ter how dis­tant they may be from one anoth­er, we still have no tru­ly uni­ver­sal sin­gle human lan­guage. The rea­son could date back to antiq­ui­ty, when we first attempt­ed a grand col­lec­tive project: that of build­ing a tow­er that would reach the heav­ens. Deter­mined to pun­ish our effron­tery, God not only destroyed the work in progress, but ren­dered our lan­guages mutu­al­ly unin­tel­li­gi­ble in order to hin­der any fur­ther attempts to do it again. Or at least that’s how one sto­ry goes.

You may not sub­scribe to a lit­er­al read­ing of the account of the Tow­er of Babel as it appears in the Bible’s Book of Gen­e­sis, but accord­ing to the Hochela­ga video above, the struc­ture does have a fair­ly plau­si­ble basis in his­to­ry.

It could be a leg­endary ver­sion of Ete­me­nan­ki, a Mesopotami­an zig­gu­rat built to hon­or the god Mar­duk at such a scale that it inspired tall tales, as it were, spread far and wide in the ancient world, such as the rumor that its con­struc­tion required mobi­liz­ing the man­pow­er of all human­i­ty. But it real­ly did exist, as evi­denced by its ruins dis­cov­ered at the site of the ancient city of Baby­lon — which, in Hebrew, was called Babel.

A cuneiform-cov­ered tablet con­ve­nient­ly found at the same loca­tion describes a con­struc­tion project of Ete­me­nanki’s size as using mate­ri­als like bitu­men and baked brick, which aligns with bib­li­cal details of the Tow­er of Babel, as do the Greek his­to­ri­an Herodotus’s ref­er­ences to its lay­out and struc­ture. Also rel­e­vant is the Baby­lo­ni­ans’ 587 BC inva­sion of Jerusalem, which brought cap­tives to the cap­i­tal. It’s hard­ly impos­si­ble that some of those dis­placed Jews would have the loom­ing Ete­me­nan­ki in mind when they went on to write the his­to­ries that would ulti­mate­ly find their way into the Hebrew Bible. They may have had no hope of return­ing to their home­land, but they must, at least, have felt rea­son­ably cer­tain that Mar­duk’s days were num­bered.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Map of All the Coun­tries Men­tioned in the Bible: What The Coun­tries Were Called Then, and Now

Lit­er­ary Crit­ic Northrop Frye Teach­es “The Bible and Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture”: All 25 Lec­tures Free Online

A Sur­vival Guide to the Bib­li­cal Apoc­a­lypse

Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Wit­ty, Eru­dite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

Did Psy­che­del­ic Mush­rooms Appear in Medieval Chris­t­ian Art?: A Video Essay

Vis­it the Online Library of Babel: New Web Site Turns Borges’ “Library of Babel” Into a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Cur­rent­ly, the tallest build­ings in New York City are One World Trade Cen­ter, Cen­tral Park Tow­er, and 111 West 57th Street. All of them were com­plet­ed in the twen­ty-twen­ties, and all of them have attract­ed com­ment, some­times admir­ing, some­times bewil­dered. But none of them, fair to say, yet exude the romance of the Wool­worth Build­ing, the Chrysler Build­ing, and the Empire State Build­ing, all of which opened before World War II, and each of which once had its day as the tallest build­ing in the world. Here to explain these endur­ing “big stars of the New York City sky­line” is archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Tony Robins, who in the half-hour video above tells the sto­ry of all their impor­tant details, inside and out.

In fact, this video comes as the pilot episode of “Obses­sion to Detail,” a new series from Dai­ly Mail Busi­ness YouTube chan­nel. The Mail may not come right to mind as a source of archi­tec­tur­al com­men­tary, but in this case, they’ve found the right man for the job.

He knows that the Wool­worth Build­ing’s lob­by con­tains gar­goyle-like car­i­ca­tures of its archi­tect and client; that the Chrysler Build­ing once had a pri­vate club on its 66th, 67th, and 68th floors whose bar had both a paint­ing of the New York sky­line and a view of the real thing; that the 86-sto­ry Empire State Build­ing is pro­mot­ed as hav­ing 102 sto­ries only by includ­ing its unused diri­gi­ble moor­ing mast and sub-base­ments; and that what we now call Art Deco was, in its day, referred to as “the ver­ti­cal style,” in ref­er­ence to the pro­por­tions its build­ings were rapid­ly gain­ing.

An expe­ri­enced New York tour guide, Robins would be remiss if he did­n’t tell you all these facts and many more besides. It’s pre­sum­ably also part of his job to frame the process­es that gave rise (or indeed, high rise) to these sky­scrap­ers as in keep­ing with the cease­less one-upman­ship and self-pro­mo­tion that is the spir­it of his city. A par­tic­u­lar­ly illus­tra­tive episode occurred when Minoru Yamasak­i’s orig­i­nal World Trade Cen­ter went up in the ear­ly sev­en­ties, which pro­voked a response from the Empire State Build­ing in the form of a rec­tan­gu­lar addi­tion on top that would pre­serve its sta­tus as the world’s tallest build­ing. Robins has been in the game long enough to have had the chance to ask the archi­tect who designed that pro­pos­al if he was seri­ous. “Of course not,” came the reply. “This was all for pub­lic rela­tions. This is New York. This is who we are. This is what we do.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Archi­tect Demys­ti­fies the Art Deco Design of the Icon­ic Chrysler Build­ing (1930)

The Sto­ry of the Flat­iron Build­ing, “New York’s Strangest Tow­er”

An Immer­sive, Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of New York City’s Icon­ic Grand Cen­tral Ter­mi­nal

Watch the Build­ing of the Empire State Build­ing in Col­or: The Cre­ation of the Icon­ic 1930s Sky­scraper From Start to Fin­ish

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

How the World Trade Cen­ter Was Rebuilt: A Visu­al Explo­ration of a 20-Year Project

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Set­ting aside just one day for the Lou­vre is a clas­sic first-time Paris vis­i­tor’s mis­take. The place is sim­ply too big to com­pre­hend on one vis­it, or indeed on ten vis­its. To grow so vast has tak­en eight cen­turies, a process explained in under three min­utes by the offi­cial video ani­mat­ed above. First con­struct­ed around the turn of the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry as a defen­sive fortress, it was con­vert­ed into a roy­al res­i­dence a cen­tu­ry and a half lat­er. It gained its first mod­ern wing in 1559, under Hen­ri II; lat­er, his wid­ow Cather­ine de’ Medici com­mis­sioned the Tui­leries palace and gar­dens, which Hen­ri IV had joined up to the Lou­vre with the Grande Galerie in 1610.

In the sev­en­teen-tens, Louis XVI com­plet­ed the Cour Car­rée, the Lou­vre’s main court­yard, before decamp­ing to Ver­sailles. It was only dur­ing the French Rev­o­lu­tion, toward the end of that cen­tu­ry, that the Nation­al Assem­bly declared it a muse­um.

The project of unit­ing it into an archi­tec­tur­al whole con­tin­ued under Napoleon I and III, the lat­ter of whom final­ly com­plet­ed it (and in the process dou­bled its size). The Tui­leries Palace was torched dur­ing the unpleas­ant­ness over the Paris Com­mune, but the rest of the Lou­vre sur­vived. Since then, its most notable alter­ation has been the addi­tion of I. M. Pei’s glass pyra­mid in 1989.

The pyra­mid may still have an air of con­tro­ver­sy these three and a half decades lat­er, but you can hard­ly deny that it at least improves upon the Cour Car­rée’s years as a park­ing lot. It stands, in any case, as just one of the count­less fea­tures that make the Lou­vre an archi­tec­tur­al palimpsest of French his­to­ry prac­ti­cal­ly as com­pelling as the col­lec­tion of art it con­tains. (Fran­coph­o­nes can learn much more about it from the longer-form doc­u­men­taries post­ed by Des Racines et des Ailes and Notre His­toire.) And how did I approach this most famous of all French insti­tu­tions on my own first trip to Paris, you ask? By not going at all. On my next trip to Paris, how­ev­er, I plan to go nowhere else.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Louvre’s Entire Col­lec­tion Goes Online: View and Down­load 480,00 Works of Art

A 3D Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Paris: Take a Visu­al Jour­ney from Ancient Times to 1900

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

Take Immer­sive Vir­tu­al Tours of the World’s Great Muse­ums: The Lou­vre, Her­mitage, Van Gogh Muse­um & Much More

Japan­ese Guid­ed Tours of the Lou­vre, Ver­sailles, the Marais & Oth­er Famous French Places (Eng­lish Sub­ti­tles Includ­ed)

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.