“If you want to under­stand ancient Rome, its archi­tec­ture, its his­to­ry, the sprawl of the Roman Empire, you’ve got to go Rome.” So says archae­ol­o­gist Dar­ius Arya in the video above, mak­ing a fair, if obvi­ous, point. “But you also have to go to the Vesu­vian cities”: that is, the set­tle­ments locat­ed near the vol­cano Mount Vesu­vius on the Gulf of Naples. “You have to go to Her­cu­la­neum. You must go to Pom­peii. Not just because they’re famous, but because of the lev­el of preser­va­tion.” This preser­va­tion was a side effect of the explo­sion of Vesu­vius in 79 AD, which destroyed all life in Her­cu­la­neum and Pom­peii, but also kept the basic struc­tures of both cities intact; vis­it­ing either one today allows us to “get immersed in the world of the Romans.”

It is in Pom­peii that the video’s cre­ator Manuel Bra­vo (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his expla­na­tions of the Great Pyra­mids of Giza and Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi’s dome in Flo­rence) immers­es not just him­self but also us in that world.

He does so with high-res­o­lu­tion trav­el footage, but also with his expla­na­tions of the city’s archi­tec­ture and urban plan­ning, break­ing down the details of every­thing from its grand Forum (“antic­i­pat­ing mod­ern prac­tice by almost 2,000 years” as a “pedes­tri­an-only precinct”) to its com­plex­es of baths, to its ther­mopo­lia (“essen­tial­ly ancient fast-food restau­rants”). Even more reveal­ing are its hum­bler fea­tures, such as the step­ping-stones across streets that allowed cit­i­zens to avoid “the rain­wa­ter, sewage, and ani­mal waste that would accu­mu­late there.”

“Almost every build­ing in Pom­peii has inte­ri­or wall paint­ings, from pri­vate res­i­dences to pub­lic spaces such as baths and mar­kets,” says Bra­vo, and these omnipresent works of art “offer valu­able insights into the every­day life and cul­tur­al val­ues of ancient Roman soci­ety.” (And indeed, they’re still offer­ing new ones: just last month, a redis­cov­ered Pom­pei­ian fres­co showed the world an ancient pre­cur­sor to piz­za.) They also evi­dence the sur­pris­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of trompe-l’œil, where artists cre­ate the illu­sion of walls con­struct­ed from sol­id mar­ble, or even lush out­door spaces. Even the already-grand Domus Romana, the form of hous­ing of choice for afflu­ent Pom­pei­ians, incor­po­rat­ed paint­ings to look grander still. Even once you make it, as the ancients clear­ly knew, you’ve still got to fake it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Pom­peii Rebuilt: A Tour of the Ancient City Before It Was Entombed by Mount Vesu­vius

A Drone’s Eye View of the Ruins of Pom­peii

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

Watch the Destruc­tion of Pom­peii by Mount Vesu­vius, Re-Cre­at­ed with Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion (79 AD)

The Last Morn­ing in Pom­peii & The Night Pom­peii Died: A New Video Series Explores the End of the Doomed Roman City

A New­ly Dis­cov­ered Fres­co in Pom­peii Reveals a Pre­cur­sor to Piz­za

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.

In Rome, one does­n’t have to look ter­ri­bly hard to find ancient build­ings. But even in the Eter­nal City, not all ancient build­ings have come down to us in equal­ly good shape, and prac­ti­cal­ly none of them have held up as well as the Pan­theon. Once a Roman tem­ple and now a Catholic church (as well as a for­mi­da­ble tourist attrac­tion), it gives its vis­i­tors the clear­est and most direct sense pos­si­ble of the majesty of antiq­ui­ty. But how has it man­aged to remain intact for nine­teen cen­turies and count­ing when so much else in ancient Rome’s built envi­ron­ment has been lost? Ancient-his­to­ry Youtu­ber Gar­rett Ryan explains that in the video above.

“Any answer has to begin with con­crete,” Ryan says, the Roman vari­ety of which “cured incred­i­bly hard, even under­wa­ter. Sea water, in fact, made it stronger.” Its strength “enabled the cre­ation of vaults and domes that rev­o­lu­tion­ized archi­tec­ture,” not least the still-sub­lime dome of the Pan­theon itself.

Anoth­er impor­tant fac­tor is the Roman bricks, “more like thick tiles than mod­ern rec­tan­gu­lar bricks,” used to con­struct the arch­es in its walls. These “helped to direct the gar­gan­tu­an weight of the rotun­da toward the mason­ry ‘piers’ between the recess­es. And since the arch­es, made almost entire­ly of brick, set much more quick­ly than the con­crete fill in which they were embed­ded, they stiff­ened the struc­ture as it rose.”

This has­n’t kept the Pan­theon’s floor from sink­ing, cracks from open­ing in its walls, but such com­par­a­tive­ly minor defects could hard­ly dis­tract from the spec­ta­cle of the dome (a feat not equaled until Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi came along about 1300 years lat­er). “The archi­tect of the Pan­theon man­aged hor­i­zon­tal thrust — that is, pre­vent­ed the dome from spread­ing or push­ing out the build­ing beneath it – by mak­ing the wall of the rotun­da extreme­ly thick and embed­ding the low­er third of the dome in their mass.” Even the ocu­lus at the very top strength­ens it, “both by obvi­at­ing the need for a struc­tural­ly dan­ger­ous crown and through its mason­ry rim, which func­tioned like the key­stone of an arch.” We may no longer pay trib­ute to the gods or emper­ors to whom it was first ded­i­cat­ed, but as an object of archi­tec­tur­al wor­ship, the Pan­theon will sure­ly out­last many gen­er­a­tions to come.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Beau­ty & Inge­nu­ity of the Pan­theon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Pre­served Mon­u­ment: An Intro­duc­tion

How to Make Roman Con­crete, One of Human Civilization’s Longest-Last­ing Build­ing Mate­ri­als

A Street Musi­cian Plays Pink Floyd’s “Time” in Front of the 1,900-Year-Old Pan­theon in Rome

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

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

Build­ing The Colos­se­um: The Icon of Rome

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.

In the New York of old, “one entered the city like a god. One scut­tles in now like a rat.” When he wrote those words, archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Vin­cent Scul­ly issued what has end­ed up as the defin­i­tive judg­ment of Penn­syl­va­nia Sta­tion. Or rather, of the Penn­syl­va­nia Sta­tions: the majes­tic orig­i­nal build­ing from 1910, as well as its util­i­tar­i­an replace­ment that has stood in Mid­town Man­hat­tan since 1968. But then, the word “stood” does­n’t quite apply to the lat­ter, since it resides entire­ly under­ground, below Madi­son Square Gar­den. Over the years, New York­ers have come more and more open­ly to resent the Penn Sta­tion they have and lament the Penn Sta­tion they lost, which archi­tect Michael Wyet­zn­er intro­duces to us in the Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above.

“A con­jec­tur­al recon­struc­tion of Impe­r­i­al Rome’s Baths of Cara­calla of 212–216 AD,” writes New York Review of Books archi­tec­ture crit­ic Mar­tin Filler, the orig­i­nal Penn Sta­tion con­sti­tut­ed “a har­mo­nious syn­the­sis of two diver­gent and sup­pos­ed­ly irrec­on­cil­able archi­tec­tur­al approach­es, the Clas­si­cal and the indus­tri­al.”

It was com­mis­sioned by the Penn­syl­va­nia Rail­road, which in the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry was “the country’s largest busi­ness enter­prise, with a bud­get sec­ond only to that of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment,” writes the New York­er’s William Finnegan, and which at that time had a for­mi­da­ble engi­neer­ing prob­lem to solve: “Its tracks end­ed, like those of every rail­road approach­ing New York from the west, in New Jer­sey, on the banks of the Hud­son Riv­er. In 1900, nine­ty mil­lion pas­sen­gers were oblig­ed to trans­fer to fer­ries to reach Man­hat­tan.”

To run the Penn­syl­va­nia Rail­road­’s tracks into the cen­ter of New York City required dig­ging a set of tun­nels under the Hud­son, where, says one his­to­ri­an on PBS’ Amer­i­can Expe­ri­ence doc­u­men­tary on the rise and fall of Penn Sta­tion, “nobody thought tun­nels could be built. It’s almost as though they were going to go to the moon.” The tech­no­log­i­cal achieve­ment was matched by the aes­thet­ic: “Its main wait­ing room, pan­eled in Ital­ian traver­tine, with flut­ed columns and cof­fered ceil­ings a hun­dred and fifty feet high, was the world’s largest room,” Finnegan writes. “The train shed was equal­ly grand, with arch­ing steel gird­ers, stag­gered mez­za­nines, and glass-block floors that let sun­light through to the tracks. ” Like oth­er major urban rail ter­mi­nals of its era, writes Tony Judt, Penn Sta­tion “spoke direct­ly and delib­er­ate­ly to the com­mer­cial ambi­tions and civic self-image of the mod­ern metrop­o­lis.”

By the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry, how­ev­er, trains were fac­ing aggres­sive com­pe­ti­tion from both the pri­vate car and the air­plane, which dis­placed their sta­tions from the cen­ter of mod­ern life. “Between 1955 and 1975,” Judt writes, “a mix of anti­his­tori­cist fash­ion and cor­po­rate self-inter­est saw the destruc­tion of a remark­able num­ber of ter­mi­nal sta­tions.” But prospects for rail of one kind or anoth­er in Amer­i­ca have looked up in recent years, and “we are no longer embar­rassed by the roco­co or neo-Goth­ic or Beaux-Arts excess­es of the great rail­way sta­tions of the indus­tri­al age and can see such edi­fices instead as their design­ers and con­tem­po­raries saw them: as the cathe­drals of their age.” Hence, in New York, the preser­va­tion of Grand Cen­tral Sta­tion — as well as the bit­ter and pro­tract­ed strug­gle (cov­ered exten­sive­ly in Finnegan’s New York­er piece) over whether and how to turn the unloved Penn Sta­tion into a cathe­dral of our age.

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

An Archi­tect Breaks Down the Design of New York City Sub­way Sta­tions, from the Old­est to Newest

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

A Sub­way Ride Through New York City: Watch Vin­tage Footage from 1905

Famous Archi­tects Dress as Their Famous New York City Build­ings (1931)

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.

Few out­side New York know the Flat­iron Build­ing by name, but peo­ple every­where asso­ciate it with the city. That owes in part to its ten­den­cy to appear in the vin­tage imagery of New York that adorns the walls of cafés, hotel rooms, and den­tists’ offices across the world. And that, in turn, owes in part — in very large part — to the Flatiron’s unusu­al shape, the result of a design meant to max­i­mize the prof­it of a tri­an­gu­lar plot of land bound­ed by Fifth Avenue, Broad­way, and East 22nd Street. You can hear the sto­ry of the build­ing, “New York’s strangest tow­er,” in the new video from archi­tec­ture-and-engi­neer­ing Youtube chan­nel The B1M just above.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured The B1M here on Open Cul­ture for videos on sub­jects like Europe’s lack of sky­scrap­ers — a con­di­tion that cer­tain­ly does­n’t afflict Man­hat­tan, though at the time of the Flat­iron Build­ing’s con­struc­tion in the first years of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the sky­scraper itself was still a fair­ly nov­el con­cept.

Laws gov­ern­ing con­struc­tion changed to keep up with devel­op­ments in the tech­nolo­gies of con­struc­tion: “Fol­low­ing a recent change in the city’s fire codes,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor, “this became one of the ear­li­est build­ings in New York to shun load-bear­ing mason­ry and instead take advan­tage of steel for its struc­tur­al frame.”

The Flatiron’s archi­tects were Fred­er­ick P. Dinkel­berg and Daniel Burn­ham, the lat­ter of whom is now remem­bered as the orig­i­nal king of the Amer­i­can sky­scraper. In fact, the very term “sky­scraper” was coined in response to the Mon­tauk Block, a high-rise he designed in Chica­go. But while the Mon­tauk Block stood only between 1883 and 1902, the Flat­iron con­tin­ues to stand proud — if, at 22 sto­ries, no longer rel­a­tive­ly tall — on the three-cor­nered plot where it first arose 120 years ago.  Alas, it has also “sat emp­ty since 2019, when its last ten­ants, Macmil­lan Pub­lish­ers, moved out.” After that began a series of ren­o­va­tions, and after that began “mul­ti­ple dis­agree­ments among the build­ing’s cur­rent own­ers and future ten­ants,” which cul­mi­nat­ed in a court-ordered auc­tion of the build­ing won by a bid­der who sub­se­quent­ly van­ished. But how­ev­er deep the Flat­iron plunges into legal lim­bo, its sta­tus as a New York icon will sure­ly remain intact.

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

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

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

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Why Europe Has So Few Sky­scrap­ers

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.

Ask any­one who’s trav­eled to the Great Pyra­mids of Giza: no mat­ter how many times you’ve seen them in pho­tographs or on tele­vi­sion, you’re nev­er real­ly pre­pared to come face-to-face with them in real life. But you can get fair­ly close to at least the appear­ance of real life by see­ing the Pyra­mids in 4k res­o­lu­tion, as they’re pre­sent­ed in the video above from trav­el, archi­tec­ture, and his­to­ry Youtu­ber Manuel Bra­vo (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his expla­na­tion of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi’s dome atop the Flo­rence Cathe­dral). This isn’t just vaca­tion footage: Bra­vo tells the sto­ry of the Pyra­mids, puts them in con­text, and even incor­po­rates vir­tu­al re-cre­ations of what they would have looked like in their hey­day.

We know the Pyra­mids as icon­ic ruins, undoubt­ed­ly mighty but also seri­ous­ly dilap­i­dat­ed. When they were built in the 26th cen­tu­ry BC, they were cov­ered in white lime­stone exte­ri­or shells, giv­ing them the strik­ing­ly smooth if chro­mat­i­cal­ly reversed appear­ance of a 2001-style mono­lith — a char­ac­ter­is­tic that no doubt encour­ages cer­tain the­o­rists who imag­ine the con­struc­tion process as hav­ing been exe­cut­ed by beings from out­er space.

The tech­ni­cal­ly inclined Bra­vo pre­sum­ably has lit­tle time for such notions, fill­ing the video as he does with details about the archi­tec­ture and engi­neer­ing of the Pyra­mids, many of them thor­ough­ly human in nature, such as the delib­er­ate­ly con­fus­ing pas­sage­ways meant to throw off plun­der­ers.

Along with high-res­o­lu­tion footage and ren­der­ings of what the Pyra­mids looked like then and look like now, Bra­vo also includes his own on-foot explo­rations, show­ing us cor­ners of the com­plex (and one espe­cial­ly claus­tro­phobe-unfriend­ly tun­nel) that we don’t nor­mal­ly see unless we take a tour our­selves. This close-up per­spec­tive gives him the oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­nect the mod­ern human expe­ri­ence of these ancient mon­u­ments to their vast scale and his­tor­i­cal­ly dis­tant con­cep­tion. To be awed and even over­whelmed is per­haps the most nat­ur­al response to the Pyra­mids, and for some, it’s worth the trip to expe­ri­ence that feel­ing alone. For oth­ers, answer­ing the ques­tion of exact­ly how and why they awe and over­whelm becomes the work of a life­time.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Walk­ing Tour Around the Pyra­mids of Giza: 2 Hours in Hi Def

Take a 360° Inter­ac­tive Tour Inside the Great Pyra­mid of Giza

Take a 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Includ­ing the Great Pyra­mids, the Sphinx & More

What the Great Pyra­mid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleam­ing, Reflec­tive White

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

The Grate­ful Dead Play at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

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.