Ancient and modern buildings


2022-10-03

When you're watching a travel video about York and Bath, England, and you hear that the nave of the Yorkminster cathedral is "one of the widest in Europe", what are you to make of that? Are you to consider that as sacred, a statement only to be in awe of, to be an alien statement? Something historical and dusty, not something alive and malleable? Why is it one of the widest in Europe? Who built it, and did they know it was wider than most others? Was it an architectural or engineering challenge to build one that wide, or was it just conventional to build them narrower?

Every statement of superlatives is awash in questions like these. They are stated off hand, to attract people to see the sights, most of which are superlative by some measure if you look deep enough in the history books.

Could a wider nave be built now? Would we be excited about a new cathedral with an ultra-wide nave? Is history simply done and dusted, only there to catalog superlatives and observe as if created by a species not our own? I feel the pre-industrial activities of man are largely viewed as if done by an alien species. We divorce ourselves from the pyramids because they were built for reasons that seem silly now, and they were built by slave labor. But is that really all we owe them? Don't we owe these amazing feats the same real awe, the perspective we have on new wonders like the Burj Dubai and the Karakoram Highway? One World Trade Center, Eiffel Tower, and so on?

These modern marvels are more open to criticism, they're more workable and discussable. The pyramids, the cathedrals, the baths, the aqueducts, the monoliths, the early settlements: these are "sterile", immune to deconstruction, only brought up as museum pieces and relics of an alien version of ourselves.