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The Symbolic Value of Buildings
A visit to venerable European cities Paris, Venice, Florence and Rome imbues the traveler with a sense of history difficult to obtain in urban youngsters like Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.
City Planning
Here in Chicago we have only experienced our city’s destruction once – in the great fire. This destruction enabled city planners to re-draw the map into an understandable north-south grid with just a few spokes emanating from the downtown hub thrown in for good measure. This modern urban design, as unexciting as it may be, works well for traveling across town with wheeled conveyances. It symbolizes a modern, efficient environment, detached from the past.
circles are conducive to
closer-to-home foot traffic and provides social gathering points.
Older towns have usually seen a number of large-scale destructions, but these occurred before the mixed blessing of automobiles, and were often rebuilt in the same pattern that had previously evolved. These cities tend to look like a sprinkling of overlapping wheels, where each hub is a piazza or gathering place, and the small streets emanate in all directions, intersecting one another as they go. This pattern can look confusing on a map, but are very friendly to foot traffic. This symbolizes a richness of experience rooted in history.
Glorious Buildings
Emperors through history deeply understood the meaning of buildings. Buildings were much more than a place to live, work, worship or be entertained. Nearly as important as these basic functions, buildings were also symbols. Buildings symbolized the might and wealth of the emperor, their ownership and mastery of the land.
to escape the symbolism that assails the visitor.
“I am the richest dude ever”, proclaims Louis XIV.
Religious leaders understood that a glorious house of worship provides worshipers with feelings of awe, reverence and closeness with the deity. In the process of church building, religious leaders also gained control of land, wealth and power, and this power came to be expressed in the buildings too. An interesting battle of building symbolism could evolve in this environment, where government and religion competed for the minds of the target audience, the populace.
the world’s largest Christian house of worship on earth. Indeed, it can house a 13 story building beneath its dome. Even with this amazing size, it still feels the need to compete. Markings on the floor (inset) show the scale of smaller buildings, even of the same faith, “Notre Dame Cathedral would end here”. Take that, hunchback!
Rome. Background: City gate, Pisa. Europe is strewn with arches. Originally utilized as the imposing frame for lockable city gates, arches evolved into statements in their own right. They tend to say, “We have prevailed, conquered and triumphed! Hooray for us!” That kind of symbol really irritates enemies.
conquer and plunder of Jerusalem and the Jewish Holy Temple in Jerusalem in 70CE. The menorah is being carried to Rome by triumphant soldiers. This infuriated me. These are my people that Titus attacked, conquered and plundered.
greatest engineering feats of all time. Built by emperor Vespasian, then his son Titus (using funds from the plunder of Jerusalem) in only 8 years (72 thru 80), this 50,000 spectator sports complex (if you consider “sport” to be the fighting-to-the-death of gladiators and animals) was clad entirely in travertine and marble. In later years, these facade stones, along with their steel and bronze clip supports were removed and salvaged for other purposes (including 2,500 carloads of stone to be used in the 1500’s for the building of St. Peter’s Basilica), leaving horrific scars in the process. Who’s your daddy now, Vespasian and Titus?
Destroying Building Symbols
It is no surprise that attacking forces through history have focused not only on the subjugation of people and the plunder of their wealth, but also the domination, and even destruction, of their buildings. In the minds of attackers old and new, “I will control you by controlling your structures”. World Trade Center terrorists took the concept further, “I will destroy your people by destroying your symbolic structures.”
One might make the argument that older cultures relate more to building symbolism than do recent cultures. We in the U.S. have the ability to relate to such obvious icons as the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and the Golden Gate Bridge for their symbolic value. But let’s be honest. How many of us viewed the World Trade Center for symbolic value beyond the technical expertise involved in constructing these sleek, tall towers? We may not have seen the WTC as symbols of American might or financial power, but the bad guys certainly did. They were so affected by that symbolism, they were willing to die to eradicate it.
destruction by the Taliban in 2001. Although the 55m tall statue is technically not a building, it is as tall as a 16 story building. The Taliban made it an early order of business to destroy this 1450 year old symbol of a competing faith. Image is supplied under a free-use license found here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Marketing: Shaping Building Symbolism
Modern marketers know that, contrary to the old days, enhancing the value of an edifice requires much more than just piling on yet more statues, artwork and arches. Although these things still resonate, we look increasingly for not only basic comforts, but also “amenities”, “finishes”, efficient transportation and the newly added “high speed communications”. Just as we see convergence in our phones, radios, music players and tvs, we will see further convergence within the building itself. Form will follow an expanded function. Classical forms will fade farther in the background in favor of esthetics that don’t even exist yet. As our convergence ties us increasingly to the “cloud”, our buildings will be more and more in the cloud, too. How much of the ultimate physical entity, a building, will we be able to shove up into the cloud?
Marketing: The new crafters of building symbolism
Size Matters
Even in current times, we see competition on the playing field of architectural symbolism: who has the tallest building? Malaysia built the enormous Petronas Towers and immediately gained recognition as a world class economic power. The incredible feats of construction taking place in Dubai have done much the same for them. “We’re not just oil and sand dunes any more”, they are telling us.
colossal buildings, but seven of the eight largest buildings in the world were designed in the US. This image adapted from http://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?searchID=203
Building symbolism is alive and well in emerging nations looking to make their mark. These places may have had the financial wherewithal to create great structures, but they needed to import the expertise.
And what of our symbolism? Is our dearth of tower cranes sending a world-wide message? Does the exportation of our architectural and engineering expertise to distant corners, assisting others build symbols of their greatness send a message? Are we the conquerors or the conquered?
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