See Gaudi's Sagrada Familia for a modern day equivalent. Under construction for 137 years and counting. Current estimate for completion is in the 2030s, if all goes well.
(I highly recommend the guided tour if you're ever in Barcelona. The history of it's engineering and construction is fascinating even if you're not that into Gaudi, or cathedrals.)
I can absolutely agree on this. As a staunch atheist I have no relationship to religion or the catholic church, but the creativity and dedication of this man is really fascinating -- even his death had a relation to the building. The architecture is truly awe inspiring and so rich in detail, you could surely spend several days there and discover something new every day.
From an engineering POV what has inspired me the most was the method with which the stresses/strains of the structure was modelled (without numerical methods or finite element analysis).
A complete metro network might take 150 years to build but each line is useful on their own, the final network is composed of several semi-independent lines which get added and expanded over time, and even if the system's fulness is designed at its origin with multi-decade plans it's useful long before that.
Same with road & highway systems, or other public transport networks (trains, tramways, …). They're useful and have a point long before they're "finished", assuming there's even such a thing.
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
Not really. At least not in the sense that structures are built today. The first mass was held just 19 years after construction began [1]. And many additions were added, and plans modified along the way. It's not like the original plan was 200 years of construction before it would serve any real useful purpose. There was actually construction being done at the time of the fire, but that doesn't mean it took 900 years to build.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/history/as-notre-dame-...
And got paid (which, in fairness, still means the money-men were thinking that far ahead).
>We don't really have projects like that anymore. Contemporary structures and infrastructure are designed to be completed within the lifetime of the creator.
The deep space probes from NASA took something like 20 years to reach their destination, on top of the mission planning time, and involved a lot of senior engineers, who didn't get to see it to completion. But you're right, I can't think of anything on a 100+ year timescale.
I wonder, in all that hierarchy, and in all those networks, who was "thinking far ahead", and who was cynically participating in the endeavor for personal gain, while quenching existential thirst elsewhere. In modern society, the majority of our lives are spent in the latter mode, I think: no one's passionate opus is sugar water or targeted ads, yet they occupy millions of us.
Incredible things can be done by people who are "phoning it in," by firms stacked top-to-bottom with talent whose passions lie elsewhere.
Is it possible that cathedrals, too, were constructed entirely obligatorily?
Well, it might not be intentional, but the new Berlin city airport certainly looks like it's going to be a contemporary example.
Technology changes too fast for that to be reasonable these days. Let’s say I design some massive bridge that will take 100 years to build. Why would we start construction today, when technological changes might render it completely obsolete before it’s even done?
The fact that people were able to plan and execute a centuries-long construction project for a monument to society’s shared imaginary friend is fascinating and speaks well of them but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing we should strive to emulate.
Well, there is the ITER nuclear fusion reactor project. It was planned in the 70ies, construction started in the 90ies, projected construction-finish will probably be around 2025 and the first projected long-term-stable plasma will probably be achieved around 2035. OK 60 years is not 200, but this still is far longer than any other contemporary infrastructure building I can think of.
This pattern continues today – witness the speed at which funding for rebuilding has been publicly pledged by people wishing to be widely seen to do so.
Sad but true, although one that is still running is the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Started 1882, and expected to reach completion in 2026.
We strive for Mars, knowing full well neither us nor our children will ever see the cities to come.
Not only that, but the ones who followed them didn't balk at working on a "legacy" project.
And we plan new bridges and tunnels that might never benefit the people that drew up their first plan.
We do. I propose - the greatest testament to the Might of God and the insignificance of Man - the Second Avenue Subway.
Not that I'm thinking about all that while struggling with a race condition.
In democracy this kinship frequently does not exist between successive entities, and there is even often an effort to dismantle the works of a previous administration as well as blaming any faults on them. There are also basic democratic political problems. One very myopic, and very common, political argument is of the form: "You want to [do something amazing] while there's [people dying of cancer] [kids starving to death in Africa] [etc] [etc]?!" This argument feels reasonable to most people, and can be used to frame a candidate (who wants to do grand things) as being out of touch. And it's extremely effective. It makes it difficult to spend large amounts of money on things outside of those that can be justified on a very immediate level, such as war.
The space program is probably the greatest project the modern United States has engaged in. And if it had carried on it's likely our species would now today inhabit bodies beyond just this planet. But it was not continued. This [1] is a song from the 70s that was published shortly before Nixon, who had a long standing animosity with JFK since losing a razor thin election to him in 1960, would completely gut the space program - which was very much a reflection of JFK. So determined were his efforts that in 1972, as Apollo 17 was returning to earth during his presidency, he stated "This may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the Moon." He initially even wanted to cancel both the Apollo 16 and 17 missions fearing that a mishap during them could negatively affect his reelection chances. The entire space program emphasizes all of the issues with democracy and grand projects.
After millenia of using horse powered travel we've gone from vehicles, to planes, to the moon, to mars in about 100 years.
Daimler (internal combustion cars): 1892.
Wright Flyer III (plane): 1903
Apollo 11: 1969.
Even steam powered trains were almost inconceivable to the average person living in say, 1700, just imagine what that person would have thought about Apollo 11! Heck, I imagine even Napoleon in 1821 couldn't really imagine the mechanized world awaiting just 50 years in the future.
* subway system in Los Angeles on par with NYC
* any-speed rail link between US and Russia
* (saw this from a poster below: interstellar probe )
Practically though, this doesn’t really make sense. Kind of like waterfall development but tripled down on all the bad parts
We've been making steel in some form since at least antiquity and possible a couple of thousand years longer.
But we still have public works projects that span eras. Some of our big infrastructure projects, and things like national parks are constantly evolving. If I were president I could make a national park today but it's just lines on a map. Generations of work may have to be done to turn it into a functioning forest, especially now when we are questioning what the definition of 'functioning forest' is and how humans fit into it. Whatever we build today, we know it's gonna be wrong and a great deal of it will have to be redone.
I also love the solution Christopher Wren came up with after the Great Fire. Everyone wanted him to design their church. He made a compromise: I'll build you your church but you don't get a bell tower until after everyone else gets a church. So he went around building churches and then swung back through to add bell towers onto them.
Most projects but not all. This is why spacex has such a big fan base because if you have seen their pictures of mars, they are not only trying to colonize it, but terraform it and even options like sending hundreds of nukes at the poles to induce warming and atmospheric buildup are expected to take hundreds of years.
It was actually my favorite structure in Rome when when I visited with the Pantheon in a close second.
I believe that it counts as an example of a long running and grandiose engineering project.
Well, the workers did it out of a sense of devotion, and in some cases as a way to guarantee their spot in heaven. They Catholic Church would use this quite a bit. For example: Commission a grand religious painting? Go to Heaven. That's why you sometimes see the people who paid for say, a mural in the mural itself getting blessed by ol' JC himself.
I'd argue it's a good thing that our modern political systems aren't well-suited for pissing away our society's resources on monuments to hubris.
> pissing away our society's resources on monuments to hubris
Is it impossible to imagine a cause that transcends vanity or hubris?
Must every collective effort be corrupted by selfishness?
Collective efforts directed to realizing the vision of the few are inherently suspect.
For that matter, what if a megaproject is required for a space faring race, and democracy is the great filter?
Or we could forget about the probe and focus on developing better propulsion technology. That would have immediate applications, but could also allow the probe to reach its destination orders of magnitude sooner.
I don’t see any reasonable motivation for generations-long megaprojects until technology has well and truly stagnated.
I posed Proxima Centauri simply b/c it wasn't religious, and perhaps palatable as something humanity should undertake, but not feasible within a lifetime, as a counter-example to show that not all lifetime-spanning projects are worthless.
If the Cold War was still raging and Russia decided -today- to colonise Mars, it'd immediately go from a "someday/maybe" to "within the next 5-10 years".
Even ignoring the hyperbole, this isn't accurate. It's only because of survivorship bias that we think of building standards as having decreased over time, but they really haven't. Take an average person from an average house 500 years ago and put them in modern construction and they would be amazed by how nice it is, how it's well-insulated and climate controlled, how smooth the walls are, how level the floors are, and even simple stuff like how the roof doesn't leak one bit when it rains.
There's going to be many more modern buildings still standing hundreds of years from now than there are buildings from hundreds of years ago still standing now (both in absolute numbers and proportionally).
Take your hypothetical person from a half millennium ago - yeah, they'd be amazed by how comfortable the house is, and all that... but they'd also likely be appalled by the level of maintenance required to maintain that, both in terms of the actual structure and the amount of work necessary to fund the ongoing use of things like air conditioning and electric lights. With that taken into account, we spend a good deal more of our lives providing ourselves with shelter.
Also, as part of that, there's the fact that the home of five hundred years ago was likely built with the most durable materials that were feasible for the time and budget. Today, even the most expensive homes are made of materials that explicitly will not stand the test of time. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that our culture values things that are more fragile and fleeting - a home with a beautiful bay window is a thrown rock away from being essentially uninhabitable until that window is replaced, at great expense. We delight in our ability to impact the world around us, and very rarely build things to last longer than they need to.
"they'd also likely be appalled by the level of maintenance required to maintain"
Modern materials have much lower maintenance requirements. You can put up a tar-asphalt roof and aluminum/vinyl siding and be fine for multiple decades without needing any maintenance whatsoever. Meanwhile, a lot of older houses needed extensive maintenance every year to keep the roofs and walls in passable shape. Wattle and daub was a common material used for walls, for example, and thatch a common material for roofs. Both are incredibly labor intensive to maintain.
"With that taken into account, we spend a good deal more of our lives providing ourselves with shelter."
Huh? How are you measuring this? The average person centuries ago lived at just barely subsistence level. They spent most of their efforts on basic survival, and sometimes didn't even have enough to eat. We spend much less of our lives laboring now than our ancestors used to. Compare how hard and long a subsistence farmer or serf works vs a modern office worker. It's much easier for us to provide shelter; we just spend some fraction of our salary on it.
"home of five hundred years ago was likely built with the most durable materials that were feasible for the time and budget"
Yeah, so only the palaces were built amazingly well and everything else was not. The living standards were so much lower back then that almost no one had the money to get access to the best available stuff, whereas nowadays most people do.
"a home with a beautiful bay window is a thrown rock away from being essentially uninhabitable until that window is replaced"
I don't even understand this criticism. The only way to not have this be a problem is to literally not have glass windows at all. Either you have an empty hole in your wall that's terrible for retaining warmth in cold weather and keeping out bugs and rain, or you don't have holes in your walls at all and live in darkness (both were common options). Would you seriously rather live in a house without windows??? To the extent that people didn't used to, it was only because glass was so expensive that the average person couldn't afford it. Now that we have modern production methods, glass is cheap, and everyone can benefit from it. I guarantee you that if you went back in time offering free glass, the average person would gleefully put it in their house. It was only used in palaces, cathedrals, and the like because of how expensive it was.
The average person 500 years ago lived in what you would call nowadays a ramshackle hut. I don't know what is coming into your mind, but you're probably thinking of one of the few well-made structures that persists to this day, rather than what was actually commonplace. Keep in mind that entire cities used to burn down too, which no longer happens in good part because of modern fireproofing codes and materials. Drywall, for instance, is an amazing material.
The overall idea that I'm trying to get across is that the best homes of today are not nearly as durable as the best homes of 500 years ago. The historical home would have had likely had stone walls if the owner could afford it, and a heavy timber-framed roof with lead or zinc overlaid for protection from the elements - exactly like Notre Dame, in fact. A modern home of the same cost (i.e., belonging to a person of equivalent economic class) is going to be much more comfortable but is much less likely to stand the test of time - at least, unless it substantial ongoing maintenance.
To put it another way, after a hundred years of abandonment, the historical home would likely still be standing. Barring extreme weather, the roof would likely be still in place. A modern home however would decay much more quickly, because of the assumptions that we make today about the availability of quality materials for repair and maintenance - and yes, because the materials to which we have access today allow architectural styles that were previously impossible, like huge bay windows.
Give people a choice between two houses, one that will last their full lifetime and then some, and another that costs double and that will last 500 years, almost everyone is rationally going to pick the former option. There simply isn't much present-day utility in over-building to such an extent.
And keep in mind, there are plenty of all-stone buildings that have collapsed from earthquakes and other natural disasters, killing many people, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_2016_Central_Italy_eart... . A lot of construction methodologies that last 500 years only do so in some environments. Against a lot of common risks, a modern building constructed of dimensional lumber is better.
And anyway, I still think the better comparison is between the average building in different time periods, not the best buildings (which are basically just outliers).
Gnu HURD?
I think we still have those projects but they are more utilitarian rather than religious. Chernobyl and Yucca Mountain will be our generation's cathedral to nuclear power. Outside of the weirdly curious I don't imagine it as a major tourist destination.
Also, some of our space missions are like this, e.g. Voyager 1.
It's only constructions like cathedrals that you can't really use until it's nearly complete.
Imagine having to wait until 2015 for Google to ship its first suite of products. The cashflow and other things wouldn't make sense. Google is essentially under constant construction though, as is a University which adds buildings every so often.
"Ok, remove the support scaffolding"
"Oh crap it's falling! Put it back, put it back!"
followed up by a design tweak.
Or the King/Bishop decided that they wanted something different and the design was changed.
The Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan is giving that line a run for its money.
It opens with following conclusion: There were only 3 bottom-level motivators where it comes to achieving grand things in human history: * Survival * Wealth * Praise of deity
There are things people still do that span generations to satisfy the first 2 drivers (like Norway being cautious about its oil reserves or overall push towards clean energy and mitigating climate change, China's investment in its own and Africa's infrastructure).
People simply got smart enough not to throw monumental amount of effort and resources to please a deity. Of course that's a massive simplification as then there's a question if the organisation that "wrote the check" really did that purely because of the spiritual beliefs of their own or their people.
But there have also been great things achieved for other reasons, like the moon landings or the ISS. Is that survival? Wealth? Or does it count as something we believe in?
When it comes to the moon landing or the ISS... Of course you can say that's because we're explorers. The moon landing was pure survival (don't let the commies win), ISS is research and maybe the researchers put in the effort for a sense of discovery but the money comes from governments and it flows mostly because of a promise of economic or military advancement.
I'm not a cynic in that regard. I love the architecture of religious monuments, I love the fact that we as a species achieved magnificent things like reaching the moon or discovering how black holes work. You can appreciate all of that without kidding yourself about where the money comes from.
We don't really have projects like that anymore. Contemporary structures and infrastructure are designed to be completed within the lifetime of the creator.
We might be able to attribute that to advances in technology allowing for faster development times. But sometimes it seems we've lost sight of the grandeur that existed at those times, and perhaps we are not challenging ourselves enough.