Except it wasn’t. It is Astana in Kazakhstan, built from scratch in the last twenty years, as audacious as Baghdad or Babylon’s gates, and as much a product of commerce – here, oil revenues. One of Astana’s functions is to be seen, to make our eyes boggle. It has a White House with a turquoise cupola and a golden spire. Behind it is a bird’s nest stadium and a vast tilted bowl building. On either side of this image, huge golden cones reflect everything, in case we have not seen enough. Tiny cars in the foreground, which look like toys, give us the scale. There is ancient looking here, and curved materials only possible in the twenty-first century, and the joys of symmetry and a touch of Las Vegas. Astana wants us to want to see it. And don’t we? Our composite city has the future in it too.
PRIPYAT
But the future eventually becomes past. What will Astana look like when it falls into ruin, like Babylon did? Something like this place, perhaps, Pripyat in Ukraine. Like Pompeii, it was abandoned, because of the explosion of Unit 4 of the nearby nuclear power plant, Chernobyl.
Above, at the time of the city’s construction, we see clean, new public buildings, organised in blocks. Neatly planted roses bloom. Order, power and beauty. In the bottom image, thirty years after the city was abandoned because of radiation, trees and bushes have seeded themselves in the concrete plazas. They look young and beautiful, and cast shadows in the evening light. Where once thousands of people went about their daily business, now almost no one does. The city is quiet, and returning to what it was before people, the Soviet Union, nuclear scientists, town planners, utopians, cold warriors and young families all imposed their will upon it. It has become an un-city.
For centuries we have been fascinated by abandoned and destroyed places, their abandonment telling us what we have lost. There are many books and websites on the subject. What do we see in them? The way we were, perhaps, a threnody or human hubris, or the fact that the present order is the disorder of the future? Pripyat is an image of mortality, of change, of the parade moving on, and – in its specific case, of course – jeopardy.
DESTRUCTION
Pripyat was not destroyed, but many of the greatest built things have been. Our human response to this is not simply to lament the destruction. If Notre Dame fell, our media would be saturated by images of the fall. Large buildings contain in them vast amounts of potential energy – all that lifting of stone high up, into the air – and we can, in our minds’ eyes, picture the release of that energy into something more kinetic.
It seems always to have been so. In the Chauvet caves in the Ardèche in France there are russet, erupting, spray-like wall paintings, from around 36,000 years ago, which are probably depictions of a volcano hurling lava into the sky twenty-two miles northwest of there. We can imagine its eyewitnesses being terrified but dazzled by these ancient fireworks, by their scale, energy and ferocity. Thirty-six millennia later, on 18 July CE 64, the Emperor Nero is said to have watched from a distant hill, with aesthetic pleasure, the burning of Rome, during which an estimated two million citizens lost their homes.
Just fifteen years later and less than two hundred miles further south, on 24 August CE 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, creating imagery like the paintings in Chauvet’s caves. The smoke and ash cloud was twenty miles high. Pliny the Younger said that it was like a vast pine tree. It buried local towns under three metres of pumice. Visually, the event has recurred in Western culture. There are hundreds of paintings of it, and it was restaged in early silent films and again, in recent years, with the advent of computer-generated 3D imaging.
The destruction of cities, the urban apocalypse, had grotesque appeal to the imagination of conquerors. In this twelfth-century illustration from a Spanish manuscript, an angel flies over burning Babylon.
As Babylon symbolised sin to Christians, the manuscript illuminator, who was adapting an eighth-century image by St Beatus of Liébana, sees the burning as a cauterisation or punishment, yet the licking tongue flames seem not to damage the glorious city. Its minarets, domes, tiling, gardens, vases and horseshoe arches are intact. The artist cannot bring himself to destroy the city so, instead, represents it stacked, geometric and haloed with fire.
Jump forward to 13 February 1258 and we find the videodrome’s circle citadel in flames. The Mongols raped and looted in the once great city’s concentric streets, smashing or stealing what Chinese porcelain remained. They seized thousands of scholarly books by Hunayn and others, which had been collected over half a millennium, and threw them into the Tigris. The ink turned the river black, a striking image of mourning for lost learning. The destruction of this symbol of Arabism was relished by the city’s enemies, but it, too, haunted the mind’s eye.
We could go on. The earthquake and tsunami that destroyed much of Lisbon on 1 November 1755 led the French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau to argue for a return to rural life and peasant values; maybe all those people living at close quarters in cities were only asking for trouble? One hundred and twenty-eight years later, one of the most startling natural visual events in history occurred. A volcano west of Java erupted, creating a smoke cloud twice the height of Mount Vesuvius’s. The ash that entered the atmosphere reduced global temperatures in the coming year and made sunlight refract or scatter in more extreme ways, thus intensifying sunsets and creating new visual patterns in the sky. Thousands of miles away, in Oslo, the painter Edvard Munch saw these and painted them in the background of his disturbing, highly chromatic The Scream. And at 11.58 a.m. on 1 September 1923, a massive earthquake in Japan devastated Yokohama and lit fires in Tokyo’s wooden buildings, which spread like a forest fire. Over 100,000 people died, and most of Japan’s great silent films, its moving image memories, were lost in the blaze.
Compared to these tragedies, the loss of life in Manhattan when the World Trade Center was attacked on 11 September 2001 was small, but New York is psychologically closer to white Westerners than most cities in the developing world and is the new Babylon, and so the atrocity was all over our perma-news, and there is no need to reproduce an image of that day here. 9/11 was the millennial Krakatoa, its imagery seared. It had its meaning – the awful deaths of 2,996 people – and it had its seeing. Later in our story we will come to unseen dying.
Our chapter on building and cities comes full circle. We started with a rhubarb leaf, considered how the visible worked in eight urban places, and ended with 9/11. Everything built must fall, but in the period before it does, a building and the city to which it contributes affords engineered, contemplative, clustered, oppressive, educative, random and future looking. The present order is the disorder of the future.
PART 2
EXPANDING
CHAPTER 6
EXPANDING HORIZONS FROM THE MIDDLE AGES ONWARDS: TRADE, CRUSADE, EMPIRE AND CONQUEST
IN our story so far we have progressed through ranks of looking. We saw colour, space, other people, emotions, movement, design, abstraction, light, buildings and cities. Around us, as our consciousness and inner eyes developed, human living became more complex. People used tools, began to farm, lived together in more constructed settings, worshipped a wider range of gods and developed larger and more hierarchical societies. When we imagined walking through the Ishtar Gate in 570 BCE we found ourselves in a kind of biosphere, an entanglement, an ancient-world looking system. We have established how we looked out into our immediate environment and the people, objects and buildings within that environment. Next in our story we should look further outwards, beyond our bailiwick, to a larger cocoon. We should extend our sense of who we are beyond our individual experiences. Nations looked. Traders looked. Empires, sailors, warriors and kingdoms looked. From the Middle Ages onwards, and from the 1400s in particular, Europeans