Life imitates art imitates life

I spent a good chunk of this year traveling. Mostly in Europe, but also bits of Asia and the Middle East. The history of these places is heavily influenced by its ruling families during the common era, but what blows my mind is how those rulers’ ideas of culture and society was shaped so heavily in turn by events that happened thousands of years earlier.

The U.S Capitol buildings are inspired by the layout of the massive European cathedrals and basilicas. Those cathedrals were inspired by the ancient Roman temples of the gods such as the Pantheon. Those Roman buildings were in turn inspired by the original Greek pagan architecture during the earliest periods of human civilization, which going even further back were drawn from the Egyptian obelisks and pyramid complex layouts.

Making these connections kind of makes you stop dead in your tracks and mentally scroll through all of human history. It kind of starts to make sense why things are the way they are and how we got to where we are. In school, we’re mostly taught the history of the country that we attend school in and very little about the rest of the world. In reality, the world was a huge interconnected geopolitical mess and lots of things happened that affected everything else. Nowhere on Earth will you be able to get an unbiased view of how human history really progressed. It will always be stained by the country’s effort to educate its students about its own history first and promote a sense of nationalistic identity amongst them.

Part of why I love traveling is that it gets you closer towards that unbiased view. No tests, no memorization, no pressure. Just pure immersion as you take in the sights and connect the dots yourself in a sea of tourists taking selfies. Not being forced to adopt a patriotic attitude towards the country you’re visiting actually allows you to see things as they really are. And you eventually confront the hard truth that human history was simply a series of chaotic events where one thing led to another and frequently inspired the next thing that happened.

The Romans brought back massive obelisks from Egypt as a trophy of their conquests and spread it all across Europe throughout its empire. These had to be lowered down with a pulley system in Egypt, hauled to the southern edge of the Mediterranean, cut in three parts so that it could be put on three massive sailboats, shipped across the Mediterranean Sea in stormy waters all the way to Rome where they were finally re-assembled and re-erected. Today, these obelisks stand in the center of roundabouts and public squares in Paris, Berlin, Rome, and Budapest. And certain cities in eastern Asia are now imitating the obelisks in order to make their cities feel more “western” so that they can attract wealthier residents and inspire a supposedly more global vibe to the cityscape.

The Romans surely didn’t expect this. They could’ve only dreamed of their fallen empire’s leftover remnants be put to some good use, much less inspire copies in far-flung lands. I wonder what Augustus Caesar would’ve said if he were alive today and saw what was happening. It’s a little mind-boggling to think about the fact that these things happened over two thousand years ago, and are still somehow affecting urban planning in cities today.

Architectural styles are the same way too. Gothic cathedrals were the staple for a long time, until the Renaissance came along and inspired a more humanist and realistic approach to decorum in architecture. This is particularly evident in the facades and domes of cathedrals, arguably the most important buildings in the medieval era. These styles were followed by Baroque, Rococo, and Classical architecture, until Gothic Revival became a thing and the ancient Gothic cathedral facades started popping up again in the late seventeenth century. Neo Baroque also made a brief re-appearance, followed by Neo Classicism in the late nineteenth century. Architectural styles are constantly evolving but always drawing inspiration from their own past.

Perhaps the finest example of this architectural mosh-pit is the Duomo di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. This massive, iconic building of Florence began as an Italian Gothic cathedral but was topped off with a Renaissance dome and finished with a Gothic Revival facade. It was under construction for a long enough time that architectural styles came and went by, until they were revived again so that the building still looked like a whole but infused with various elements of styles throughout the years. The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is another excellent example of this, following a Modernisme style of architecture that draws heavily from Gothic and Art Noveau forms. St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice has Byzantine-styled onion domes combined with a Gothic facade featuring pillars and stones from all over the world.

When humans undertake massive megaprojects to build things, they surely comprehend the final outcome and how majestic it will look, but they seldom realize how it might impact someone hundreds or thousands of years down the road. It’s not even possible to comprehend what might happen. It’s a true testament to the human ability’s desire to preserve its own creations for its own future that these ancient monuments are still standing. And who knows? Maybe the Burj Khalifa, today the tallest building in the world, will one day inspire the design of a space elevator. Maybe the street layouts of Manhattan will inspire urban planners in a terraformed Mars. Maybe the modern office buildings and airplanes will lend an architectural style or two to the underwater biospheres of tomorrow.

It’s tough to know what will happen and where we’ll go, but it sure as hell is exciting to be along for the ride. As a designer, this makes me realize the potential impact of everything I’m doing now. Even if no-one today goes to a museum to look at digital interfaces, they one day very well might. Websites have been giving themselves a facelift every couple of years, mobile apps swap their entire UI every few months. It’s all happening so fast that we can barely keep up with the progress, but who knows? In 2800, our descendants will be able to step back in time and look at the early days of the invention of the internet, glimpsing at banking interfaces, early search engine results, image compression, video quality, and network speeds at some museum exhibiting the state of technology at the crack of the millenium. And it might just inspire a wave of revivals in whatever equivalent of software they’ll be using in that century, complete with drop shadows and colorful gradients.