Maillart’s bridges

The Swiss engineer, architect, and artist Robert Maillart (1872–1940) exploited the structural strength and expressive potential of reinforced concrete to generate a modern form for his bridges. By using simple construction concepts he developed graceful structures based on flat or curved reinforced concrete slabs. Amongst his radically innovative ideas were the mushroom slab, the deck-stiffened arch, the open three-hinged arch, and the hollow-box arch. Maillart’s biographer David Billington (1997, 2) asserts that the engineer’s “elegance arose from structure itself and not from an extraneous idea of beauty.”

Taken singly or together, Maillart’s bridges are engineering and architectural feats that elegantly demonstrated, as Le Corbusier claimed in Vers une Architecture (1923), that engineers recognized (long before architects) that beauty could be achieved through thoroughly defining and solving problems. That new approach to design lay at the foundation of modem architecture.

Maillart studied civil engineering at Switzerland’s Federal Technological Institute in Zürich under Wilhelm Ritter, an expert on reinforced concrete. Graduating in 1894, he worked in private and government engineering offices, mostly on railroad, road, and bridge projects.

Unreinforced concrete was first used in 1865 for a multiple-arch bridge on the Grand Maître Aqueduct between the River Vanne and Paris. The invention of reinforced concrete is credited to Joseph Monier, a French gardener who in 1867 patented molded planters made of cement mortar reinforced with iron-wire mesh. Over the next decade there followed several bridge patents. Because French law prevented him from building bridges, Monier sold the patents to contractors Wayss, Freitag, and Schuster, who built Europe’s earliest reinforced concrete bridges in Germany and Switzerland.

Around the turn of the century the French engineer François Hennebique built reinforced concrete bridges at Millesimo, Italy (1898), and Châtellérault, France (1900). Therefore, while his designs were probably the most elegant, Maillart was not the pioneer of reinforced concrete bridges. In 1902 he established his own firm, specializing in reinforced concrete design and construction. By then he had already built a 100-foot-span (30-meter) bridge over the River Inn at Zuoz; its innovative slenderness and flatness created a stir in professional circles. There followed the 115-foot (35-meter) Thurbridge near Billwil (1903) and another single 167-foot (51-meter) arch across the Rhine near Tavanasa (1905, since demolished), identified by some scholars as marking the birth of a modern architecture that reintegrated art and technology.

Maillart moved his practice to Russia in 1912 and produced a number of factories, warehouses, and office buildings in Riga, Charkov, and Kiev. Following the October 1917 Revolution, he returned to Switzerland and in 1919 set up a consulting design practice in Geneva, later opening branch offices in Bern and Zürich.

From 1925 he built several remarkable bridges in Switzerland of two principal structural types: stiffened-slab arches, such as the 140-foot (43-meter) span over the Val-Tschiel near Donath, of 1925; and three-hinged arches in which the arch, roadway, and stiffening girder were integrated into a monolithic structure, exemplified by, among others, the Schwandbach Bridge (1933) in Bern Canton and the Salginatobel Bridge (1930) over the Salgina Valley in Graubunden Canton. The latter is a hollow, box-concrete arch bridge with a span of 295 feet (90 meters) and a rise of 43 feet (13 meters). The slender arch rib deepens from the supports to the quarter-span points, at which it becomes integral with the concrete road deck and tapers again to the midspan hinge. Salginatobel Bridge is widely regarded as an exceptional monument of modern architecture, a piece of structural art. In 1991 the American Association of Architects and Engineers designated it an International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. It has also been called “the most spectacular and classic example of [its] type in the world.”

Ritter had urged his students to think of shapes and forms that could not be analyzed easily by mathematical calculation. Clearly, Maillart had learned that lesson, and his visual imagination and intuition were a major part of his approach to engineering; just as clearly, his subtly beautiful bridges evidence a thorough comprehension of the nature of forces in a structure. His deep appreciation of the properties and behavior of reinforced concrete permitted him to develop innovative, light sculptural forms. Through his bridges, Maillart, virtually unknown and unacknowledged before about 1930, became internationally famous as a designer of sophisticated concrete structures.

Maiden Castle - Dorset, England

The ancient British hill fort now known as Maiden Castle (from mai-dun, Celtic for “great hill”), about 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) southwest of modern Dorchester, grew from a neolithic village to become the largest pre-Roman fortress among nearly 1,400 in England. Indeed, it was one of the most extensive in western Europe. Still visible 2,000 years after its massive ramparts were completed, the fort crowns a low saddleback chalk hill south of the Frome Valley. Its strength did not lie (as in the case of others) in its siting, but rather in the sheer size and scale of its fortifications. By the middle of the first century b.c., four rings of ditches and steeply sloping earthen walls, in places as much as 90 feet (28 meters) high and reinforced by timber palisades or drystone structures, occupied an area of 100 acres (40 hectares). Within the defenses, the long axis of the fort is over 0.5 mile (0.8 kilometer) and its inner circumference about 1.5 miles. It was a remarkable engineering achievement, not only in terms of its monumentality, but also because of its organic nature, by which it grew over twenty centuries.

Maiden Castle has a long prehistory, revealed by archeological studies first undertaken by Mortimer Wheeler in 1934–1938; further excavation took place in 1985–1986 under the direction of Niall Sharples. The first earthwork was a neolithic causewayed camp (ca. 4000 b.c.) consisting of a single ditch and bank

defending an area of about 12 acres (4.8 hectares). It was followed after half a century by a 1,750-foot-long (537-meter) bank barrow, crossing the center of the fort from east to west. About 1,000 years later settlers built burial mounds on the site, after which it seems to have been abandoned for some time.

After about 700 b.c. various tribes settled Britain, and most of the southwestern region now known as Somerset and Dorset was occupied by the Durotriges. They secured their lands against rival tribes with hill forts: such places as Hambledon Hill, Hod Hill, South Cadbury, Spettisbury Rings, and of course Maiden Hill, which some scholars suggest was their capital. Around 600 b.c. these Iron Culture settlers incorporated the existing earthworks into their own defenses—an earth rampart augmented by a timber palisade—enclosing about 15 acres (6 hectares) at the east end of the saddleback. There was continual growth: limestone walls were added to parts of the ramparts, and it seems that around 450 b.c. a westward extension was constructed. Sometime before the third century b.c., the encircling fortifications were enlarged, and entrances with double gates were constructed at the east and west ends; the entire hilltop—some 45 acres (18.2 hectares)—was secured. The height of the earth walls was increased, perhaps late in the second century b.c., and yet another rampart and ditch were built around the perimeter. Further enlargement took place a century later. Although it may be that not all Dorset hill forts were continuously occupied, and that some were simply used as havens in times of danger, evidence suggests that Maiden Hill was a permanent settlement, and at the middle of the first century a.d. perhaps 5,000 people were living within what they believed to be the safety of its walls. There were made streets, and archeologists have discovered graves, storage pits, and other pits for refuse—it might be said, sanitary landfill.

The Romans launched a full-scale invasion of Britain in a.d. 43, moving westward across the country. The Roman historian Suetonius claims that twenty of the southwest hill forts fell quickly to the II Augusta Legion, come from Strasbourg under the general Titus Flavius Vespasianus (later to become Emperor Vespasian). They reached Maiden Castle within the year. The Durotriges were renowned warriors, accustomed to hand-to-hand combat. At longer range, they used slings and were prepared to defend their town with them: ammunition dumps within the ramparts held a reserve of 40,000 large pebbles brought from Chesil Beach. The Romans chose to turn their war machines against the well-defended east gate, defended by slingers on its four ramparts. Overwhelmed by the weight of numbers and the superior tactics and weapons technology of the invaders—especially the catapults that launched missiles from beyond the slingers’ range—Maiden Castle surrendered, although not before offering savage resistance.

After three millennia the huge, spectacular hill fort had become obsolete, and it was abandoned within about thirty-five years. Many of the former inhabitants moved to the new Roman town of Durnovaria (Dorchester), others to the century-old Celtic village in the shadow of Maiden Castle. In about A.D. 370 the Romans built a temple in the precincts of the fort, but it too was abandoned when they withdrew from Britain only 100 years later. The site is now maintained and managed by English Heritage.

Ma’dan reed houses - Iraq

The reed houses that form part of the distinctive culture of the Ma’dan, or Marsh Arabs, of southeastern Iraq are an architectural achievement because they result from pushing available resources to their limits. Descended partly from the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, this seminomadic people, now numbering perhaps 200,000, have for millennia inhabited Lake Hammar and the surrounding marshlands in the Tigris-Euphrates Delta, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) south of Baghdad. Not only have they developed a sophisticated house form using a single building material—the stalks of the prolific giant reed (Fragmites communis)—but they have also created the very land upon which their houses and farmsteads stand.

The Ma’dan villages are irregular clusters of small islands constructed by alternating layers of reed mats and layers of mud dredged from the marsh bottom. Thus, paradoxically, much of the fertile land is actually floating on the water. Each island has its house and buffalo paddock, and communication between them is by means of narrow canoes (mashuf) of bitumen-coated wood, propelled through the shallow water with long poles. The Ma’dan fish, hunt waterfowl and pigs, breed water buffalo, and raise crops of paddy rice and great millet. Many domestic necessities—beds, cots, baskets, and canoe poles—are woven from reeds. In short, until recently the Ma’dan have lived in harmony with the ecosystem of their harsh but bountiful environment.

The reed house (mudhif) is constructed around a framework made by tying the giant reeds—they can grow to 20 feet (6 meters) long—to make bundles that taper from about 1.5 feet to 6 inches (45 to 15 centimeters). The thick ends are stuck into the mud floor of the island in opposing pairs and then bent and lashed together, with a substantial overlap at the top, to form a row of parallel parabolic arches, at about 6-foot (2-meter) centers. The builders even use a tripod of bundled reeds as scaffolding for this part of the work. The primary frames are stabilized with closely spaced, much thinner reed bundles (like purlins) around the perimeter of the house. The completed framework is covered with intricately woven split-reed mats to form the integrated walls and roof. The upper parts of the end walls are enclosed with a curtain of the same material, and four or five reed “columns” are erected to support a framework to which a decorative lattice is fixed, always to beautiful effect. Depending on the length of the reeds used for the arches, the house can be 12 feet (3.7 meters) wide; the length is indeterminate, and buildings up to 100 feet (30 meters) have been recorded. Furnishings are sparse: the reed floors are covered with carpets, and there is a clay hearth for making coffee. The distinctive house form has a long pedigree,

being illustrated on a clay plaque dating from the fourth millennium b.c. found in excavations of Sumerian Uruk. That fact, and the appearance of vegetable forms in stone, such as Egyptian papyrus and lotus columns, has given rise to the speculation that all columnar architecture in the protohistoric civilizations (and perhaps beyond) springs from such construction.

The unique culture of the Marsh Arabs is in danger; indeed, it may already be beyond help. Largely as a result of their isolation, they have maintained their traditions and were untouched even by Turkish and British colonialism. Because of high evaporation, the marshes have long been regarded as wasteful of water that could be used for irrigation; a major drainage scheme was proposed in a 1951 report drafted by British engineers commissioned by the Iraqi government. In the 1970s Turkey dammed the Euphrates. But the Ma’dan’s problems started in earnest after 1980, during the Iran-Iraq War. Within two years Iran regained the territory, including the marshlands, taken earlier by Iraq. The marsh dwellers fled as the Iraqi army sent enormous electrical currents through the water to electrocute invading Iranian soldiers. Saddam Hussein’s unrelenting destruction continued after the war.

Following Saddam’s defeat in the Gulf War in 1991, southern Iraqi Shi’ite Muslims launched a guerrilla offensive against his Sunni Muslim government. The uprising was crushed, and many rebels sought refuge in the marshes, supported by the Ma’dan, who are also Shi’ite. To flush them out, in 1992 Saddam began to drain the region systematically, using the 1951 British report. Within a year a network of 20-foot-high (6-meter) dikes was preventing two-thirds of the normal water flow from reaching the marshlands, thus turning much of it into expanses of dried mud. Between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers, the man-made Saddam River carried floodwaters directly to the Persian Gulf. A third of Lake Hammar dried up, and thousands of Marsh Arabs moved deeper into the surviving wetlands or fled to Iran and elsewhere. Some sources estimate that fewer than 10,000 remain in Iraq, recognized as a “persecuted minority” by the European Parliament, to pursue their traditional lifestyle. To compound the offense of ethnocide, Saddam’s actions have caused probably irreversible environmental damage. International organizations such as the UN Human Rights Commission, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the International Wildfowl and Wetlands Research Bureau have been watching in alarm, but have been powerless to act.

London Underground - England

London’s underground railroad system, popularly known as “the Tube,” is the oldest in the world. As early as the 1830s Charles Pearson, the city of London’s solicitor, suggested that the mainline stations could be linked by an underground railroad with as many as eight tracks. Despite the potential economic and social advantages of the scheme, it could find no financial backing, and Parliament refused to approve it. The city’s first above-ground passenger service was the London and Greenwich line, opened in February 1836. Within four years it was carrying nearly 6 million passengers annually between the major mainline train stations on the borders of the metropolis and the edge of the central business district. With an area of 60 square miles (154 square kilometers) and a population of 2.5 million, Greater London was then the world’s largest city, and the most crowded, plagued by street congestion.

To find a solution to a worsening problem, the City Terminus Company (CTC) revived the underground railroad idea in 1852 and placed it before Parliament, only to again fail. The following year the Bayswater, Paddington, and Holborn Bridge Railway Company submitted a plan for a different line, ostensibly at half the cost. Parliament endorsed the North Metropolitan line in 1853, and the company promptly had the CTC line approved as part of its own. The Great Western Railway Company agreed to finance construction of the underground in return for direct access to the city. In 1854 an act of Parliament was obtained to begin the Metropolitan Railroad. A sum of £1 million was raised by December 1859, and the following February the first shafts were sunk. The earliest tunnels were made by the “cut and cover” method: a deep trench would be excavated, side walls and roof built, and the ground surface backfilled. The process was expensive and slow, and it created chaos along the route of the railroad, not least of which was the dispossession of citizens and the demolition of buildings, often the homes of the poor. The first trial run was on 24 May 1862, and on 10 January 1863 the Metropolitan Railway opened, the world’s first underground line, between Bishop’s Road, Paddington, and Farringdon Street. There were 38,000 passengers on that first day, and from that moment the London Underground began to grow. In 1868 the first section of the Metropolitan District Railroad from South Kensington to Westminster was opened.

It was soon realized that, a citywide underground network must eventually pass beneath the River Thames. “Cut and cover” methods would not be appropriate to build such lines, but an “old” technology was already in place. Completed in 1843, Marc and Isambard Brunel’s Thames Tunnel had been dug using the former’s tunneling shield, patented in 1818. The machine had been improved in fifty years, and the engineer James Henry Greathead finally built a

lighter and (more importantly) circular version. In 1870, with one Peter Barlow, he drilled the 6-foot-diameter (1.83-meter) Tower Subway Tunnel from Tower Hill to Vine Lane. Its system of elevators and a twelve-seat car, all wound by steam-operated wire cable, was unreliable, and within months it was reduced to a pedestrian passage. Although extremely short-lived, it was the first tube railroad, and the construction method obviated all the disadvantages of “cut and cover.” Greathead’s tunneling machine had a diaphragm within, which segments of the cylindrical, cast-iron tunnel lining were bolted together as the excavator was advanced hydraulically; the gap between the excavation and the lining was filled with cement grout. Because it was circular in cross section, the tube was structurally stronger.

The next route to be completed was the Circle line in 1884. At that time all trains were drawn by steam locomotives, filling the tunnels with smoke and fumes. Steam trains could not operate in the deeper tunnels, and after considering cable-hauled cars, the decision was made to employ electric traction. Most of the transition took place in the first decade of the twentieth century, although the world’s first successful electric tube route, the City and South London Railway, was opened in December 1890. In 1902 an American, Charles Tyson Yerkes, financed the expansion of the network and by 1907 five new lines—Central, Northern City, Bakerloo, Piccadilly, and Charing Cross Euston and Hampstead—were opened, and electrification proceeded. Yerkes formed the Underground Electric Railway Company of London (known as the Underground Group). Between 1902 and 1905, they built the world’s largest power station, at Chelsea, to electrify the District line. Powering the Tube for almost a century, it was closed in 2000 when the Underground moved to the national grid. By 1913, mergers had brought all lines except the Metropolitan, into the group.

Underground services expanded from 1907 through the 1930s. In 1933 the Underground Group and the Metropolitan Railway were subsumed by the London Passenger Transport Board, which managed all public transport systems in the London area. Following World War II (when no fewer than eighty Underground stations served as air-raid shelters for Londoners), the Passenger Transport Board was nationalized and renamed the London Transport Executive, which in turn became the London Transport Board. More administrative changes began in May 2000, with the establishment of Transport for London, an executive body of the Greater London Authority.

In September 1968 the first section, of the Victoria line was opened, and extensions were completed by 1971. In May 1979 the Jubilee line opened, bringing the total number of routes beneath London to eleven: Bakerloo, Central, Circle, District, East London, Jubilee, Metropolitan, Northern, Piccadilly, Victoria, and Waterloo and City. Upgrades and improvements continue. Recently, computer signaling was introduced; the Central line was modernized and the Victoria line converted to automatic operation. The most significant addition to the complex system, begun in 1993, was the construction of the £1.9 billion (U.S.$2.8 billion) Jubilee line extension, the largest engineering project undertaken in Europe since the Channel Tunnel. Completed in May 1999, the new route from Westminster Station to Stratford via North Greenwich (to serve the Millennium Dome) involved negotiating the already crowded undercity with its myriad railroad tunnels, cables, drains, and service ducts, as well as overcoming subsidence problems.

Nearly 80 percent of Londoners working in central London travel to work on public transport, most of them on the Tube. Trains traveling at an average speed (including stops) of 20.6 mph (33 kph) move a total of almost a billion passengers annually over a multilevel underground network—some tubes reach 221 feet (67.4 meters) deep—that extends 45 miles (72 kilometers) east to west and 28 miles (45 kilometers) north to south. The first underground railroad in the world, which began with a track a mere 3.57 miles (5.7 kilometers) long, now covers 250 miles (392 kilometers); 42 percent of that is in tunnels.

Larkin Administration Building - Buffalo, New York

The Larkin Administration Building (1902–1906) by Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959) was his first major public work, built, as he said, “to house the commercial engine of the Larkin Company in light, wholesome, well-ventilated quarters.” It was a milestone in the history of commercial architecture, in terms of both its spatial organization and the exploitation of modern technology. Indeed, some historians identify it as the twentieth-century structure that, more than any other, changed the face of architecture; within a few years it was hailed in Europe. Peter Blake has claimed that it was the “first consciously architectural expression of the kind of American structure which Europeans were beginning to discover to their delight: the great clusters of grain silos and similar industrial monuments that [they] found so exciting in the early 1920s.” (Blake 1964, 55–56). The Larkin Company’s soap-manufacturing and mail-order operations occupied a large urban industrial site between Swan, Exchange, Van Renssalear, and Hamburg streets of Buffalo, in western New York State. Wright’s innovative building on Seneca Street, near the corner of Seymour and Swan, housed the firm’s administrative functions.

Around 1902 Wright realized that different building types called for different esthetic systems. Thereafter, he developed two patently distinct architectures. In his houses he pursued what might be called prairie horizontality—the line of repose that reached its best expression in the Frederick C. Robie House, Chicago (1908–1910). For nondomestic buildings, such as the Larkin Building; Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois (1905–1909); and Midway Gardens, Chicago (1913–1917), he adopted “Cubic Purism,” often squat and squarish with symmetrical plans and elevations. The rather severe exterior of the Larkin Building was relieved with sculpture by Richard Bock, who produced a globe of the world, supported by celestial beings and emblazoned with the company name.

The great six-story space in the center of the building—today we think of it as an atrium—was lit by a large skylight. It was surrounded by balconies; lit by high-level windows around the perimeter of the building, they contained the general office spaces, set out (years before their time) on an open plan. In keeping with Wright’s views about the nature of work, and no doubt with those of his client John D. Larkin, the interior espoused nonhierarchical, democratic office planning. There was even an employees’ lounge with a piano, where the company provided a weekly lunch-time concert for the workers; an organ stood at one end of the third story of the atrium. Many of the 1,800 employees worked at long desks running between the outer walls and the atrium. The lighting was an important part of the design; the desks received daylight from two sides: the exterior windows and the atrium. Electric lamps were mounted at the ends of the tables in the ground floor of the central court so that every office worker had well-balanced, shadow-free light. Wright believed in making total architecture and designed the lighting system himself, as well as the steel office furniture. The employees were protected from industrial pollution and the noise of the nearby rail yards by heavy red brick walls, and from undue interior noise by sound-absorbent surfaces. The revolutionary working environment was also air-conditioned, one of the first in the United States.

Just as he separated service rooms from living rooms in his contemporary houses, Wright gathered the services—electrical and plumbing ducts, stairways, toilets (he introduced wall-hung water closets to make cleaning easier), and heating systems—at the outer corners of the main building. “Beating the box” (as he put it), he expressed the service functions as square towers, “freestanding, individual features.”

Responding to criticisms by Russell Sturgess of The Architectural Record, who called it “an extremely ugly building” and “a monster of awkwardness,” Wright said in 1908, “It may be ugly … but it is noble. It may lack playful light and shade, but it has strength and dignity and power.” He went on to claim: “It is a bold buccaneer, swaggering somewhat … yet acknowledging a native god in a native land with an ideal seemingly lost to modern life—conscious of the

fact that because beauty is in itself the highest and finest kind of morality so in its essence must it be true.” His opinions, even if a little arrogant, were confirmed by the great Dutch architect H. P. Berlage, who spoke of the Larkin Building to attentive European audiences. To call it Wright’s magnum opus (exclaimed Berlage) “was not to say enough.” It was a building without equal in Europe, and there was “no office building [there] with the same monumental power.”

The Larkin Company went into decline in the 1930s, and within a decade its world-famous Administration Building was being used as a showroom. In 1949–1950, for “mysterious and untraceable reasons,” it was pointlessly demolished, brick by brick. Today, only a single pier remains—the site was never redeveloped but used as a parking lot—and in 1997 the outline of the building’s footprint was painted where once stood one of the most important achievements of twentieth-century architecture.

Lalibela rock-hewn churches - Ethiopia

Lalibela is a village in the mountainous Welo region of northern Ethiopia, about 440 miles (700 kilometers) north of Addis Ababa; in the Middle Ages it was known as Roha and was the capital of the Zagwe dynasty. Standing on a rock terrace at an elevation of 8,500 feet (2,600 meters), it is the site of eleven large rock-hewn monastic churches that date from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Each is architecturally distinctive and all are finely carved inside and out. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, they are not the earliest such churches in Ethiopia (others predate them by at least 500 years), but they are widely recognized as the most beautiful. Francisco Alvarez, a Portuguese Jesuit missionary, visited Lalibela in the 1520s, the first European to see the churches. He was reluctant to report to his superiors, fearing that they would not believe his account of buildings “unlike any to be seen elsewhere in the world.” Nevertheless, he described them. “hewn entirely out of the living rock, which is sculpted with great ingenuity.” The culturally unique churches are remarkable for that reason: each has been cut from the purple-red volcanic tufa, in some cases 90 feet (27 meters) into the ground. Some of them are connected by tunnels or passageways open to the sky. Even to the modern mind, they are an architectural marvel.

The history of the churches is swathed in mythology. It is probable that King Lalibela (1181–1221) commissioned them. According to legend, angels carried him to heaven when he was affected by a poison that his envious brother had administered; God sent him back to earth with instructions to build the churches and later dispatched angels to continue the work at night. Another account says that the king recruited Indian, Arab, and Egyptian builders, or even “white men” from Jerusalem, a link that is strengthened by the naming of the local river, Jordan. It has been suggested that, upon learning that the Holy City had fallen to Islam, Lalibela wanted to create a “new Jerusalem” in his secure mountain fastness. Tradition has it that the eleven buildings were completed in twenty-four years—archeologists calculate that would have needed 40,000 workers—but the time frame seems too short. Maskal Kabra, Lalibela’s queen, is said to have built one of them to his memory.

The churches stand in two groups flanking the Jordan. Four of them—Bet Medhane Alem, Bet Maryam, Bet Amanuel, and the cruciform Bet Ghiorghis, dedicated to Ethiopia’s patron saint—are in effect huge blocks of sculptured stone standing in deep excavated courtyards and attached to the rock only by their bases. Bet signifies “the house of.” They look like normal buildings, but each one is a single piece. The others must be accurately described as semimonolithic, because they remain attached to the rock by at least one face, whether the roof or walls. For example, although the twin churches of Bet Golgotha and Bet Qedus Mikael share a roof, they have, respectively, one and three facades exposed. Bet Abba Libanos is isolated from the mother rock except for its roof, which is integrated with the overhanging cliff; in front of it stands a large forecourt, cut from the tufa. The other churches are named Bet Danaghel, Bet Debre Sinai, Bet Gabriel-Rufa’el, Bet Merkorios, and Bet Meskel.

The eclectically blended artistic influences are varied—Greek, Egyptian, and even Islamic—and the nature and the extent of the carefully carved exterior and interior walls, ceilings, moldings, and window tracery are just as diverse. Bet Qedus Mikael has smooth exterior wall surfaces, and its interior is austere, decorated with Greek crosses; on the other hand, Bet Golgotha is more ornate, perhaps because it houses the tomb of King Lalibela, and it contains bas-reliefs of saints, the only sculptures in any Ethiopian church. Other churches have painted decoration, mostly with a teaching function, in various states of preservation.

The churches of Lalibela are home to hundreds of monks, clerics, and students, who celebrate liturgies that are the same as they were eight centuries ago. It is the most important pilgrimage site in Ethiopia, a country that includes an island of Christianity in a sea of Islam, and during the major holiday seasons it may be visited by as many as 50,000 devotees. More recently, Lalibela has become a tourist attraction, precisely because of its spectacular churches, and draws over 10,000 secular visitors a year. Inevitably, there is a tension between conservation and development. But because tourism is the village’s only real source of wealth and is encouraged by the central government, a compromise must be reached. In 1996 the European Community earmarked EUR4.7 million for shelters to replace the corrugated-steel roofs that covered Bet Medhane Alem, Bet Maryam, Bet Meskel, Bet Amanuel, and Bet Abba Libanos from damage caused by torrential rains, and an international architectural competition was held. Structures designed by the first-prize winners, Teprin Associati of Italy, were completed by December 2000. UNESCO and the Ethiopian Department of Preservation of Cultural Heritage are urging restoration of the deteriorating fabric of the churches.

Lal Quila (the Red Fort) - Delhi, India

Lal Quila (the Red Fort) was built between 1638 and 1648 at the command of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (who also built the Taj Mahal) as the royal residence in his new capital, Delhi. The fort, representing the highest achievement of Mughal architecture, contained all the accoutrements befitting a center of empire: public and private audience halls, domed marble palaces, luxuriously appointed private apartments, a mosque, and exquisite gardens. Much of the opulence has gone, but in its heyday its magnificence would have been unparalleled, as boasted by an inscription on one of its walls: “If on Earth be an Eden of bliss, it is this, it is this, none but this.”

Delhi stands at the western end of the plain of the Ganges. The epic Mahabharata speaks of it as a thriving city built about 1400 b.c., although archeo-logical reality suggests it was settled about 1,000 years later. The first city named Delhi was founded in the first century b.c. by Raja Dhilu; southwest of the modern location, it had six successors. Its Mughal history is relevant here. In 1526 Babur, the first Mughal ruler, established Delhi as the center of an empire that would unite vast areas of south Asia for the next two centuries. His son Humayun built a new city near Firuzabad but it was leveled when Afghan Sher Shah Suri overthrew him in 1540. He built a new capital, Sher Shahi, as the sixth city of Delhi. Once more eclipsed when the emperors Akbar and Jahangir moved their courts elsewhere, Delhi reached prominence, even glory, in 1638, when Akbar’s grandson Shah Jahan moved his capital from Agra to establish the seventh city of Delhi: Shahjahanabad, now known as Old Delhi. Most of it is still embraced by Shah Jahan’s walls, and four of its seventeenth-century gates still stand. He also built Lal Quila as the royal residence within the new city.

Almost immediately, Shah Jahan commissioned the architects Ustad Hamid and Ustad Ahmad to design a fitting royal residence—the Red Fort—at the northeastern corner of Shahjahanabad. It was completed within about ten years. An area of 124 acres (50 hectares) was enclosed within 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) of formidable defense walls. It was flanked by the Yamuna River on the eastern side, which fed a moat 76 feet (22.8 meters) wide and 30 feet (9 meters) deep. Thick red sandstone walls (from which the fort derives its name), punctuated by turrets and bastions, rose 60 feet (18 meters) from the river; those on the other side stood up to 112 feet (33.5 meters) above the surrounding terrain. Two of the six main entrances—the Lahori Gate and the Delhi Gate—survive. Now the moat is dry and the Yamuna flows almost a kilometer away, but Lai Quila towers above the modern city of Delhi that spreads out to the west.

The buildings within the walls are all carefully arranged on the long north-south and shorter east-west axes of the octagonal plan. Although they reveal the delicate work that can be found in all Mughal architecture, they exemplify the later phase of the style, characterized by the increasing use of marble, elaborate floral decoration of external surfaces, and the proliferation of tall minarets and bulbous domes. Shah Jahan seems to have preferred the flowing plant motifs inspired by the European sixteenth-century herbariums that had been perfected by his father’s artists. The walls of carefully cut marble were patterned with precious and semiprecious stones and surfaces were decorated with inlaid flowers of hard stones in many colors.

Immediately inside the fortified Lahori Gate was the Chatta Chowk, a vaulted two-story arcade containing thirty-two shops. East of it, on the same axis, was another gate called Naubat Khana (Drum House), also two stories high, from which musicians played martial, music for the emperor five times a day, or announced the arrival of important guests. Further east on the axis and across a courtyard stood the Diwan-i-Am (Public Audience Hall), ornamented with gilded stuccowork and hung with heavy curtains. There the emperor, seated in a canopied, marble-paneled alcove set with precious stones, would hear through his prime minister the complaints and petitions of the commoners. The Diwan-i-Am was also used for state functions. At the eastern terminus of the short axis of the plan stood the Rang Mahal—(Palace of Colors), its roof crowned with gilded turrets. It housed the emperor’s wives and mistresses. The interior was richly decorated with painting. Its ceiling, overlaid with silver and gold, was reflected in a pool in the marble floor. The Nahr-i-Bihist (Stream of Paradise) flowed through its center, feeding small water channels that flowed to cool the other rooms of the Red Fort.

The north-south axis, through the center of a courtyard that separated the Diwan-i-Am and the Rang Mahal, was flanked by sumptuous pavilions. In the Diwan-i-Khas (Hall of Private Audiences), the emperor met with his courtiers and dignified guests. Standing on a plinth and supported by thirty-two pillars, the white marble hall was decorated with floral patterns of precious stones. At its center the fabled Peacock Throne (carried off to Persia in 1739) stood on a white marble dais under a ceiling inlaid with silver and gold. South of that building lay the emperor’s private apartments, the Khas Mahal. On their east side was a large sitting room that opened to a cantilevered gallery, where each sunrise the emperor appeared before his subjects. At the northern end of the large square in front of these buildings stood the Hammam (Royal Bath). Built of marble and extravagantly decorated with inlay, glass, and paint, it comprised three apartments that were also used for private meetings. Shah Jahan’s son Aurangzeb built the Moti Masjid (Pearl Mosque) within an enclosing wall beside the Hammam in 1659–1660. At the northern end of the long axis stood a three-story octagonal tower, Shah Bhurj—the shah’s private working area. At the southern end Shah Jahan built the Mumtaz Mahal, a palace for his favorite daughter Jahanara Begum.

Mughal power waned in the eighteenth century. The British captured Delhi in 1803, and the city was the focus of India’s first war of independence—the British still prefer to call it the Indian Mutiny—in 1857. In 1911 the colonials moved their imperial capital from Calcutta to Delhi and began to build the eighth city, New Delhi, officially inaugurated in 1931. India finally expelled the British in 1947, and the nation celebrates its liberty by flying the Indian flag above Lal Quila each 15 August, Independence Day.