THINKING BIG : Builders Tame the Eart, Touch the Sky

Since the day in history’s mist when a farmer, Romulus perhaps, marked the perimeter for the city’s first walls, Rome has been a prototype for models, materials and dreams adapted by builders of later civilizations for their own needs.

Look around. Builders’ lines flare from ancient Rome toward the 21st Century as surely as the roads that once yoked a vast empire and the high-arched aqueducts that carried water to Caesars’ fountains. Trajan’s Forum becomes the shopping mall, the Roman road a superhighway. Hadrian’s villa presages Versailles. The Colosseum leads to Camden Yards.

And Rome does not stand alone as an inspiration to the engineers and architects, the visionaries who would follow.

The great--and not so great--engineering projects of history mark humanity’s thirst to master the Earth and its resources, to pay homage, to build security: the Pyramids of Giza and the Colossus at Rhodes, China’s Great Wall.

Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, Roman. Each society developed structures in which to shelter, to teach, to sell, to govern, to pray, to lock away. Gravity-defying buildings have mirrored a society’s needs, aspirations and the realities of changing times: narrow archers’ slits in grim medieval castles, vaulted cathedrals, gracious pillar-fronted villas, suburban ranch houses, soaring suspension bridges, spaghetti-junctioned freeways.

The greatest among civilization’s structures are the legacy of the dreamers who conceive them, the rulers--government, commercial or ecclesiastic--who finance them, and the skilled artisans and humble laborers who make ideas reality, often at risk to life and limb.

“Well building hath three conditions: commoditie, firmenes and delight,” wrote poet Sir Henry Wotton in 1624. What he meant was that buildings should respond to the need for which they are constructed, that they should be well founded and that they should be pleasing to the eye.

The concepts are universal, if hardly revolutionary: Wotton borrowed the phrase from Italy’s Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, whose work would help shape Washington, D.C., far off in time and distance, and Palladio lifted his theory from Vitruvius, a Roman builder in the 1st Century before Christ.

Thus, much of what is new is also old in the closing days of a century in which modern builders have combined audacity with technology to compose marvels as compelling as any ancient Hanging Garden.

Over time, each great project has been succeeded by one greater, most of them embodying a leap of engineering vision: irrigation canals, aqueducts, Greek columns, the Roman arch, the Taj Mahal, De Lessep’s canal, Eiffel’s tower, the skyscraper, the geodesic dome, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Alaska pipeline, the Chunnel, the Three Gorges Dam.

There are other aftereffects. Frustrated pharaohs, popes, presidents and every homeowner who ever decided to add a bathroom bear testimony across history that few buildings have cost what the architect said they would, or were ready when the contractor promised.

Over the centuries, advances in techniques have generally paralleled those in industrialization and mathematics. But there are constants: Reed building techniques developed by the Egyptians 6,000 years ago survived until late this century among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. And there have been startling discontinuities. For instance, concrete, the oldest synthetic building material, was developed by the Romans but, astonishingly, for about 1,300 years the formula was essentially lost in Europe; it did not play a major construction role until the invention of reinforced concrete in the 1860s.

In these modern days, technical developments have accelerated, like the high-speed elevators that have made skyscrapers livable.

The first major multistory concrete building was opened in 1886, the Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, Fla.

By 1942, workers had mixed 8,100,000 cubic meters of concrete for the Grand Coulee Dam across the Columbia River in Washington. That’s nearly three times as much masonry as in the Great Pyramid of Khufu, built more than 4,500 years ago and still one of the largest buildings ever erected.

The use of iron as a building material--with steel and glass not far behind--marked the most far-reaching revolution in the history of building. Iron was first used as a primary structural element at St. Anne’s church in Liverpool in 1772, and the first all-steel skyscraper, the Rand McNally Building, was finished in 1890. That was in Chicago, where the taller-than-all Sears Tower now touches low clouds.

If it all sounds easy, it shouldn’t.

“The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines--so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings,” advised the widely traveled American innovator Frank Lloyd Wright.

Every project is a risk. There are hits. And, inevitably, there are misses. Some are footnotes: the Spruce Goose, the Edsel. Some are disasters: the Titanic, the Hindenburg, Russia’s unnavigable White Sea canal, which claimed the lives of 100,000 workers.

History’s lesson to builders, then, on the eve of a new century, is as simple as it is oft unheeded:

Be audacious.

And beware.