size of buildings and end of empires/civilisations

I just returned from London and noted the rapid skyward ascent of buildings. So many, so quickly.

It seems that all over the world city buildings are growing upwards and becoming more magnificent and majestic.

And then I was watching this video about the Egyptian Dynasties. Another one has been found. Perhaps the oldest.

www.youtube.com...

This was succeeded by more elaborate buildings to the Great Pyramid and then no progress.

iI wonder if there is a point in civilisations, where the size of buildings can predict the collapse of that civilisation?

a reply to: shipman

Is it that or the density of population centers? Maybe both.

When we consider the Great pyramids are but grand headstones, the biggest ever, it makes you wonder how much power and influence someone had over so many people to get them to invest so much time and energy to build them.

Modern cityscapes are even more vain and controlling, you ask me.

One day they will be ruins too.

a reply to: shipman

Perhaps a good study would be that of Dubai and their enormous skyscrapers.. www.heritage.org...

Where is their economy heading? Will their nation and infrastructure survive the changing times and their petroleum-based economy?

a reply to: shipman

Interesting idea. I suppose one might argue that any civilization that regularly produces over-large buildings is (a) wasting valuable work in producing monuments to earthly vanities, and/or (b) attempting to support overcrowding (thereby adding to and accelerating that problem). Neither of which, arguably, are good signs for a society's long-term stability.

But it could be an artifact of the sample, in that civilizations that have collapsed are just more easily detected and analysed if they left large structures.

The example I have in mind here is the imaginatively-named 'Mound Builder' civilization that existed in America at some point before Europeans arrived. We know absolutely nothing about the mound builders, except they left gargantuan earthworks all over the place, which must have taken decades it not centuries to construct. Carbon dating identifies them as being built as late as the 11th Century or as early as 300BC, or maybe spanning a period of five millennia, depending on who you believe.

The consensus today is that the mounds were built by Amerindians, which seems reasonable enough, except the only eyewitness accounts of mound builder culture are those of a few of the Conquistadors, who quite frankly could easily have made them up. E.g., there's accounts of the mound builders having plentiful gold artifacts, but no accounts of those artifacts being seized and the people massacred as one might expect.

There's even one extravagant yarn in which they encountered the Queen of the Mound Builders herself and captured her without a struggle (as you do), but wouldn't you know it, she escaped single-handed in the middle of the night and disappeared. Talk about 'the one that got away'!

If the accounts weren't inventions, the mound builders must have just sort of evaporated and left nothing else behind, not even a folk memory. The usual explanation is that they were decimated by smallpox or whatever other contagious delicacies the Europeans introduced, but the thing about this is that to be blunt there aren't any skeletons, which one would naturally assume to have been left lying around.

(N.b., the above is a bit of a mini-rant, a personal take on the facts, and therefore YMMV).

Anyway... the point of all that being that if the mound builders hadn't built mounds, we wouldn't even know they had ever existed.

a reply to: shipman

Interesting angle, although it would stand to reason that a civilization collapsing for any reason/from any cause, would be at the peak of its building majesty at the latest point in time before the downfall.

a reply to: FamCore

I'm not even sure Dubai's infrastructure was built to withstand a few decades. The place is like the world's sexiest supermodel, but with a skeleton made of hollow glass.

You could say that the grandest buildings are symbols of inequality by some measures. From the lowest paid worker involved to the most well to do occupier there must be a huge devide of wealth and life style. One could also find connections between inequality and the health of the culture that produces these monuments. I'd say yes for the most part, but you can't necessarily judge a book by its cover either. I think that in other times, some of the grandest and most elaborate structures were gifts from amazing and resilient people to future generations.

I've always believed that people have the ability to spend a small percentage of their time and energy preparing for life and all it's needs. We can learn to gather or produce food, shelter, clothing and transportation needs with a very small percentage of our time and energy. With the rest we could spend on art, culture and building, designing our environment into something beautiful and strong. Our opportunities are limitless, and that includes grandiose structures and buildings.

So I guess my answer to your question would be yes in most cases, but not all. I personally believe that the pyramids and some other structures of antiquity are in fact symbols of great civilisations that got it right for a time, and for a change in our history.

a reply to: shipman

S&F for an original premise. I believe the buildings rising upward reflect man's ego, his ability to conquer nature and master engineering. To prove his mastery of the environment. And I suppose if you're (not you) the God fearing type, then ego is a sin and therefore would get slapped down... so the downfall begins.

Well then, what does that say about China?

a reply to: Jason88

That being more or less exactly what happened in the story of the Tower of Babel.

a reply to: intrptr

Modern cityscapes are even more vain and controlling, you ask me.
Modern cityscapes are the product of high urban property values, not the grandiosity of despots.

Though I concede that Dubai is a bit of an exception.

a reply to: shipman

I think it is perhaps worth a deeper examination of the situation.

The larger one builds a monument, that is a structure which serves no function other than to commemorate an event or person, the more one may be trying to impress or placate, to make a statement.

However, modern buildings of significant scale, are not put together as monuments, cold, solid stone, whose purpose is mere edification. These modern buildings, for all that I loathe them for embuggering the skyline of a city which looked its best at least one hundred years before my birth, are fully functional, have a purpose beyond the fluffing of the ego of the dead, and the empowering of the leadership. They contain working people, living lives, working at jobs and doing their business, for all that this also is often distasteful and the work they do in those offices nothing more than binding people in paper and debt.