Pharaonic Megastructures

For the last week or two, I have been somewhat obsessed with the idea of pharaonic megastructures—those monster construction projects that are usually proposed by demented leaders, using public money to compensate for what is probably a personal physical inadequacy.  (A shortcoming, so to speak.)

These useless structures form some kind of contest among the various builders:  each successive pharaoh wanted the biggest pyramid, cities want the tallest building, communist dictators strive for the largest soccer stadium, simple-minded university presidents suffering from an Edifice Complex strive to build ever larger football stadiums.

It used to be a running joke that if you visited a communist country, as part of the government’s mandatory arranged tour, you would be steered to admire the new soccer stadium.  Just pick a dictator and google the name followed by the words ‘soccer stadium’.  Fidel Castro, Juan Peron, Daniel Ortega, Mao, and Hugo Chavez all have their stadiums.  Actually, at the time of his death, Hugo was building two soccer stadiums, both to be located next to his copy of Disneyland, in the appropriately named “Hugo Chavez Park”.  They might have moved the zoo there, too, if the starving people in Venezuela hadn’t been so desperately hungry that they killed and ate the animals.

As fascinating as I find every mega-rich oil country’s competing to build the world’s tallest building—a building so tall that more than half of the bottom floors are taken up by the elevators necessary to reach the top floors—what I find really interesting are the incredible mega-monster architectural boondoggles that were seriously proposed but were never actually built.

Let’s start with The Illinois.  By 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright was pushing 90, and there was growing criticism that some of the 500-odd homes he had designed were nothing more than a collection of unlivable, high-priced boxes.  Perhaps to prove his continued relevance, Wright announced plans to build the tallest building ever (even though there was no oil in Illinois).  While Chicago is the birthplace of skyscrapers, The Illinois was going to really push the envelope by rising a full mile above the city—a full 528 floors that would mean the building would have been roughly four times the height of the Empire State Building, which was at that time the tallest building in the world.

Wright wanted to build the building out of steel, meaning it might have been possible to actually construct the monster, but steel buildings sway in the wind.  At a mile above the ground, those top floors would have been tolerable only for bronc riders, circus acrobats, and astronauts.  And then, there was the problem of the elevators.  As buildings get taller, there is an increasing need for additional elevators, so that you eventually get to the point where the entire middle of the structure is full of the shafts necessary to reach the upper floors.  Today, innovative engineers are experimenting with elevator cars that move sideways into a different shaft to pass those cars that have stopped to let passengers on and off.  Back in 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a unique solution for this problem.

Wright wanted to use atomic-powered elevators that could reach 60 miles per hour.  And now you know one of the reasons The Illinois was never constructed.

Then there is the Volkshalle, the People’s Hall, designed by Adolf Hitler.  This is not exactly an obscure architectural work, but it is the one that most people have actually heard of.  In 1925, Hitler sketched out a rough drawing of a monster version of a huge hall, loosely based on Rome’s Pantheon.  After rising to power, Hitler turned the plans for the “Great Hall” over to his architect, Albert Speer.  Under Speer’s plan, the hall was to be the center point of Germania, the new, improved capitol complex of the country.

The dimensions of this proposed monster are staggering.  Over a thousand feet tall with an interior capacity so large that St. Peter’s Basilica could fit through the oculus…. Actually, the dimensions don’t really matter.  Hitler lost, the hall was never built, and as it turned out, it never could have been built.  Albert Speer was many despicable things, but he was also a good architect, and as such, he realized there was a problem:  Berlin is built on loose sand that is on top of a subterranean swamp, and it was not at all certain that a foundation could be constructed capable of supporting such a structure.

On the outskirts of Berlin, Speer conducted a test, building an ugly concrete mushroom called the Schwerbelastungskörper, that weighed over 12,600 tons and sat on a hundred square meter base.  Don’t let the name throw you—it just means “Heavy Load-Bearing Body”.  Within this ugly stump was situated a surveyor’s level aimed out a tiny window at a distant marker.  In a relatively short time, as measured by the surveyor’s level, the concrete mushroom sank five inches.  There was no way that Hitler’s much more massive Volkshalle could ever be constructed.  It is more than ironic that the only part of Hitler’s Germania that was ever constructed and is still standing is an ugly, overlooked concrete mushroom.

I’ve read all the books Albert Speer ever wrote.  He’s a great writer and his books are very good…so good that you can almost forget that he was a self-serving Nazi who used slave labor for his projects.  Nowhere in any of his books did Speer even mention this test.  Do you think Speer ever told Hitler his dream could never be built?  

The last weird megastructure that was proposed but never constructed would have been a monster statue that started out as a monument to the descamisados of Buenos Aires, the shirtless workers.  Juan Peron used the term as his own, but it originally came from Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo.  Later, Peron’s wife, Evita, became the champion for the underclass, speaking passionately for the poor, working tirelessly to be heard over the rattling of her diamond jewelry.

Evita wanted a massive statue of one of those workers, to be displayed on top of a huge plinth, the two of which together would have risen to more than 460 feet—more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty.  Underneath the statue was to be the tomb of a shirtless worker.  It was never actually explained why the figure on the top of the monument was to be wearing a shirt.  Supposedly, Evita had been inspired during a visit to Paris, when she visited the tomb of Napoleon at Les Invalides.

However, the statue, El Monumento al Descamisado, underwent a sudden design change.  On July 26, 1952, Eva Peron died from uterine cancer, a diagnosis that her husband had ordered her doctors to keep from her.  On the day of her death, the Argentine Chamber of Deputies enacted a law changing the figure on top of the plinth to be that of Evita, with her coffin to be entombed in the base and the inscription on the plinth to be, “Monument to Eva Peron”.

Work had barely begun on the foundation when Juan Peron was driven from office, and he took refuge in Spain.  Evita’s coffin had been stored in a government office and the new government was scared to death that the coffin might be a rallying point for those same descamisados.  The body was quietly shipped to Milan and buried in a cemetery under the name of Maria Maggi.  

Two decades later, Peron came back into power and Evita’s coffin was disinterred and shipped to Buenos Aires.  For a while, it was kept in Peron’s living room as sort of a creepy coffee table and Juan encouraged his new wife to lie on top of the coffin to “soak up some of Evita’s energy.”  After Juan died, his newly energized wife was briefly the President of Argentina and she suggested that instead of a statue, the prior site be used for a massive mausoleum for both Perons.

Instead, the military stepped in and put the former president under house arrest. Since the military junta was still worried about the potential for Evita’s coffin being used as a rallying symbol for Peron’s supporters, it had Evita buried in a nearby cemetery, supposedly under sufficient concrete that the body might survive a direct hit from a nuclear warhead.  

So maybe, that last megastructure actually was built and Evita finally did get her massive monument.  It’s just upside down and underground.