What We Can Learn From The Rise And Fall Of History's Great Buildings
For millennia, humans have built structures not only to house themselves, but to express their personalities and aspirations. But even history’s greatest structures fall prey to time and conquest, and their destruction often reflects the society that created them.
James Crawford (@jdcrawf) collects 21 architectural histories in “Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings,” and joins Here & Now‘s Meghna Chakrabarti to talk about the book.
- Scroll down to read an excerpt from “Fallen Glory”
Interview Highlights
On Palmyra, Syria, and its recent destruction by ISIS
“It really grew up and reached an incredible level of opulence over a very short period from about 20 AD up to about 200 AD. And it was built on money and trade, because the flow of goods between the Roman and Sasanian empires moved through this desert oasis — the only way to go between the two was through the city. So they were sort of part of the Roman Empire, but they had a large degree of autonomy at the same time, and basically they taxed the flow of goods and became fabulously wealthy as a result. And I think the Roman viewed them as slightly tacky and nouveau riche in terms of how they developed.”
“I think Islamic State apply an incredibly crude understanding of history, perhaps deliberately, because they don’t really care. One of the reasons I think they attacked Palmyra so
