Avebury Stone Circle England

The Avebury Stone Circle, covering around 28 acres (11 hectares), is the largest known stone circle in the world. It partly embraces the linear village of Avebury, 90 miles (145 kilometers) west of London in a part of England that is replete with prehistoric remains: Silbury Hill: the Sanctuary; and the long barrows of East Kennet, West Kennet, and Beckhampton. John Aubury, who accidentally discovered if while foxhunting in the winter of 1648, wrote that Avebury “does as much exceed in greatness the so renowned Stonehenge as a Cathedral doeth a parish Church.” Indeed, it is sixteen times the size of Stonehenge.

When the Avebury circle was intact, its complex, if rather irregular, geometry comprised a 30-foot-deep (9.2-meter) ditch inside a 20-foot-high (6-meter) grass-covered chalk bank 1,396 feet (427 meters) in diameter. One observer describes it as “a curiously amorphous ‘D’ shape.” The ditch, possibly once filled with water, enclosed an outer circle of about 100 enormous, irregular standing stones that varied in height from 9 to 20 feet (2.7 to 6 meters). Within the large circle, there were two inner circles, each about 340 feet (104 meters) in diameter. The northern one (now largely destroyed) seems to have comprised two concentric rings, one of twenty-seven stones and one of twelve; at their center stood three larger stones. The southern circle had a single 20-foot-high (6-meter) stone at its center. The inmost circles are thought to have been set up about 2600 b.c.; the outer ring and enclosing earthworks have been dated at a century later.
Its construction called for colossal effort on the part of the builders. The standing stones were quarried and dressed 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from their final position, dragged or perhaps sledded to the site—some weighed 45 tons (41 tonnes)—and set upright. The excavation of the vast surrounding ditch with rudimentary stone tools yielded an estimated

200,000 tons (203,200 tonnes) of spoil, mostly chalk stone. Some of the spare material may have been carried 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) to construct the mysterious 130-foot-high (39.6-meter) chalk mound known as Silbury Hill, just outside the village of Avebury. Many of the stones are now missing, possibly “quarried” by farmers or cleared for agricultural and even religious reasons since about the fourteenth century a.d., when villagers actually buried some of them. Only 36 of the original 154 megaliths remain standing.

The outer circle was broken to form four 50-foot-wide (15.3-meter) entrances, facing approximately north, south, east, and west. Two were the terminations of avenues of the same width, defined by standing stones and extending up to 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) across the surrounding countryside. According to the eighteenth-century antiquarian William Stukeley, the so-called West Kennet Avenue ran south to the Sanctuary, another stone circle on Overton Hill; the one named Beckhampton Avenue ran west to end at the neolithic tomb known as Beckhampton Long Barrow. Stukeley’s measured drawings, made before 1743, are the only surviving record of the former condition of the site. He interpreted the ground plan of Avebury as the body of a serpent passing through a circle—a traditional alchemical symbol—and whose head and tail were marked by the avenues.
Recent investigations have led some scholars to speculate that the Avebury circle was part of a network of sacred places that stretched 200 miles (360 kilometers) across southern England. Similar to Stonehenge and many other megalithic monuments in Britain, the Avebury Stone Circle formed part of at least a local complex of megalithic works. The whole complex probably continued to be used for around 2,300 years. That persistence and the very size of the Avebury Stone Circle give weight to the suggestion that it was “perhaps the most significant sacred site in all of Britain, if not the entire continent of Europe.” The renaissance of paganism in the West at the end of the twentieth century excited new interest in its elusive mysteries.

Further reading

Burl, Aubrey, and Edward Piper. 1980. Rings of Stone: The Prehistoric Stone Circles of Britain and Ireland. New Haven, CT: Ticknor and Fields.

Grundy, Alan H. 1994. Britain’s Prehistoric Achievements. Lewes, UK: Book Guild.

Hadingham, Evan. 1975. Circles and Standing Stones. London: Heinemann.

Aswan High Dam Egypt

The Aswan High Dam, replacing earlier dams, contains the River Nile nearly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) upstream from Cairo by a massive embankment 375 feet (114 meters) high and 3,280 feet (1,003 meters) long, built of earth and rock fill with a clay and concrete core. It impounds Lake Nasser, one of the largest reservoirs in the world, covering an area more than 300 miles (480 kilometers) long and 10 miles (16 kilometers) wide, that holds enough water to irrigate over 7 million acres (2.8 million hectares) of farmland for many years. Its economic and social impact on the lower reaches of the Nile (that is, in the north of Egypt) makes it an engineering feat of some importance, although

The annual flooding of the Nile has been the historical life source of Egypt, in what is almost a rainless region. Almost all the population lives within 12 miles (20 kilometers) of the river. The flooding—13 billion to 169 billion cubic yards (12 billion to 155 billion cubic meters)—is caused by late-summer rains on Ethiopia’s plateaus that find their way into the Nile’s tributaries. Late in the nineteenth century, regional population growth was outstripping agricultural production, and the river had to be controlled to recover stability. The first Aswan Dam was built from 1899 to 1902 and raised in 1907–1912 and again in 1929–1934. When its potential to generatenot necessarily always beneficial.

the power needed in industrializing economies was realized, hydroelectric installations were added in 1960. But its inadequate storage capacity meant that in years of extreme flooding, sluices would have to be opened to protect the structure, thereby, ironically, inundating the very areas the dam was meant to protect. Designs for the High Dam, 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) south of the existing structure, were put in hand in 1952. Egypt and Sudan signed the Nile Water Agreement in November 1959.

President Gamal Abel el Nasser initiated the Aswan High Dam project. Because of his connections with the Communist bloc, the United States and Britain refused to secure loans, so the Soviet Union provided civil engineers to design the earthen dam and supplied the equipment and 400 technicians and electrical engineers to build the hydroelectric power station. Moreover, almost a third of the estimated U.S.$1 billion cost was met by the Soviet Union, and the remainder was funded by Egypt’s controversial nationalization of the Suez Canal. Construction, commenced in 1960, was complete by mid-1968. The last of the twelve turbines was installed in 1970, and President Anwar Sadat officially inaugurated the High Dam.
Despite causing some ecological problems, the dam brought good outcomes for the people of the Nile valley. For example, with a regulated agricultural system in place, through multiple cropping the nation’s agricultural income has increased by 200 percent. For all that, the poor drainage of the newly irrigated lands has led to increased salinity, and more than half of Egypt’s arable soils are now medium to poor in quality. Village communities were provided with water and electricity. A fishing industry was established, with an annual production target of 112,000 tons (101,600 tonnes) by the year 2000. The hydroelectric scheme generates 2,100 megawatts, about half of Egypt’s annual needs at the time of construction; demand has since increased, and the Aswan High Dam now provides a little over 20 percent. Egypt was untouched by the drought over much of Africa in the late 1980s, and during the following decade the land was saved from several unusually high floods. In 1996 Lake Nasser rose above the spill level for the first time, and plans are in hand to open up more irrigated farmland, even recovering parts of the Sahara Desert.
Nevertheless, the construction of the Aswan High Dam has caused some problems, mostly as cumulative effects of impeding the flow of the river. Farmers have had to turn to artificial fertilizers to replace the nutrients that no longer reach the floodplain. Before the High Dam was built, half the water flowing in the Nile reached the Mediterranean; the millions of tons of silt it once carried to the sea are now mostly trapped behind the dam; consequently the ocean is eroding the coastline. The now-stagnant waters in the Delta destroyed long-standing ecological systems, and the loss of nutrients from the river has drastically damaged the sardine industry in the Mediterranean: 20,000 tons (18,288 tonnes) were caught in 1962; that figure was reduced to only 670 tons (609 tonnes) in 1969. Other branches of the Mediterranean fishing industry were similarly affected. Thankfully, for whatever reasons, there has since been a complete recovery.
The Aswan High Dam also had social and cultural implications. Not least traumatic of these was the displacement of population. More than 90,000 Nubians had to be relocated; those living in Egypt were moved about 28 miles (45 kilometers), but Sudanese Nubians had to move to new homes 370 miles (600 kilometers) away. Much of Lower Nubia was submerged under Lake Nasser, including archeological sites between the First and Third Cataracts of the Nile. At the urging of UNESCO, a rescue program named the Nubia Salvage Project was started in 1960 by the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. As a result, twenty monuments from the Egyptian part of Nubia (including the front of the rock-hewn tomb at Abu Simbel) and four others from the Sudan were dismantled, relocated, and reerected. Others were documented before their inundation, but some were lost forever without being recorded.

Further reading

Fahim Hussein M. 1981. Dams, People, and Development: The Aswan High Dam Case. New York: Pergamon.

Little, Tom, 1965. High Dam at Aswan: The Subjugation of the Nile. New York: John Day.

Shibl, Yusuf A. 1971. The Aswan High Dam. Beirut: Arab Institute for Research and Publishing.

Artemiseion Ephesus, Turkey

The Artemiseion, a huge Ionic temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis, stood in the city of Ephesus on the Aegean coast of what was then Asia, near the modern town of Selcuk, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) south of Izmir, Turkey. The splendid building was acclaimed as one of the seven wonders of the world, as attested by Antipater of Sidon: “When I saw the sacred house of Artemis 1/4 the [other wonders] were placed in the shade, for the Sun himself has never looked upon its equal outside Olympus.” Among several attempts to identify the architectural and sculptural wonders of the ancient world, the seven best known are those listed by Antipater in the second century b.c. Artemis was the Greek moon goddess, daughter of Zeus and Leto. Whatever form she was given, it was always linked with wild nature. On the Greek mainland she was usually portrayed as a beautiful young virgin, a goddess in human form. In Ephesus and the other Ionic colonies of Asia, where ancient ideas of the Earth Mother and associated fertility cults persisted, she was linked with Cybele, the mother goddess of Anatolia, and her appearance was dramatically different, even grotesque. The original cult statue has long since disappeared, but copies survive. That is hardly surprising, because the trade in them flourished in Ephesus at least until the first century a.d. They portray a standing figure, her arms outstretched like those of the earlier décolleté figurines common in Minoan Crete. Artemis was fully dressed except for her many breasts, symbolizing her fertility (although some recent scholars have suggested that the bulbous forms are bulls’ scrotums). The lower part of her body was covered with a tight-fitting skirt, decorated with plant motifs and carved in relief with griffins and sphinxes. She wore a head scarf decorated and confirmed soon after by one Philo of Byzantium.

in the same way and held in place with a four-tiered cylindrical crown. Ancient sources say that the original statue was made of black stone, enriched with gold, silver, and ebony.

The Artemis shrines at Ephesus had a checkered history. The earliest was established on marshy land near the river, probably around 800 b.c.; it was later rebuilt and twice enlarged. The sanctuary housed a sacred stone—perhaps a meteorite—believed to have fallen from Zeus. By 600 b.c. Ephesus had become a major port, and in the first half of the fifth century, its citizens commissioned the Cretan architect Chersiphron and his son Metagenes to build a larger temple in stone to replace the timber structure. In 550 b.c. it also was destroyed when the Lydian king, Croesus, invaded the region. Croesus, whose name has passed into legend for his fabulous wealth, contributed generously to a new temple, the immediate predecessor to the “wonder of the world.” It was four times the area of Chersiphron’s temple, and over 100 columns supported its roof. In 356 b.c. one Herostratos, a young man “who wanted his name to go down in history,” started a fire that burned the temple to the ground.
The Ephesian architects Demetrios and Paeonios (and possibly Deinocrates) were commissioned to design a more magnificent temple, built to the same plan and on the same site. The first main difference was that the new building stood on a 9-foot-high (2.7-meter) stepped rectangular platform measuring 260 by 430 feet (80 by 130 meters), rather than a lower crepidoma like the earlier stone building. Another departure from the normally austere and reserved Greek architectural tradition was the opulence of the temple, which went beyond even its great size. Its porch (pronaos) was very deep: eight bays across and four deep. The Ionic columns towered to 48 feet (17.7 meters); each had, in place of the usual Ionic base, a 14-foot-high (3.5-meter) lower section, carved with narrative decorations in deep relief. The other difference was in the quality of the detail. The wonder of the world was decorated with bronze statues by the most famous contemporary artists, including Scopas of Paros. Their detail can only be guessed at, as can the overall appearance of the great temple. Attempts have been made at graphical reconstruction, but they vary widely in their interpretation of the sparse archeological evidence. Antipater described the Artemiseion as “towering to the clouds,” and Pliny the Elder called it a “wonderful monument of Grecian magnificence, and one that merits our genuine admiration.” Pliny also asserted that it took 120 years to build, but it may have taken only half that time. It was unfinished in 334 b.c. when Alexander the Great arrived in Ephesus.
By the time the Artemiseion was vandalized by raiding Goths in a.d. 262—it was partly rebuilt—both the city of Ephesus and Artemis-worship, once flaunted as universal, were in decline. When the Roman emperor Constantine redeveloped elements of the city in the fourth century a.d., he declined to restore the temple. By then, with most Ephesians converted to Christianity, it had lost its reason for being. In a.d. 401 it was completely torn down on the instructions of John Chrysostom. The harbor of Ephesus silted up, and the sea retreated, leaving barely habitable swamplands. As has so often happened, the ruined temple was reduced to being a quarry, and its stone sculptures were broken up to make lime for plaster. The old city of Ephesus, once the administrative center of the Roman province of Asia, was eventually deserted.
The temple site was not excavated until the nineteenth century. In 1863 the English architect John Turtle Wood set out to find the legendary building, under the auspices of the British Museum. He persisted through six expeditions and in 1869 discovered the base under 20 feet (6 meters) of mud. He ordered an excavation that exposed the whole platform. Some remains are now in the British Museum, others in the Istanbul Archeological Museum. In 1904 and 1905 another British expedition, led by David Hogarth, found evidence of the five temples, each built on top of the former. Today the site is a marshy field, a solitary column the only reminder that in that place once stood one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

Further reading

Clayton, Peter, and Martin Price. 1988. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. London: Routledge.

Cox, Reg, and Neil Morris. 1996. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Parsippany, NJ: Silver Burdett

Archigram

The Archigram group was established in 1961 by a few young British architects “united by common interests and antipathies.” Its founders were Peter Cook, Michael Webb, and David Greene, who were soon joined by Dennis Crompton, Ron Herron, and Warren Chalk. Archigram’s international impact—its architectural feat, so to speak—was significant. Other architects would give form to its notions. The Centre Pompidou, Paris, by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, and Arata Isozaki’s buildings at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair are redolent of the fantastic schemes drawn, but never built, by Archigram. The Austrian architect Hans Hollein, too, admits his debt to them after 1964. It is in the realm of ideas about living in an advanced industrial civilization that they offered most.

All the founders had been students at the Architecture Association school in London, where they had learned, in the face of a then-reactionary architectural profession, to apply democratic principles to the art. The members who came later assimilated those ideas and blended them with other influences, notably the futuristic urban visions of Friedrich Kiesler and Bruno Taut and the technological notions of Richard Buckminster Fuller, whom they heroized. They also formed a symbiotic intellectual association with the exactly contemporary Japanese Metabolist group, in which Isozaki was preeminent. The Japanese applauded their efforts to “dismantle the apparatus of Modern Architecture.”
Like the Dutch De Stijl group around 1920, Archigram’s cooperation was mainly through a polemical journal; and like the Hollanders, it drew its name from the title of the journal. Archigram (derived from “architecture” and “telegram” or “aerogram”) was published (almost) annually between 1961 and 1974. Archigram, more like a polemical broadsheet than a journal, directed an attack on the smugness of modernist architectural conservatism, reinforced by what can best be called Britishness. The powerful publication ran to ten annual issues, preaching an urgent message about architecture that has been described as “esthetic technocratic idealism.” Possibly the most significant architectural publication of the decade, its “pop” format, including beautifully drawn comic strips, declared the group’s “optimism and possibilities of technology and the counterculture of the pop generation.”
The 1964 issue, after a controversial “Living City” exhibition at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, attracted the critic Reyner Banham, who became the group’s champion. There followed a succession of (perhaps) outlandish architectural proposals. Archigram’s direction was urban, technological, autocratic—and some have said inhumane. The members believed that technology was the hope of the world, so traditional means of building houses and cities must be superseded. Their favorite

were change, adaptability, flexibility, metamorphosis, impermanence, and ephemerality. Accordingly, they designed a living environment that incorporated all kinds of gadgetry. They proposed an inflatable bodysuit containing food, radio, and television, and the “suitaloon,” a house carried on the back. These eccentric ideas extended from the individual to the communal: Chalk’s Capsule Homes (1964) were projected alongside Cook’s Plug-in City (1964–1966), in which self-contained living units could be temporarily fitted into towering structural frames, and Herron’s nomadic Walking City; in which skyscrapers could move on giant telescoping legs. The group published its Instant City in 1968.

It has been suggested that in the 1960s Archigram was to modern architecture what the Beatles were to modern music. But in the early 1970s they more or less dispersed, Greene and Herron (for a while) becoming teachers in the United States. Crompton, Cook, and Herron formed Archigram Architects (1970–1974). Herron and Cook then established independent practices in various partnerships. Crompton maintained links with the Architectural Association, and Greene turned to writing poetry and practicing architecture. Webb moved permanently to the United States and after 1975 taught at Cornell and Columbia Universities in New York. Chalk continued writing and teaching in the United States and England, mostly at the Architectural Association, until he died in 1987.

See also

Industrialized building; Pompidou Center (Beaubourg)

Further reading

Archigram. (1961–1974). 10 issues (numbers 1-91/2). London: Archigram.

Cook, Peter, ed. 1972. Archigram. London: Studio Vista.

Crompton, Dennis ed. 1994. A Guide to Archigram, 1961–1974. London: Architectural Press

words

Appian Way Italy

The Appian Way (Via Appia), the oldest and perhaps most famous Roman road, was built by the Censor Appius Claudius Caecus in 312 b.c. Enlarging a track between Rome and the Alban Hills and forming the main route to Greece and the eastern colonies, this so-called queen of roads (regina viarumeters) ran south from the Porta Capena in Rome’s Servian Wall to Capua. It passed through the Appii Forum to the coastal town of Anxur (now Terracina), 60 miles (100 kilometers) from Rome, to which point it was almost straight, despite crossing the steep Alban Hills and the swampy Pontine Marshes. In 190 b.c. it was extended to Brundisium (modern Brindisi) on the Adriatic coast—more than 350 miles (560 kilometers) from the capital and eighteen days’ march for a legion. Parts of it—now called the Via Appia Antica—remain in use after more than 2,000 years.

The medieval proverb “A thousand roads lead man forever toward Rome” was popularized in William Black’s Strange Adventures of a Phaeton (1872) as “All roads lead to Rome.” That was probably once true: the Romans built about 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers) of paved roads throughout their empire, mainly to expedite movements of the legions. Inevitably, the system was put to wider use and eventually served all kinds of travelers: dignitaries, politicians, commercial traffic of all kinds, and even an official postal service.
Roman engineers efficiently developed road-building techniques to create enduring structures. Usually (but not always), roads were laid upon a carefully constructed embankment (agger) to provide a foundation—rubble laid in such a way as to provide proper drainage—for the base. The dimensions of the agger varied according to the importance of the road. Sometimes it may have been just a small ridge, but on major routes it could be up to 5 feet high and 50 wide (1.5 by 15 meters). For very minor roads no embankment was built, but two rows of curbstones defined the carriageway; the excavation between them was layered with stones and graded material, the topmost sometimes forming the pavement. Overall, the depth of a Roman road from the surface to the bottom of the base was up to 5 feet. It seems that road width varied according to function, importance, and topography. The widest (decumanus maximus) was 40 feet (12.2 meters) wide, while a minor road might be only 8 feet (2.4 meters). Rural thoroughfares were generally 20 feet (6 meters), but all roads became narrower over difficult terrain: some mountain passes, at less than 10 feet, were too narrow (and often too steep) for carts.
Although stone was sometimes transported from a few miles away, local material was normally used. Of course, that practice gave rise to differences in construction along the length of a road, as is evident in the Via Appia. At one place a 3-foot-thick (1-meter) bottom layer of earth and gravel from the neighboring mountains was consolidated between the curbs and covered by a thinner layer of gravel and crushed limestone, also contained by parallel rows of closely placed large stones. Elsewhere, a base layer of sand was covered with another of crushed limestone into which slabs of lava up to 15 inches (50 centimeters) thick were fixed. Stone surfaces were mandatory for urban streets after 174 b.c., but other

roads were not always stone-paved, especially in difficult terrain. Like the substructure, surfaces varied according to what materials were locally available: gravel, flint, small broken stones, iron slag, rough concrete, or sometimes fitted flat stones were used. The pavement thickness varied from a couple of inches on some roads to 2 feet (0.6 meter) at the crown of others. Surfaces sloped down—as steeply as 1 in 15—from the center, to allow rainwater runoff into flanking ditches.

Roman roads were strong enough to support half-ton metal-wheeled wagons, and many were wide enough to accommodate two chariots abreast. Some roads were provided with intentional ruts, intended to guide wagons on difficult stretches. Under normal traffic a paved Roman road lasted up to 100 years. Beginning with the Appian Way, the ancient Roman engineers flung an all-weather communication network across Italy and eventually their empire. The poet Publius Papinius Statius wrote late in the first century a.d.:

• How is it that a journey that once took till sunset
• Now is completed in scarcely two hours?
• Not through the heavens, you fliers, more swiftly
• Wing you, nor cleave you the waters, you vessels.

Further reading

Chevallier, Raymond. 1976. Roman Roads. London: Batsford.

Hagen, Victor von, and Adolfo Tomeucci. 1967. The Roads That Led to Rome. Cleveland: World Publishing.

White, K. D, 1984. Greek and Roman Technology. London: Thames and Hudson.

Angkor Wat Cambodia

Angkor Wat, a temple complex dedicated to the Hindu deity Vishnu, was built in the twelfth century a.d. in the ancient city of Angkor, 192 miles (310 kilometers) northwest of Phnom Penh. It is probably the largest (and, as many have claimed, the most beautiful) religious monument ever constructed. Certainly it is the most famous of all Khmer temples.

Angkor served as the capital of the Khmer Empire of Cambodia from a.d. 802 until 1295. Evidence uncovered since 1996 has led some scholars to assert that the site may have been occupied some 300 years earlier than first thought, obviously affecting accepted chronologies. Whatever the case, its powerful kings held sway from what is now southern Vietnam to Yunnan, China, and westward from Vietnam to the Bay of Bengal. The city site was probably chosen for strategic reasons and for the agricultural potential of the region. The Khmer civilization was at its height between 879 and 1191, and as a result of several ambitious construction projects, Angkor eventually grew into a huge administrative and social center stretching north to south for 8 miles (13 kilometers) and east to west for 15 miles (24 kilometers). The population possibly reached 1 million.
Apart from the hundreds of buildings—temples, schools, hospitals, and houses—there was an extensive system of reservoirs and waterways. The public and domestic buildings, all of timber, have long since decayed. But because they were the only structures in which masonry was permitted, over 100 temple sites survive. Earlier examples were mostly of brick, but later, the porous, iron-bearing material known as laterite was used, and still later sandstone, quarried about 25 miles (40 kilometers) away.
The city of Angkor was the cult center of Devaraja, the “god-king,” and an important pilgrimage destination. The Khmer kings themselves, from Jayavarman II (802–850) onward, had come to be worshiped as gods, and the temples they built were regarded as not only earthly but also as symbols of Mount Meru, the cosmological home of the Hindu deities. The official state religion was worship of the Siva Lingam, which signified the king’s divine authority. Jayavarman II had identified the kingship with Siva, and acting upon that precedent, King Suryavarman H (1113—ca. 1150) presented himself as an incarnation of Vishnu. He built Angkor Wat as a temple and administrative center for his empire and as his own sepulcher (which is why it faces west); to celebrate his status, he dedicated it to Vishnu.
Financed by the spoils of war and taking over thirty years to finish, the sandstone-and-laterite Angkor Wat occupies a 2,800-by-3,800-foot (850-by-1,000-meter) rectangular site. Its layout provides an architectural allegory of the Hindu cosmology. The temple is surrounded by a 590-foot-wide (180-meter) moat, over 3 miles (5 kilometers) long, which represents the primordial ocean. A causeway decorated with carvings of the divine serpents leads to a 617-foot-long (188-meter) bridge that gives access to the most important of four gates. The temple is reached by passing through three galleries separated by paved walkways. It is an approximately pyramidal series of terraces and small buildings arranged in three ascending stories—they stand for the mountains that encompass the world—and surmounted at the center by a temple “mountain” of five lotus-shaped towers, symbolizing the five peaks of Mount Meru. Four of the original nine towers have succumbed to time and weather. The temple walls are replete with wonderfully crafted bas-reliefs, many of which were once painted and gilded, including about 1,700 heavenly nymphs and others that depict scenes of Khmer daily life, episodes from the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, the exploits of Vishnu and Siva, and (of course) the heroic deeds of King Suryavarman II.
In 1177 Angkor fell to the Cham army from northern Cambodia, who held it until it was retaken early in the reign of the Khmer King Jayavarman VII (1181–ca. 1215). When he built Angkor Thom nearby he dedicated his new capital to Buddhism, and Angkor Wat became a Buddhist shrine. Many of its carvings and statues of Hindu deities were replaced by Buddhist art. The Thais sacked Angkor in 1431. The following year the Khmers abandoned the city, and it was left to the encroaching jungle for a few centuries. However, Theravada Buddhist monks kept Angkor Wat as intact as possible until the late nineteenth century, making it one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in Southeast Asia.
The French explorer Henri Mouhot “discovered” Angkor in 1860. After French imperialism imposed itself in Indochina in 1863, the site attracted the scholarly interest of westerners. In 1907, when Cambodia had been made a French protectorate and Thailand returned Angkor to its control, L’École Française d’Extreme Orient established the Angkor Conservation Board. It seems that for forty years the European colonizers were more interested in reconstructing Angkor Wat than in undertaking scholarly restoration. The prodigal use of reinforced concrete made many of the buildings unrecognizable. The vandalism was mercifully halted when Khmer Rouge

guerrillas occupied the site, followed by the Vietnamese army. When an uneasy peace was restored in 1986, the Archaeological Survey of India took up the project, replacing much of the French work with more modern and less intrusive techniques. At the invitation of the Cambodian government, the Japanese Government Team for Safeguarding Angkor began a four-year preservation and restoration project in November 1994, initially focused on the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom but extending to the outer buildings of Angkor Wat. Because of delays caused by the July 1997 conflicts in Cambodia, the program was extended into 1999.

Further reading

Fujioka, Michio Tsuenari Kazumori, and Chikao Mori. 1972. Angkor Wat. Tokyo: Kodansha International.

Mannikka, Eleanor, 1996. Angkor Wat: Time, Space, and Kingship. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Narasimhaiah, B. 1994. Angkor Wat, India’s Contribution in Conservation, 1986–1993. New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India.

Amsterdam Central Station The Netherlands

Amsterdam Central Station is in fact geographically central in the city. Although it conformed to the general pattern of many metropolitan railroad stations before and after, it was an architectural and engineering achievement in that it was built on three artificial islands in the River IJ, supported by no fewer than 26,000 timber piles driven into the soft river bottom. That was a feat perhaps remarkable to the rest of the world but quite commonplace to the Dutch, who for centuries had coped with too much water and too little land.

Economic activity in Amsterdam revived with the railroads in the second half of the nineteenth century. New shipyards and docks were built. Extravagant public buildings such as P. J. H. Cuypers’s National Museum (1876–1915) and H. P. Berlage’s famous Stock Exchange (1884–1903) celebrated both the financial boom and awakening nationalism. In 1876 Cuypers and A. L. van Gendt were commissioned to design the Amsterdam Central Station. It was the first time that such work had been trusted to an architect rather than to engineers, a decision taken because the building would hold an important place in the nation’s image. Indeed, the brief jingoistically demanded that it should be in the Oud-Hollandsche (Old Dutch) style.
That qualification presented little difficulty to Cuypers, who had developed a personal historical-revivalist manner based on late Gothic and early Renaissance forms and ideas. His abundantly decorated National Museum was already under construction. Eclectically drawing on a wide variety of styles, it did not readily expose his rationalist architectural philosophy, gleaned from E. E. Viollet-le-Duc’s theories. Cuypers wanted to restore the crafts to a place of honor and insisted on the honest application of traditional materials. He was responsible for the appearance of the station; van Gendt, thoroughly experienced as mechanical engineer for the railroad, would take care of constructional aspects.
Work commenced in 1882. The station was built on the artificial islands in the Open Havenfront of Amsterdam’s original harbor, which had been cut off from the River IJ by the railroad. Special engineering skill was needed to create a solid foundation for the massive building and the rolling loads imposed by trains. As noted, 26,000 timber piles support the structure. The four-story station building, of red brick with stone dressings, is unmistakably Dutch. It is 1,020 feet (312 meters) long and 100 feet (30.6

meters) deep. On the axis of Damrak—the main street leading to the dam in the downtown area—a central pavilion flanked with clock towers houses the main entrance to the concourse. Its facade is resplendent with ornament: the clock faces; the arms of those European cities to which the railroad gave access; and an assortment of allegorical relief sculptures wherever they could fit, aptly representing such themes as “Steam,” “Cooperation,” and “Progress.” Convinced that the building process needed the collaboration of all the arts, Cuypers sought the artistic advice and skill of others, especially J. A. Alberdingk Thijm and V. de Steurs, who had worked on the National Museum.

Late in 1884 the architect produced two sketches for the platform roof; they have been characterized as “unassuming.” But that part of the design was not in his contract, and the structure—anything but unassuming—was designed by the railroad’s own civil engineer, L. J. Eijmer. Carried on a frame of fifty semicircular, open-web trusses of wrought iron, spanning 150 feet (49 meters), the original station shed covered about 3.75 acres (1.5 hectares). During construction, problems arose over anchoring the arches, no doubt due to the foundation soil, but rejecting a suggestion to build several smaller, lighter roofs, it was resolved to proceed with the monumental design “on a scale that could compare with that of the great examples abroad.” Cuypers designed the decorative elements of the rafters and the glazed gable end. The roof was completed in October 1889. In 1922, to cover new platforms, another similar arch was added beside the IJ.
The final phase of construction was the King’s Pavilion at the station’s eastern end in 1889—in the event, an ironic title, since the kingdom of the Netherlands was to be ruled only by queens for more than a century. Coaches could be driven inside, where a stair led to the royal waiting room, all in Cuypers’s individualistic neo-Gothic style and enriched with a

color scheme by the Austrian G. Sturm and executed by G. H. Heinen. The room was restored in 1995.

The building of Amsterdam Central Station, “a palace for the traveler,” clearly demonstrates two issues that confronted architects and engineers late in the nineteenth century. First, after sixty years of building railway stations, they were no closer to finding an esthetic that suited the building type, fitted the new materials and technology, and removed the unnecessary tension between utility and beauty. Second, and related to the first, the nature of architectural practice was changing as increased knowledge called for specialization and the eventual replacement of the omniscient, not to say omnipotent, architect by a design team: architect, yes, but also mechanical engineer, structural engineer, interior designer, and consultant artist. That idea would not be enunciated until Walter Gropius wrote the Bauhaus manifesto in 1919.

Further reading

Hoogewoud, Guido, Janjaap Kugt, and Aart Oxenaar. 1985. P. J. H. Cuypers en Amsterdam: Gebouwen en Ontwerpen, 1860–1898. The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij.

Oxenaar, Aart. 1989. Centraal Station Amsterdam: Het Paleis Voor de Reiziger. The Hague: SDU.