Beijing-Hangzhou Canal China

The Grand Canal (Chinese, Da Yunhe) in China is the world’s longest artificial waterway and the oldest canal still in existence. The 1,121-mile-long (1,794-kilometer) series of linked channels extends from Hangzhou on the southeast coast to the capital, Beijing, in the north. As an engineering achievement of the ancient Chinese, the canal compares with the more familiar Great Wall. It passes through twenty-four sophisticated locks and is crossed by sixty bridges. Most of China’s large rivers, including the Huai, the Huang Ho, the Wei, and the Yangtze flow from the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, and the north-south Grand Canal provides a vital connector between their systems. That fact in itself presented a challenge to which the ancient builders were equal: the gradient of the canal was carefully designed and maintained by dredging to ensure that the seasonal flooding of the rivers did not inundate agricultural land along the artificial waterway. In places, dikes and levees provided further protection.

The Grand Canal—once known as the Grand Imperial Canal—had a simple reason for being. Successive emperors wanted to secure communication between the heavily populated politico-military centers of North China and the rice-producing regions of the south. This meant constructing a link that enabled the rapid deployment of troops and provided a faster, safer corridor for transporting grain and freight, free from the threat of the pirates who preyed on coastal shipping. During the Song dynasty (a.d. 960–1279), the annual grain traffic on the canal exceeded 340,000 tons (345,440 tonnes), carried by fleets of up to forty barges, lashed together up to four abreast and towed by water buffalo.
Suggested dates for the commencement of the canal vary from the fourth to the sixth century b.c. The 140-mile (225-kilometer) section traditionally known as the Shanyang Canal, from Qingjiang in northern Jiangsu to the Yangtze, probably was constructed sometime in that period and extended almost a thousand years later, during the Northern Qi dynasty (a.d. 550–576), when existing waterways were linked to form a single system. The second Sui emperor, Yang Di, launched an intensive building program between 605 and 610. He is said to have employed 6 million peasants constructing links between the Huang Ho and Yangtze Rivers. By thus joining the north and south of China, the canal allowed for the development of an integrated national economy and reestablished the power of the imperial civil service. Therefore, it is not surprising that it retained its importance during the Tang dynasty (618–907), when China was at the height of its power.
The canal was a key to trade expansion under the Tang and Song, and around 800 the center of political

and economic activity slowly began to move to the south. By the twelfth century, Jiangsu arid Zhejiang Provinces had become the heart of China, and the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) established a capital at Hangzhou in 1138. In 1282, under the Mongols, another canal was built between the Huang Ho and the Ta-ch’ing River in northern Shantung, but several attempts to join it to the sea proved unsuccessful. Eventually the Hui-t’ung Canal was built to join the Huang Ho and the Wei Rivers. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) reigned from Yingtian until 1421, after which the capital was returned to Beijing. The whole Grand Canal, comprising six main sections, was dredged and repaired. Since then it has been widened repeatedly, the last changes being made at the beginning of the Ch’ing dynasty in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Early in the twentieth century the Grand Canal began to fall into disuse for reasons that included the frequent flooding of the Huang Ho; the move to coastal shipping; the construction of major north-south railroads; and not least, general neglect as a result of political turmoil. However, the Communist regime started rehabilitation in 1958, and over the next eight years the canal was dredged, straightened, and widened, and a new 40-mile (64-kilometer) section was built. But it was not until the late 1980s that plans were put in hand to dredge the entire Grand Canal, reinstating it as an important highway for local and medium-distance freight vessels, especially in the south. Shallow-draft vessels—mostly barges and tourist boats—can now navigate the stretch south of the Yangtze all year-round. The section north of the Yangtze is seasonably navigable, and major works are in progress to allow bulk carriers to reach Xuzhou; beyond that, the canal remains impassable.

Further reading

Bishop, Kevin, and Annabel Roberts. 1997. China’s Imperial Way: Retracing an Historical Trade and Communications Route from Beijing to Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Odyssey.

The Grand Canal: An Odyssey. 1987. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

Harrington, Lyn. 1974. The Grand Canal of China. Folkestone, UK: Bailey and Swinfen

Bedouin tents

There are only three essential structural systems in architecture: the post and beam (trabeated), the arch and its extensions (arcuated), and those that employ stretched filaments and membranes (tensile). Because durable tensile materials like steel and reinforced concrete were not developed until after 1865, and synthetic membranes, like fiberglass-Teflon laminate and Kevlar, until more than a century later, tensile technology was limited to buildings not considered “proper” architecture. But despite the denial of means, the method of creating them has been understood, refined, and applied from ancient times. Purest among such applications are the tents of the Bedouin. Their origins are lost, but they are indeed architectural feats for their structural economy, functionality, and environmental sustainability.

The nomadic Arabs known as Bedouin (badawi, for “desert dwellers”) inhabited Arabia from sometime in the second millennium b.c. With the expansion of Islam in the seventh century a.d., they spread into the Syrian and Egyptian deserts and invaded northern Africa, where their flocks, allowed to overgraze,

soon turned much of the coastal pasture into semidesert. The Bedouin, who now comprise about 10 percent of the population of the Middle East, continue to herd camels, sheep, goats, and sometimes cattle. Their patterns of migration depend on availability of pasture: in winter, if there is rain, they move farther into the desert; in summer, they locate near assured water supplies and build simple mud-and-stone temporary houses. While on the move, the Bedouin live in a beit al-sha’r (“house of hair”). The dwelling, little changed for about 4,000 years, consists of short wooden posts supporting a framework of tightly stretched goat-hair ropes, over which a loosely woven goat-hair cloth membrane (fala’if) is stretched to serve as walls and roof.

The goat-hair yarn is spun on a drop spindle by the older women and woven into cloth strips on a horizontal loom. The breadth of the strips approximates the ancient cubit (about 20 inches or 50 centimeters); they vary in length from 23 to 65 feet (7 to 20 meters), depending on the size of the tent for which they are made. Because the women work only in “spare” time, even short strips of cloth may take several months to produce. The portable loom allows any unfinished work to be rolled up when the group moves on. The finished strips are sewn together with black goat-hair thread to make up a single roof membrane. That is a social occasion, with women working together. The goat hair’s natural color, usually black, is retained, although sometimes the addition of sheep’s wool yields a streaked cloth. The black fabric absorbs heat, but it also provides deep shade, so that temperatures inside can be considerably lower than outside. The coarse weave allows heat to disperse, and the covering provides good insulation in the cold desert night. When it rains, the loosely woven fabric swells, stopping most leaks. A tent cloth lasts an average of five years, and its maintenance and replacement depend upon a renewable resource, as they have for centuries.
When the Bedouin make camp, the leader of the band directs the women in pitching the tent. Before the poles are raised, the roof is spread on the ground, with one of its long sides facing windward, and stretched by tightening lines attached to pegs. Once it has been lifted on the pole and rope frame, the goat-hair flaps that form the walls—long enough to enclose the entire tent at night—are hung and pegged down, with the entrance facing away from the prevailing wind. The low profile of the roof and very long guy ropes are designed to maximize wind resistance.
Traditionally, brightly decorated curtains divide the interior. The men’s area, always at the end toward Mecca, also incorporates the majlis, where guests are received around a hearth. The private family area (mahram), or women’s section, is much larger and barred to all men except the head of the family. The third space is the kitchen. Of necessity for a nomadic lifestyle, furnishings are sparse. Carpets and mattresses cover the desert floor; pillows stacked around a camel saddle may provide seating for guests.
The Tuaregs, descendants of the Berbers, whom the Arabs displaced from North African coastal regions, also live in tents. About 800,000 strong, the seven major Tuareg confederations inhabit an area from the western Sahara to western Sudan. Although some have permanent settlements, most prefer small nomadic groups. Believing that “houses are the graves of the living,” they set up rectangular tents about 10 feet (3 meters) long and 10 to 15 feet (3 to 4.6 meters) wide, covered with up to forty tanned goatskins, dyed red and sewn together, or mats of palm fiber. In this matriarchal society, when a woman marries, her family makes a tent for her, and it remains her property. In about two hours, she can put her household on pack animals, ready to move on.
Two other examples will demonstrate that not all transportable houses are tensile structures. The nomadic lifestyle of some Amerindian tribes was constrained by the migration of the great buffalo herds. Their houses needed to be strong enough to withstand the prairie winds while lending themselves to easy dismantling, carrying, and reerection. Possibly derived from the Inuit’s Arctic summer dwellings, the tepee was adopted about two hundred years ago as the year-round house of the Plains nations. A conical skeleton frame of up to thirty wooden poles was lashed together near the top and covered with a fitted membrane of tanned buffalo hides. Although it was transportable, it did not share all the tensile characteristics

of the Bedouin tent. The same is true of the ger (or yurt), the traditional house of Mongolian herdspeople, still in use all year-round. Its self-supporting framed structure—a cylinder roofed with a dome—applies a dynamic arrangement, refined over centuries, of leather-lashed saplings, a roof ring, and tensioning bands. The covering, traditionally felt, is secured with ropes. The ger can be dismantled and carried by pack animals, although sometimes it is transported intact on a wagon.

Many Middle Eastern governments are attempting to impose a permanent sedentary lifestyle on the Bedouin, Modernization, if not altogether desirable, is probably inevitable. Trucks are displacing camels as the principal means of transportation; some camps have refrigerators and television sets powered by portable generators whose noise disturbs the quiet of the desert. Coffee is brewed for guests on gas stoves rather than the traditional hearth, and “off-the-hook” canvas tents are appearing among the “houses of hair.”

See also

Tension and suspension buildings

Further reading

Chatty, Dawn. 1986. From Camel to Truck: The Bedouin in the Modern World. New York: Vantage.

Crociani, Paola. 1994. Bedouin of the Sinai. Reading, UK: Garnet.

Hobbs, Joseph J. 1989. Bedouin Life in the Egyptian Wilderness. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Weir, Shelagh. 1976. The Bedouin: Aspects of the Material Culture of the Bedouin of Jordan. London: World of Islam.

The Bauhaus Germany

The German design school known as the Bauhaus (literally, house of building), that functioned between 1919 and 1932, laid the foundation of a different kind of architectural education, one that was eventually adopted throughout the world. It restored the links between design and making that had been undermined during the Renaissance and virtually destroyed by the European academies. Much of the Bauhaus’s significance lies in the fact that some of its leaders migrated to the United States in the 1930s to head up the schools of architecture at Harvard and the Illinois Institute of Technology; other members also became teachers and practitioners in America.

The Bauhaus was conceived by Walter Gropius (1883–1969). After reluctantly commencing architectural studies at Berlin-Charlottenberg in 1905, between 1907 and 1910 he worked in the office of Peter Behrens before forming a partnership with a fellow employee, Adolf Meyer. During World War I Gropius served as a cavalry officer, and following the November 1918 armistice he was appointed director of two separate institutions in Weimar, Saxony, Germany: the Grand Ducal Academy of Arts and the Grand Ducal Academy of Crafts. He immediately proposed that they should be combined, and in April 1919 courses started at Das Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar. Gropius’s 1919 Manifesto called for “the unification of all the creative arts under the leadership of architecture”; building on the doctrines of nineteenth-century English reformers, Gropius sought to improve design standards by combining art and production
Architecture was not in the curriculum of the Bauhaus’s first phase at Weimar (1919–1923). Because he believed that good art, architecture, and design were more the result of collaboration than of individual virtuosity, Gropius’s formal program was based upon the proposition that one cannot design without understanding the process by which the design is realized. The designed object must be “by systematic practical and theoretical research into formal, technical, and economic fields” derived from “natural functions and relationships”—in short, the Bauhaus provided an applied design education based on Marxist materialism. Under Johannes Itten students were introduced to elements of design—shape, line, color, pattern, texture, rhythm, and density. There were also workshops for stone, wood, metal, pottery, glass, painting, and textiles. Every course was conducted by a team: a craftsperson and an artist.
The aims of the Bauhaus were maintained through the three phases of its existence in three different places and despite several changes in its direction. They were: first, “rescue all of the arts from the isolation in which each then found itself”; second, raise the status of craft to that of the so-called fine arts; and third, link the designer with emerging industrial production. Those ideas are taken for granted now, but they were first spelled out by the Bauhaus.
In spite of Gropius’s ostensible nonpolitical stance, the unfamiliar ideas, left-wing beliefs, and eccentric ways evident at the Bauhaus unsettled the government and brought opposition. Objecting to official

insistence upon an exhibition Art and Technics in 1923, immediately afterward the staff resigned. Gropius was swamped with offers to relocate, and accepted one from Dessau. To house the school he designed a group of connected blocks (1925–1926): administration, classrooms, studios, workshops, and accommodations for staff and students. Although Gropius often denied any such intention, the need for modem architecture—a tangible expression of the spirit of the age—meant that the Dessau complex would be adopted as a model internationally.

Architecture was introduced into the curriculum at Dessau. Just then, groups of European architects, mostly socialists, were searching for a pure form of architecture, liberated from the historical styles that they associated with a decadent aristocracy or (worse in their eyes) with the rising industrial bourgeoisie. The architects included English Arts and Crafts, Italian Futurists, Dutch De Srijl, and German Expressionists. Buildings inevitably became expressions of their beliefs, and their response to Europe’s widespread housing crisis of the 1920s was an austere form of workers’ housing with open floor plans, white interiors, and furniture that “worked,” whatever that meant. For them, a building must have a flat roof and flat walls, devoid of all ornament and decoration. And because color was bourgeois, the exteriors of houses must be white, gray, or black—in fact, just like the Dessau Bauhaus. It is not surprising that by 1932 the Americans Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson recognized in all this what they (inaccurately) dubbed an International Style. It was soon imitated throughout the world, frequently with no heed to the underlying sociopolitical theory.
Gropius resigned the Bauhaus directorship in April 1928, not only to concentrate upon his architectural practice but also in an attempt—futile, as it happened—to stem the growing National Socialist (Nazi) Party’s propaganda attacks upon the school. He recommended the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer as successor. But because Meyer was overtly Communist, the mayor of Dessau dismissed him in 1930, appointing in his place a German architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Under mounting pressure to close altogether, Mies moved the Bauhaus to Berlin in 1932. A year later he disbanded it.
Although its ideas were spread internationally by many publications—not least the Bauhausbüche series after 1925—and exhibitions, the Bauhaus became more influential through the diaspora of staff and students: for example, Gropius went to head up the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, Mies became dean of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and László Moholy-Nagy established the “New Bauhaus” in Chicago. A Bauhaus archive, originally at Darmstadt, moved to Berlin in the 1970s; another is housed at Harvard. The design philosophy and the educational philosophy of the Bauhaus continue to have impact on the teaching and practice of architecture and design.

Further reading

Gropius, Walter. 1965. The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hochman, Elaine S. 1997. Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism. New York: Fromm.

Wingler, Hans Maria. 1969. The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Baths of Caracalla Rome, Italy

The Baths of Caracalla (Thermae Antoninianae) were built between a.d. 212 and 216 by the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (a.d. 188–217), usually known as Caracalla. Although in layout the Baths of Caracalla largely emulated the model established about a century before in the Baths of Trajan, their massive scale and opulent internal finishes were without precedent. Their fully integrated plan and imposing scale and grandeur amply demonstrated the Romans’ design skills. Significantly, the baths demonstrated the structural advances made possible through the masterful use of concrete to span vast spaces using barrel and groin vaults, domes, and half-domes, as well as the sophisticated mechanical engineering services developed by the Romans.

Public baths (thermae) were an essential part of all Roman towns. The majority of citizens lived in crowded tenements (insulae) without running water or sanitary facilities, so communal baths were constructed and made available to both sexes of all social classes. Entry was free. Generally, mixed bathing was not favored, so the baths were open to women in the mornings and men in the afternoons and evenings. The thermae were the center of Roman social life—people could meet friends there and engage in any number of leisure and cultural pursuits on offer. As well as changing rooms, gymnasia, saunas, and pools of various temperatures, there were libraries, museums, restaurants, bars, shops, lecture theaters, concert halls, playing fields, gardens, and courtyards, all richly furnished with mosaics, fountains, and statues. Although extremely costly to build, the baths were a political investment—a means for the emperor to demonstrate his concern for the well-being of the community.
The Baths of Caracalla occupied a 50-acre (20.25-hectare) site. The complex was divided into three parts: the rectangular main building, approximately 750 by 380 feet (225 by 115 meters) and large

enough to accommodate 1,600 bathers; encircling landscaped parks and gardens; and a perimeter ring of shops, lecture halls, and pavilions. Laid out symmetrically, the compactly planned baths offered identical bathing circuits on either side of the central (and shorter) axis. The sequence of bathing spaces on that axis comprised the hot bath (caldarium), warm bath (tepidarium), and the cold bath (frigidarium) in a large unheated central hall. The last, which also served as a foyer, was open on one side, allowing easy access to the open-air swimming pool (natatio). Changing rooms (apodyteria), gymnasia, or exercise yards (palaestrae), with terraced porticoes, and sauna (laconica) were arranged symmetrically on the transverse axis. Rooms for massage, manicure, and other services associated with the bathing routine were featured on either side of the baths. Decorative interior finishes—colored marble veneers on walls, marble, basalt and granite columns and arches, and coarsely textured black-and-white mosaic floors—created a rich and sumptuous character.

Since the baths were public facilities that attracted large numbers of people, the gathering spaces needed to be vast and uncluttered with structural elements. In the absence of structural impediments, bathers were afforded extended views to various parts of the thermae. The Romans achieved these objectives by exploiting the semicircular arch. The rectangular central hall of the Baths of Caracalla demonstrated their structural method. It was roofed with an enormous semicircular intersecting concrete vault divided into three compartments. Each was 108 feet (30 meters) high and rested at the corners on enormous piers. Clerestory windows adequately lit the hall.
Water for the Baths of Caracalla flowed from a branch of the Aqua Marcia aqueduct into a huge reservoir, divided into eighteen chambers with a total capacity of about 2.2 million gallons (10 million liters). The water was carried through pipes laid underneath the gardens to the main building, where it was distributed directly to the cold pools, or to wood-fired boilers, where it was heated for the warm and hot baths. For ease of inspection and maintenance, distribution pipes and waste drains were located in separate tunnels. A separate network of tunnels was used to store wood for about fifty furnaces (praefurnia) that heated the saunas (laconica) and other rooms via a hot-air system (hypocausta) beneath the floors. The heated rooms were on the southwestern side of the complex to gain maximum benefit from the sun; all had large windows. The hottest room, the circular, protruding caldarium, was covered by a 115-foot-diameter (35-meter) dome, higher than the Pantheon’s and only slightly less in span.
The Baths of Caracalla are now in ruins, but their soaring height and impressive scale allow visitors to appreciate their size and massiveness.

See also

Roman concrete construction

Further reading

Piranomonte, Marina. 1998. Le Terme di Caracalla. Milan: Electra.

Sear, Frank. 1989. Roman Architecture. London: Batsford.

Ward-Perkins, J. B. 1981. Roman Imperial Architecture. Harmondsworth. UK: Penguin.

BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) San Francisco, California

BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is a 95-mile (152-kilometer) automated rapid-transit system, the first of the “new generation” of such systems in the United States. By the end of the twentieth century there were thirteen in operation, including Washington, D.C. (opened 1976), Atlanta (1979), and Miami (1986). BART has thirty-nine stations on five lines radiating out from San Francisco to serve Contra Costa and Alameda Counties in the eastern Bay Area of northern California.

In 1947 a joint Army-Navy review board, predicted that another connecting link between San Francisco and Oakland would be needed to prevent intolerable traffic congestion on the Bay Bridge. It proposed the construction of a tube to carry high-speed electric trains under the waters of the bay. Four years later the California State Legislature created the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit Commission and charged it with finding a long-term transportation solution in the context of environmental problems, not least among them the danger from earthquakes. After six years of investigation, the commission concluded that any transportation plan would have to be part of a total regional development plan. Because no such plan existed, the commission prepared a coordinated master strategy, later adopted by the Association of Bay Area Governments.
The commission’s most economical transportation solution was to establish a five-county rapid-transit

district, with the task of building and operating a high-speed rapid rail network linking major commercial centers with suburban nodes. The San Francisco BART District was formed, comprising the counties Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, and San Mateo. Plans were made for a revolutionary rapid-transit system. Electric trains would run on grade-separated corridors at maximum speeds of 80 mph (128 kph) and averaging around 45 mph (72 kph). Sophisticated, well-appointed vehicles would compete with private automobiles in the Bay Area, and well-designed, conveniently located stations would be built.

By mid-1961, after extensive public consultation, the final plan was submitted to the five counties for approval. San Mateo County was unconvinced and withdrew from the scheme in December. Marin County also withdrew a few months later, not only because it could not sustain its share of the cost but also because there were questions about the feasibility of running trains across the Golden Gate Bridge. The original proposal was therefore revised as a three-county plan, providing links across the bay between San Francisco and Contra Costa and Alameda. Those counties accepted the BART Composite Report in July 1962.
As part of the following November’s general election, voters approved a $792 million bond issue to finance the high-speed transit system and to rebuild 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) of the San Francisco Municipal Railway. The estimated $133 million cost of the Transbay Tube was to be funded by Bay Bridge tolls. The rolling stock, which would run on 1,000-volt direct current, was estimated to cost another $71 million, and the total cost of the system was projected at $996 million—the largest public works project ever undertaken by local residents in the United States. There were to be many delays, and costs would inevitably rise, eventually totaling $1.62 billion.
Parsons-Brinckerhoff-Tudor-Bechtel was the consortium appointed to manage the project, consisting of Parsons-Brinckerhoff-Quade and Douglas (the New York originators of the first plan); and from San Francisco, Tudor Engineering Company and the Bechtel Corporation, BART construction began on 19 June 1964, on the Diablo Test Track in Contra Costa County; completed ten months later, it was used to develop and test the vehicular system.
The Oakland subway was commenced in January 1966. In the following November the first of the fifty-seven, 24-foot-high-by-28-foot-wide (7.4-by-14.8-meter) steel-and-concrete sections of the Transbay Tube, almost 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) long in total, was submerged in the bay. A 3-mile-long (4.8-kilometer) drilled rock tunnel through the Berkeley Hills was completed four months later. The Transbay Tube structure was completed in August 1969. Lying as much as 135 feet. (41.3 meters) underwater, it took six years to design (seismic studies were an integral part of the process), and under three to build. The tunnel (indeed the entire BART system) would survive intact the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. The final cost of the tunnel was $180 million. Before the tube was closed to visitors so the rail tracks could be installed, thousands of pedestrians passed through.
In July 1967 construction began on the two-level Market Street subway, 100 feet (30.6 meters) below San Francisco. The work was complicated by a difficult mud-and-water environment and the century-old network of underground utilities. The first tunneling on the west coast was carried out entirely under compressed-air conditions; this section of the project brought the BART workforce to 5,000 in 1969. On 27 January 1971 the bore into the west end of Montgomery Street Station marked the completion of that phase of the project.
Although delays and inflation were eroding capital, public and governmental pressure groups forced the relocation of 15 miles of line and 15 stations, and a general improvement of station designs. They were also substantially altered during construction to improve access. Discussion of BART’s financial problems is not the purpose of this essay: suffice it to say that an increasing input of federal money was needed to support the constant variations and improvements to the original plan. BART’s linear park was constructed to demonstrate how functionality need not spoil the amenity of the environment, and major landscaping was partly funded by federal money.

had reached $80 million—$18 million above the estimate for the whole 450-car fleet. The first car was delivered in August 1970, and within months, 10 test cars operated on the Fremont Line. The paid service began operation on 11 September 1972 on the 28 miles (45 kilometers) between Fremont and MacArthur Stations. Heavily subsidized by federal grants, 200 more cars were bought by July 1975. In the late 1980s, BART purchased another 150 from SOFERVAL, an American subsidiary of Alsthom Atlantique of France, and 80 more from Morrison-Knudsen a few years later.

A central control room, installed in 1972 in the Lake Merritt Administration Building, was replaced in 1979 by an Operations Control Center, from which train operations and remote control of electrification, ventilation, and emergency-response systems are supervised.
In 1991, the BART Extensions Program launched a $2.6 billion plan to expand services in Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Mateo Counties. Since then 5 stations and 21 miles (33 kilometers) of double track have been added, including the Pittsburg-Antioch Extension, whose North Concord/Martinez Station opened in December 1995, the first new one in over 20 years. The $517 million Dublin/Pleasanton Extension opened in May 1997. A proposal to connect BART to San Francisco International Airport (SFO) was first considered in 1972, just as the inaugural service was opened. The first stage opened in February 1996. During the next phase, BART will move further down the San Francisco peninsula, adding 9 miles (14.4 kilometers) of track and 4 new stations, including one inside the new International Terminal. Work on the final leg started in 1997, and the line was scheduled for completion early in the twenty-first century. In 1995, BART launched a ten-year program, costing $1.1 billion, to overhaul the system infrastructure and the original fleet of cars.

Further reading

Anderson, Robert M., et al. 1980. Divided Loyalties: Whistle-Blowing at BART. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

Grant, Howard. 1976. Notes from Underground: An Architect’s View of BART. San Francisco: Reid and Tarics Associates.

Grefe, Richard, and Richard Smart. 1976. A History of the Key Decisions in the Development of Bay Area Rapid Transit. San Francisco: McDonald and Smart.

When the first 250 vehicles were eventually ordered from Rohr Industries of California, the price

Banaue rice terraces Ifugao Province, Philippines

In the Banaue municipality of the northern Ifugao Province on the Philippine island of Luzon, the indigenous Igo

bedrock of the steep Cordillera Central Mountain Range. For millennia, succeeding generations of farmers built and maintained 12,500 miles (20,000 kilometers) of dikes and retaining walls—enough to stretch halfway around the equator—creating a unique, irregular patchwork of terraced rice paddies. The American anthropologist Roy Barton called these terraces and others in the region “a modification by man of the earth’s surface on a scale unparalleled elsewhere.”

The Cordillera rice terraces were added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in December 1995, a decision justified in the following terms: “The fruit of knowledge passed on from one generation to the next, of sacred traditions and a delicate social balance, they helped form a landscape of great beauty that expresses conquered and conserved harmony between humankind and the environment.” Moreover, they were cited as “outstanding examples of living cultural landscapes.”
The tiers rise to about 4,900 feet (1,500 meters) above sea level. Each is defined by a stone or clay retaining wall, snaking along the contours of the steep mountainside. Stone walls are up to 50 feet high (15 meters): some of the clay walls are more than 80 feet (25.5 meters) high. Some garden terraces have been backfilled with soil, ash, and composted vegetable material, while others have been simply carved from the rock and overlaid with soil washed down from the higher levels. Rice cannot be grown without large quantities of water, and the terraces are served by an elaborate irrigation system, comprising canals cut through the rock and bamboo and wooden aqueducts. Once the highest terraces are flooded, water spills over the descending walls until the whole hillside is irrigated.
What of their builders? Igorot (literally, “the mountain people”) is a broad ethnic classification applied to a number of groups bound by common sociocultural and religious characteristics—Ibaloy, Kankanay, Ifugao, Kalinga, Apayao, and Bontoc—who occupy the Cordilleras. They originate from the warlike immigrants who reached the northern islands of the Philippines from Vietnam and China, some scholars believe 10,000 years ago. Their descendants eventually became rice farmers and, against the difficulties presented by the hostile topography, built their amazing tiers of rice fields on the precipitous mountainsides. The true age of the terraces remains in question: some sources suggest that the Igorot commenced them between 200 b.c. and a.d. 100, others that they date from at least 1000 b.c. As late as the 1990s rising nationalism had not permeated their tribal highlands, and the Igorots, while regarded as citizens, did not think of themselves as Filipinos. They were further alienated by the Marcos administration’s dam-building schemes, which included flooding the mountain valleys in their Cordillera homelands. They continue to resist integration into Filipino society.
The rice culture of the Igorot, central to their way of life, inevitably had a spiritual dimension. As Joaquin Palencia remarks, “the adversarial nature of the geography of this region and the tremendous

odds faced by the Ifugao to assure access to food … set the stage for the bul-ul, the rice god figures that came to be a mechanism through which superhuman restraint became central to the production of a basic need.” Indeed, the Igorot embrace no fewer than 1,500 gods, each type fulfilling a different function. The bul-ul is a large-headed, seated or standing humanoid figure, ritually carved, usually from sacred narra wood. The sizes of the rice field and its guardian bul-ul are directly related: the Banaue terraces have large, thickset bul-ul. Once the ceremonies and feasts are completed, the figure is installed in a granary in the attic of a house, from which it is believed to protect crops and ensure abundant harvests. But the forces threatening the Banaue rice terraces, and others like them at Hungduan, Kiangan, Mayoyao, and Bontok, are other than spiritual.

Rice farming is labor intensive—and hard labor at that—and yields low financial returns. The main threat to the terraces is the departure of young Ifugaos, who seek better work opportunities in the cities. Water shortage is also a problem: the lack of rain in the dry season is exacerbated by systematic deforestation and illegal logging. Because of such poor forestry management there is no longer enough water for irrigation, and recent harvests have been unable to sustain even the terrace owners, much less provide a cash crop. Moreover, with only one crop a year, mountainside farming compares poorly with the lowland paddies, where there are two. Many Ifugao farmers, encouraged by the Rice Terraces Commission (RTC), established under President Fidel Ramos in 1994, are now planting vegetables that can be harvested after six weeks, a quarter of the time needed for rice.
In 1998, when these combined problems were exacerbated by accelerated erosion caused by introduced giant earthworms, the RTC introduced a plan to maintain the terraces, focused on the preservation of Ifugao culture, diversification of the regional economic base, and the application of appropriate current agricultural technology. Its success has yet to be proven. Promoted by the Philippines tourism authority as “the eighth wonder of the world,” the Banaue rice terraces are among the country’s major attractions. Already under threat from cultural change, neglect, and inadequate irrigation, if they are not maintained they will be in ruins within a couple of decades.

Further reading

Barton, Roy Franklin. 1922. Ifugao Economics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Palencia, Joaquin C. 1998. The Ifugao Bul-nl. Tribal Arts Online. May. http://www.tribalarts.com.

Reyes, Angelo J., and de los Aloma, M., eds. 1987. Igorot: A People Who Daily Touch the Earth and the Sky. Baguio, Philippines: CSC.

Scott, William Henry. 1966. On the Cordillera: A Look at the Peoples and Cultures of the Mountain Province. Manila: MCS Enterprises.

rot people have constructed 49,500 acres (20,000 hectares) of agricultural land upon the inhospitable

B Babylon: Nebuchadnezzar’s city Iraq

The city of Babylon (“Gate of God”) once stood on the banks of the Euphrates River, 56 miles (90 kilometers) south of Baghdad, Iraq. It was the capital of Babylonia in the second and first millennia b.c. In a.d. 1897 the German archeologist Robert Koldewey commenced a major excavation. During the next twenty years he unearthed, among many other structures, a processional avenue to the temple of Marduk and the legendary fortified city wall, which once enjoyed a place among the seven wonders of the ancient world. It was not until the sixth century a.d. that its place was usurped by the so-called Hanging Gardens.

Babylon entered the pages of history as the site of a temple around 2200 b.c. At first it was subject to Ur, an adjacent city-state, but gained its independence in 1894 b.c., when the Sumu-abum established the dynasty that reached its zenith under Hammurabi, known as “the Lawgiver.” The Hittites overran the city 330 years later. It was governed by the Kassite dynasty, which extended its borders and made it the capital of the country of Babylonia, with southern Mesopotamia under its control. When the Kassites yielded to pressure from the Elamites in 1155 b.c., Babylon was governed by a succession of ephemeral dynasties and became part of the Assyrian Empire in the late eighth century b.c. In turn, the Assyrians were driven out by Nabopolassar, who founded the Neo-Babylonian dynasty around 615 b.c. His son Nebuchadnezzar II (ca. 604–561 b.c.) built the kingdom into an empire that covered most of southwest Asia.
Babylon, now Nebuchadnezzar’s imperial capital, underwent a huge rebuilding program—new temples and palace buildings, defensive walls and gates, and a splendid processional way—to make it the largest city in the known world, covering some 2,500 acres (1,000 hectares). It must have impressed visitors, because the myth sprang up, perhaps from the assertion of the Greek historian Herodotus, that it was 200 square miles (510 square kilometers) in area, with 330-foot-high (99-meter) walls, 80 feet (25 meters) thick. Of his achievement, Nebuchadnezzar boasted, “Is not this great Babylon that I have built for the house of my kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honor of my majesty?”
The Euphrates River divided the city into two unequal sectors. The “old” quarter, including most of the palaces and temples, stood on the east bank; Nebuchadnezzar’s new city was on the west. The whole was surrounded by an 11-mile-long (17-kilometer) outer wall enclosing suburbs and the king’s summer palace. The inner wall, penetrated by eight fortified gates leading to the outlying regions of Babylonia, was wide enough to allow two chariots to be driven abreast on its top. Most prominent among

the portals was the northern Ishtar Gate, dedicated to the queen of heaven: a defensible turreted building with double towers and a barbican, faced with blue glazed brick and richly ornamented with 500 bulls, dragons, and other animals in colored brick relief.

Through the Ishtar Gate passed the north-south processional way, which ran past the royal palace and was used in the New Year festival. It was paved with limestone slabs, about 3.5 feet (1 meter) square; the flanking footpaths were of breccia stones about 2 feet (600 millimeters) square. Joints were beveled and the gaps filled with asphalt. The road was contained by 27-foot-thick (8-meter) turreted walls, behind which citadels were strategically placed. The faces of the walls were decorated with lions in low relief. Much of the significance of the road lies in the exotic and doubtless expensive materials employed. The land between the rivers had little naturally occurring stone, and except for their faces, the city walls and gatehouses and even the king’s palace were constructed of sun-dried brick.
Inside the Ishtar Gate, at the northwest corner of the old city, stood Nebuchadnezzar’s extensive palace with its huge throne room, and the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It is more likely that they were “overhanging” gardens. Described by one first century b.c. visitor as “vaulted terraces raised one above another,” they were irrigated with water pumped from the Euphrates. Another early description says that this 400-foot-square (122-meter) artificial mountain was more than 80 feet (25 meters) high and built of stone. It was planted with all manner of vegetation, including large trees. There is a romantic legend that the Hanging Gardens were built for Nebuchadnezzar’s wife, Amytis, a Mede who missed the green mountains of her motherland. Beside the palace stood the rebuilt temple of the city’s patron god, Marduk, replete with gold ornament. In a sacred precinct north of the temple stood a seven-story ziggurat (stepped pyramid); some descriptions put its height at 300 feet (90 meters).
Nebuchadnezzar was Babylon’s last great ruler. Because his successors were comparatively weak, the Neo-Babylonian Empire quickly passed. In 539 b.c. the Persian Cyrus II took the city by stealth, over-threw Nebuchadnezzar’s grandson Belshazzar, and subsumed Babylon into his empire. The city became the official residence of the crown prince, but following a revolt in 482 b.c., Xerxes I demolished the temples and ziggurat, thoroughly destroying the statue of Marduk. Alexander the Great captured the city in 330 b.c. but he died before be could carry out his intention to refurbish it as the capital of his empire. For a few years after 312 b.c., the Seleucid dynasty used Babylon as a capital until the seat of government was moved (with most of the population) to the new city of Seleucia on the Tigris. Babylon the Great became insignificant, and by the foundation of Islam in the seventh century a.d., it had almost disappeared.
Now Babylon is being rebuilt. In April 1989 the New York Times International reported that, under Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, “walls of yellow brick, 40 feet [12 meters] high and topped with pointed crenellations, have replaced the mounds that once marked [Nebuchadnezzar’s] Palace foundations. And as Babylon’s walls rise again, the builders insert inscribed bricks recording how [it] was ‘rebuilt in the era of the leader Saddam Hussein.’” An annual International Babylon Festival—one was subtitled “From Nebuchadnezzar to Saddam Hussein”—is part of the megalomaniac dictator’s projection of himself as the ancient king’s successor. Portraits of the two hang side by side on a restored wall in Babylon.

See also

Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Further reading

Reade, Julian. 1991. Mesopotamia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Saggs, Henry William Frederick. 1988. The Greatness That Was Babylon. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.

Service, Pamela F. 1998. Ancient Mesopotamia. New York: Benchmark Books.