Public-transit projects are the religious building endeavors of twenty-first century America, less because they’re motivated by the belief in any particular deity than by how much time and money they now require to complete. Take New York’s Second Avenue subway, whose less than two-mile-long first phase opened in 2017: its construction had cost $4.45 billion, and the line itself had first been proposed 97 years earlier. That’s nothing by ancient standards: the Temple of Apollo at Didyma took six centuries; the Temple of Olympian Zeus at Athens lagged a full 650 years behind schedule; and the Heraion of Samos ended up passing the 800-year mark.
These facts come from the new Told in Stone video above on “the longest construction project in history.” Some of the structures covered will be familiar to Open Culture readers: for instance, Notre-Dame de Paris, which took nearly 200 years to build (and which reopened just this month after five years of fire-damage repair and restoration), or Sagrada Família, which broke ground in 1882 and is scheduled for completion in 2026 — if you don’t count decorating its exterior, which could go on until 2034. Ornamentation is important in architecture of this kind: it’s why the Duomo di Milano, whose construction began in 1386, wasn’t truly complete until 1965.
The decoration process was also prolonged in the case of the Basilica Papale di San Pietro in Città di Vaticano, or Saint Peter’s Basilica, which took 120 years to build, spanning the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the timeline goes for such an ambitious project in that era, it could have been worse; that particular High Renaissance church owes its notoriety to its sheer cost, which works out to “tens of billions” of dollars today. This video, being Microsoft-sponsored, leads up to that software giant’s 3D, AI-assisted replica of Saint Peter’s Basilica, which we featured here on Open Culture when it was released this past fall. Perhaps beholding its glory will give New Yorkers a little more faith that the Second Avenue Subway will reach 125th Street in their lifetimes.
Related content:
The Creation & Restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral, Animated
Explore the World’s First 3D Replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Made with AI
The Beauty & Ingenuity of the Pantheon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Preserved Monument: An Introduction
How the World’s Biggest Dome Was Built: The Story of Filippo Brunelleschi and the Duomo in Florence
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
