Welcome to On Verticality. This blog explores the innate human need to escape the surface of the earth, and our struggles to do so throughout history. If you’re new here, a good place to start is the Theory of Verticality section or the Introduction to Verticality. If you want to receive updates on what’s new with the blog, you can use the Subscribe page to sign up. Thanks for visiting!
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The Colossus of Chicago
The caption for the illustration shown above reads: Puck’s suggestion for the World’s Fair - the “Colossus of Chicago” would knock out the Eiffel Tower. It was drawn by Louis Dalrymple for the 8 October 1890 issue of Puck magazine, a popular humor and satire publication. With Colossus, Dalrymple was mocking a series of proposals leading up to the 1893 World’s Fair that sought to out-do the Eiffel Tower from the previous World’s Fair in Paris. Eiffel had become so popular that the organizers of the 1893 World’s Fair wanted to re-create its success in Chicago.
Verticality, Part VII: Heavens on Earth
Humanity’s first major attempts to recreate heaven on earth
In the previous section, we explored ancient civilizations and how they utilized Verticality in their architecture. In each of these civilizations, building a structure that connected the surface to the sky was seen as the pinnacle of human achievement. This was done to appease or satisfy some type of god or gods, and untold amounts of time and effort were spent on the road to achieving it. Throughout time, however, the needs of our gods would begin to see competition from the needs of humanity, or our own Ego.