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!
Click to filter posts by the three main subjects for the blog : Architecture, Flight and Mountains.
The Towers of Svaneti
Joseph Campbell once said that you can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is. The Towers of Svanetia are a perfect example of this. Svanetia is a mountainous region in Georgia dotted with small, medieval villages. These highland villages are home to a unique type of tower house, which gives us a window into the history and culture of the region. Pictured above is an illustration of one such village and its towers.
Verticality, Part VI: Archetypes
Man’s initial attempts to get closer to the sky in each of the five cradles of civilization
How does one achieve physical Verticality? At the most basic level, we can get closer to the sky in two ways. First, we can recreate the human body with singular elements that express height on their own. These objects can be seen as proxies for our own bipedal bodies. Second, we can physically raise the surface under our feet in order to raise our bodies up closer to the sky. These constructions can be seen as recreations of mountains, which are the highest places we can reach in the natural landscape. As our ancestors set out to externalize their need for Verticality, they experimented with both of these methods.
Verticality, Part V: Global Threads
How Defense and God provided the initial thrust for the Verticality narrative
Once our ancestors ceased to be nomadic and began establishing permanent settlements, two major threads of our development emerged. The first was the need to defend our territories against others; once we’d accomplished this, our attention shifted to our relationship with the unknown, or God. Each of these threads would evolve over time, and each was approached through the lens of Verticality.