100 Great Wonders of the World [antikvár]

''00 w o very feature and structure in this bool^ is a cause _ of wonder. Even in a time of mass and instantaneous communicatiouj when images of _ the globe's farthest and most remote reaches can be transmitted into every sitting room, the feats of human ingenuity and skill, and the extremes of the natural world can still astonish. The manmade achievements celebrated here span thousands of years of human history, while the Earth's natural splendours illustrate millions of years of upheaval, movement and erosion. THE DESIRE TO BUILD Everywhere in the world there has always been a delight in the spectacular and an urge to burden our groaning planet with the tallest, heaviest, largest constructions that imagination and technology would allow, from Stonehenge to the Three Gorges Dam. The CN Tower in Toronto, swaying slightly in the wind, rises more than 553m (1,815ft) into the sky. It dwarfs the Empire State Building in New York City, which, for more than 40 years, enjoyed the prestige of being the world's highest building. Like the elegant Eiffel Tower and the soaring spires of medieval cathedrals, it shows what human beings can do when they aim for the skies. Some wonders are marvels of engineering, which conquer distance and tame nature. The Trans-Siberian and the Canadian Pacific Railway represent the pioneering impulse to cover vast distances and establish links across apparently impenetrable terrain. Some wonders, such as Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China, are astonishing structures completed without the benefit of modern machinery. Others illustrate the power of faith to overcome the challenges presented by seemingly inaccessible places— like the Meteora monasteries in Greece and the mysterious religious settlement at Machu Picchu, built by the fncas. Power and status have prompted the raising of monuments too—from the colossal, scattered statues of Nemrut Dag to the stone faces of American presidents hewn into Mount Rushmore. The more enigmatic the structure, the more awe-inspiring. Was Stonehenge an observatory or a funereal temple? Were the patterns in the desert at Nazca drawn for alien spaceships? Who lived in the Mayan temple-cities, in the jungles of the Yucatán? And who are the stone figures gazing mutely from Easter Island? A dozen theories can be found for every question, but these ancient manmade wonders keep their secrets safe. PARADISE ON EARTH Many vast constructions in stone and marble display the glory of kings, from Versailles to the Kremlin. Some become gilded prisons—like the Forbidden City of the Chinese emperors in Beijing, or the Pótala Palace of the Dalai Lamas at Lhasa—in which the ruler becomes a puppet, cut off from real hfe. Such buildings may also be attempts to create an earthly paradise. If there is a paradise on earth,' said Shah Jehan, builder of the Red Fort in Delhi, 'it is this, it is this, it is this.' The Alhambra in Spain was designed with the same intention, and at Versailles, Louis XfV's architects and landscape designers set out to build a palace of ideal proportions, which would demonstrate not only the Sun King's majesty, but also the order of the world. The same is true of great religious buildings—cathedrals, mosques and temples—created as symbols of the divine order. The colossal temple-mountains of the East, like Borobudur in Java and Angkor Wat in Cambodia, are stone lessons on the true nature of the universe. They demonstrate the indefatigable human ambition to match earthly wonders with wonders of the human spirit. Hence the importance of orientation: of aligning a building with the order of the world. The Great Pyramid in Egypt was built so that its four sides accurately faced north, east, south and west. On the other side of the world, 3,000 years later, the city of Teotihuacán in Mexico was laid out in similar fashion. Sometimes orientation was used to spectacular symbolic effect. At Chichén Itzá, also in Mexico, the steps and terraces of the pyramid-temple represent the days and months of the year, so that at the spring and autumn equinoxes the shadows and patterns of sunlight made it look as if its serpent-god was coihng and writhing its way out of the temple.