Letter to a Suicide Bomber

Dear Radical Muslim Suicide Bomber,

I realize your faith is the most important thing in your life. There's no reason to even discuss that. I also realize you may feel frustrated, ignored, helpless, poverty stricken, and any number of different things. But I'd like to ask you to look at this:

As you probably know, that's the Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan. Please click on that picture, and look at it. I mean really look at it. Look at it like you've never seen it before. Look at it like you've never seen anything like it before. Look at what your people accomplished. It is absolutely breathtaking. This building was built in 1634. Sixteen Thirty-Four.

Just so you can understand where I'm going with this, I propose a little game. Go to Google Maps and look at my home, New York City. Choose any point at random on the island of Manhattan and start looking up and down streets. I'll give you an entire hour to find any building built more than 250 years ago.

I could probably do it, because I know the history of the city, so I'd know where to start searching. But I'm assuming you live in another country. If you can find one by searching at random that way, I'll give you a million dollars. One of the things I love about New York is that we do have more gorgeous historical buildings than many other parts of this republic, in addition to our futuristic structures, but they are few and far between, and you have to know where they are. They probably pale in comparison to someplace like Boston or even Philadelphia.

And don't get me wrong, I love the Modernity of my city. The gravity-defying domes and soaring minarets of your mosques, the sun-bathed reach for the heavens of Europe's medieval cathedrals, as much as the sky-scraping steel and glass monoliths of America's newer cities, these all attest to the wondrous glory of the human spirit. They show what beauty and majesty is possible in the world when mere mortal human beings care to dream and push the boundaries of engineering and construction and artistry.

We all have our differences. There are parts of my country I could go where my political ideology, social attitudes, or spiritual philosophies would meet hostile, even violent opposition. But maybe there's something more important than all of that. It's this:

That's the Shrine of Hazrat Ali (the Blue Mosque) in Mazari Sharif, Afghanistan. This one was built in 1521.

Fifteen-hundred and twenty-one.

I'm only using these as mere examples: I mean whatever mosque you might see down your street. Your part of the world is filled with architecture of this age and caliber from one corner to the next.

I realize you may look at this and feel that it represents ideas in Islam that you find particularly offensive, even disgusting. It may make you terribly angry. This may seem so important that you MUST do something to stop it, even at the expense of your own life. You may feel that people practicing their faith in such a way MUST realize the errors of their ways, and you are the person to show them, with a bomb strapped to your chest. My interest is in aesthetics and culture and history, but the loss of human life will always be the greatest tragedy. I personally feel that killing is always wrong, period, regardless of what my government and its military are doing, but that's not a discussion for here.

But what I'd like to ask is that for just one moment, you stop...and look. Look at it. Look at how beautiful and majestic and important that structure is. How truly valuable is the age and longevity of its majesty in this fleeting, ever-challenging, alienating twenty-first century. Look at the exquisite, elaborate patterns of its ornament and consider how one of your ancestors had to be a genius in geometry to even conceive such grace. Consider the millennia of ceramacists perfecting the art of tile-making to produce glazing of an intricacy and vibrance the world had never seen. Notice a sense of proportion, elegance, and symmetry clearly inspired by Allah, Himself, and in glory to Him, every bit as much as Beethoven was inspired by God.

Instead of anger and fear and hate, there's a much more positive emotion you might feel: Pride (don't ask the Catholics). I implore you to just stop and think to yourself, "this is what my people contributed to the world. This is what the culture of which I have the honor to be a part was capable of producing." Maybe for just one moment, think not of the differences in cultures and beliefs, but what fantastic and impressive beauty your great ancient culture has been able to give all of the world, and don't destroy it. Please, don't destroy it. If I were to be able to look at, for instance, the Blue Mosque, and think "my people did this," I might weep with joy and pride.

Your ancestors gave you the greatest gift. Please don't take that for granted.

Yours Sincerely,
Ryan Witte

It's a Small World, After All

One thing I've never mentioned here before is that I LOVE me some model trains.  I suppose this isn't really Architecture, but some of these set-ups are so elaborate that they come pretty darn close. Just a lot smaller. I also think there's something obviously akin to Urban Planning involved here. If nothing else, they require an intimate understanding of the ways we organize our structures and transportation routes in the real world so that, however compressed, they won't appear awkward or unrealistic in miniature. Getting really involved in creating something like this, psychologically speaking, I'm sure requires some amount of God Complex.

Model railroads focus attention on our world in a number of interesting ways. They tend to favor the built environment and especially industrial areas that typically have much more rail traffic. There is a favored time period, near the turn of the twentieth century, when rail travel and heavy industry were at an all-time peak. In general, they favor environments and scenes that have the most mechanical components (like amusement parks), with the most inherent motion. But, despite the fact that these layouts are heavily populated, they would seem to favor a universe devoid of human beings and other animate creatures, because they can't be simulated as realistically. I suppose looking to automata, which have been around for hundreds of years, it would theoretically be possible to give the little human figures motion. But with the huge number of them in a single layout, it would hardly be realistic to attempt it.

Up until now, I'd thought that the most incredible model train layout was the holiday exhibit at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh.

--Photo courtesy Bob Fazio.

--Photos courtesy Josh Aronoff.

The lighting in the room slowly changes from day to night, all the lights in the village come on, and then it goes back up to day again.  I think the process takes around a half hour all together.

--Photo by Michael Orban.

It's still incredible. It looks especially large when you're only seven years old, but it's around eighty by twenty feet.  The rivers of real water and boats sailing around them are great.  It also has tons of animated scenes, there's a kid swinging on a tree swing, kids flying kites that actually float around in the air, all kinds of fun things they say are "only viewable from a child's point of view."  But what I suppose is most impressive about their layout is how very educational and historical it is. All throughout the layout are historical scenes like a Women's Suffrage parade, an African American baseball team, replicas of real structures from the history of coal mining and steel smelting.  It's like an elementary school teacher's dream come true.

--Photos courtesy Jaaron Farr.

Pittsburgh really is the perfect place for something like this, too, since the steel magnates made their fortunes from the westward expansion of railways, Andrew Carnegie himself probably more than any other.

MIT students started a fairly impressive model railroad in 1946, still running today. They're the Tech Model Railroad Club, and they allegedly coined the term "hackers," referring to something other than computer vandals.  Their layout is far more urban and industrial than most. Their website explains that originally the club was mostly electrical engineering students who were more interested in control systems than with scenery. The switching controls they created for the layout were evidently quite sophisticated for the time and used mostly surplus equipment from the telephone industry.

Then there's this very large layout in New Jersey, The Great American Railway at Northlandz. It's a little bit excessively mountainous, but it has some very impressive bridges. The longest of them is forty feet long, although the engineering of the bridges is questionable at best, to the point that they don't really look like any real bridge. They have over a hundred trains running per day. The walk around it is said to be a mile long, and it's said to be the largest HO-scale layout in the world.

In my opinion, the most mind-boggling of them all is the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, also claimed to be the largest model train layout in the world. Listening to their statistics, it's quite safe to say it makes Northlandz look childish. They run over 800 trains, the longest of which is several meters long. They have actual ocean liners and cargo ships floating around in enormous lakes. It's also a hundred times more realistic.

It's completely out of control.  I'd love to visit.

Miniatur Wunderland has a factory that produces what appears to be chocolates. After the tiny people make this giant slab of chocolate, it pops out the bottom so the visitor can eat it. I have no doubt that it's a pre-packaged chocolate only appearing to have been made by a miniature factory. But it would be remarkable to see a miniature set-up like this that would in reality produce a product from start to finish. For instance, haul raw materials in from all different parts of the layout by train, unload them into a miniature factory, and bake miniature loaves of bread or something. I can't think of any product off the top of my head that wouldn't be restricted by the actual size of things like eggs in the case of bread. There must be something, though.

©2009, Ryan Witte