Pantheon
After seeing a particularly arresting picture of it, I’ve been thinking about the Pantheon in Rome. Here are a few bits about it from Wikipedia:
Almost two thousand years after it was built, the Pantheon’s dome is still the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome.
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It is one of the best-preserved of all Ancient Roman buildings, in large part because it has been in continuous use throughout its history.
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Throughout the day, light from the oculus moves around the interior in a reverse sundial effect: marking time with light rather than shadow.
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The large bronze doors to the cella, measuring 14.6 ft wide by 24.7 ft high, are original.
It is incredible that, at so many times in millennia past, humans have stopped fighting and worked together long enough to build things of timeless beauty and monumental scale, things that only existed in imagination before they were wrought: first in two dimensions, wispy tendrils of imagination captured from the astral and fixed to the lines, curves, compression, tension of the terrestrial; secondly in construction, sweat of brow and blood of veins both spilled to compact and level and hew and fit and lift and carve and assemble something we could only make together.
It is equally incredible that, seeing the works of those before us, we have invariably plundered their metal, battered their sculpture, stolen their casings, and trampled them to ruin.
The Pantheon is the exception that proves the rule.