2026-04-03 19:06:28
AI is about to metamorphose the media. Two worlds might emerge from this: one of slop, psyops, and fake news; another with clear information that leads to positive action.
I want the second one, and we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make it happen, creating in the process a legendary media company. So I’m building Uncharted Territories into a media company designed from the ground up with AI. But I can’t do it alone. If you want to help me build the future of media with AI, join me in working at Uncharted Territories: I’m hiring people to work on software development, research, video, social media, merchandising, and more.
In today’s article, I’ll tell you how I think AI will change media, and what we need to do to navigate that.
AI has already overwhelmed us. And it’s just starting.1
And Twitter just banned 800 million AI accounts!
Early on, it’s fun.
But it’s already getting stale. Imagine 10x more AI content. 100x. One million times more. As it submerges us and drowns us in an overload of information, fake news, morally bankrupt mass media, biased fact-checkers and shameless influencers, how will we know what is true? What to think? How can we make good decisions in a world like that?
This was the quality of media content before the Internet.
Good journalists—those we were most exposed to—were way more intelligent than the average human, and journalistic standards raised the bar further, so that most content was quite good.
But it wasn’t perfect. The newsroom was biased, the news served the interests of those who financed it, and it was limited in creativity to what had been done and what other journos did, among other shortcomings.
When the Internet appeared, it reduced many of its costs, but it obliterated that of distribution.
Suddenly, you could post your content on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter for nothing, and if it was good, it reached lots of people.
Production shrunk less, but it still came down:
For written content, platforms like social media, blogging, or newsletters made it as easy as in newsrooms
For pictures or video content, mobile phones with cameras and simple editing software made it easier than before, but still quite hard to get great content
The result was a massive increase in content:
Most of which has been crap.
But there’s so much of it that some was bound to be amazing. You can see it to the right in this graph, where there is a lot of great Internet-era content, and some even better than what we had before, because it allowed hundreds of millions of people to become creators, and some of them are amazing. They would never have been able to create but for the drop in distribution costs.
AI drops production costs even further.
The result is this:
Even more content.2 Most of it, crap.
Look at the right, though.
We’re approaching a golden era of content. Those who can best merge humans with AI will be able to create magical pieces. What will media companies need to make this amazing content?
The first key insight is that as supply explodes, attention is still limited so demand quantity won’t bulge. This means demand quality will go through the roof. The more content we see, the higher our expectations.
Anecdotally, I feel it every day in Uncharted Territories: When I compare old posts from five years ago from those of today, it seems to me like the quality jump is insane: So many more insights per article, illustrations, diversity of topics, depth of research… Mostly thanks to the help of AI. But the audience just gets used to it, it’s the new normal.
What will be the new bar? We can get a clue from the Streaming Wars.
When companies like Netflix, Disney, Apple, and Amazon started spending tens of billions in producing content for their platforms, they created a lot of TV shows.
The results in terms of customers have been amazing.
But how much did the quality of these shows increase? What are the best TV series since the Golden Era of prestige TV started? The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Office, Lost… Nearly all predate the Streaming Wars. You’d assume with the explosion of content, we’d have an explosion of amazing content. But that hasn’t happened.
Part of it is niching out: Now you might enjoy some TV show that few other people know, because content specialized in specific niches. But that doesn’t explain it all. There are hundreds of TV shows that look amazing, Hollywood-level production values, but they’re crap. Because the stories are crap.
This shows that the limiting factor in Hollywood has been great storytellers. This became extremely obvious for those who watched Game of Thrones: The showrunners were lauded as amazing storytellers… until they ran out of material from the author of the books, George R.R. Martin. After that, they still had the biggest budgets in the world, with the biggest teams, and yet their ratings started suffering, and the last season was dismal.
So:
More quantity and quality of supply → the expectations of customers rise
The limiting factor in fiction becomes great storytellers → they define the new equilibrium
What will happen to media with AI? Will AI become an amazing storyteller? It might happen in a few years, with the singularity, but I don’t think it will come immediately, because telling a good story is incredibly hard, as we just saw. It requires a deep understanding of humans, their emotions, their drives, the world, the structure of stories, the rules of dialogue, of character arcs… To give you an example, the makers of K-Pop Demon Hunters, a seemingly simple movie, spent seven years of their lives on the project, referring to hundreds of different experts, working for 500-1000 man-years to completion. They tweaked the eyes of their characters pixel by pixel to enhance their microexpessions. AIs are not there yet.
All of that applies to fiction. What about non-fiction? What is the equivalent of great storytellers in non-fiction in the AI era? What will become a commodity, and what will be the remaining limiting factor in a world of AI?
To truly answer this, we need to answer a more fundamental question.
What are you trying to achieve when you’re watching the news, scrolling Twitter, reading Substacks?
Make better decisions.
Humans are prediction machines. They try to understand how the world works so that they can make the most of it. That’s why we love stories: They help us understand how others have faced challenges. It’s why we’re fascinated about visions of the future, why we love uncovering new truths about the world.
The application can be professional, like how to communicate to advance at work; it can be personal, like how to shift behavior to become more attractive; it can determine where to live, to maximize the chances of a bright future; it can help us choose who to vote for… Whatever it is, the underlying, frequently subconscious goal is to make better decisions.
When you realize this, you realize how shitty the current media experience is: We consume hundreds of thousands of dull, stupid, vacuous, imperfect pieces of content to create an image of the world that matters to us. We then have to synthesize all this data to form an accurate representation of the world, to inform our decisions. You see the problem, right?
So how can we make this better? Here’s my take.
The most important requirement is to help the audience understand the world better. The more new things you can share, the more they help the world understand, the more valuable your media company. This means pieces of content should not be vapid, irrelevant, rehashing known facts, limiting themselves to facts only, etc.
And insights shouldn’t come as completely independent tidbits. A single, coherent worldview is much more compelling, because it puts the insights in context, and pushes not just data points, but entire mental models to better understand the world.
If you’re boring, though, people won’t finish your content. If they do, they might forget. You must be entertaining to help people consume your content and remember its lessons. So being entertaining is at least as important as being insightful. Doing either is hard. Doing both is devilish.
If a media outlet produces a million pieces of content and 5% are false, you’re quickly going to stop trusting everything. If an outlet barely gets anything wrong, the audience will learn to trust it and rely on it more and more.
But nobody is perfect. Every media outlet is bound to make mistakes. A company that tries to bury them will destroy its reputation. One that is honest about its truthfulness, that corrects itself when it makes a mistake, will be seen as more honest and therefore more trustworthy.
You can limit yourself to saying true facts and yet be unfaithful to the truth, by cherry-picking what you cover and choosing a narrative that fits your agenda.
You can make money with biased media, but that will never make you a quality source, because you’ll be pushing incorrect mental models into your audience’s mind.
All other things being equal, everybody prefers artisanal objects to industrial ones. The experience might be very similar, but just knowing that a human was behind them makes them more valuable, more sacred. The same will happen with content.
But artisanal objects are not usually the same quality as industrial ones. They must be functionally the same, but an artisanal object benefits from tiny flaws. Having a true person behind the content, one that is true to herself, who shows herself as she is, with her virtues and her flaws, will be more likely to reach people’s hearts. Live performances are one way to show the authenticity of artisanal humanity.
One of the areas in which authenticity will shine is courage. It’s easy to say what’s right when it’s popular; it’s much harder when it’s right but unpopular. #MeToo in 2017 was much more courageous than in 2024; saying that women and men are biologically different, and therefore psychologically different, was harder in 2023 than in 2026. Courage is exceptionally useful because it presents insights in the topics that are most likely to have failed mental models of the world, as information on these topics is limited.
If your first language is Japanese, maybe you’d rather read articles in Japanese instead of English. Maybe the illustrative examples are closer to who you are. Maybe the data presented includes your country, or your region. Or the mental models you have of the world, so that you are never bored by information you already know.
Before, it was too expensive to do that, but with AI it will become so cheap as to be possible in some cases. The future of content will be personalized.
If you do all this as a single creator, you’ll have a great voice, but you will remain an artisan of the media. The media companies that maximize their impact will have to do all the above at scale.
So if you want to build an amazing media company that incorporates AI from the ground up, it must deliver insights, entertainment, truth, honesty, authenticity, all without bias, and personalized at scale.
I envision a new Uncharted Territories that achieves all of that:
More content, with more insights, and more formats. Imagine The New York Times, but without the bias. The Economist, but for the 21st Century. Mr Beast, but with useful content.
More video: long form and short form.
More interactivity: What if articles became software?
More audience participation: What would it look like if the audience worked articles together?
And much more
But how specifically? What else should that company build? What type of content should it create? To answer this question, we must look into how media is produced today: What are all the tasks involved? Where is AI better than humans, and where are humans going to continue shining? Which tasks should be automated to make them more scalable and better than today? This gives you a strategy of what must be built. That’s what I’ll cover in the next article (paywalled).
Once you have that strategy, how do you make it a reality? By hiring the people to build it. If you’re the type of person who loves Uncharted Territories, loves AI, and wants to use both to take a shot at making a huge AI-first media company to make the world a better place, apply. I have positions as:
Software developers
Vibe coders
Research/Writers
Video creators
Short form video creators
Editors
Cartographers
Merchandise managers
Chief of Staff
But I can’t do any of this if you, the readers, don’t back the mission. I’m taking a huge risk hiring all these people, which I can’t afford with the revenue I’m currently getting from you. So if you like Uncharted Territories and you want to see more of it in the world, if you want more articles, more topics, more formats (short articles, podcasts, videos, short videos), if you want to see great media in the world of AI (and not just slop), you should support us: Without your subscriptions, I won’t be able to do any of this.
And if you really believe in UT and want to fund our growth, you can also consider investing.
Over the last few years, I’ve been studying and narrating these changes from Uncharted Territories, but it’s not enough. I can’t remain a bystander while the biggest change in the history of humanity is unfolding before us. Luckily, I have a background in the two key skills required to succeed in this world:
Tech: I spent 15 years building online products and growing them, starting from product management and ending as the Chief Product Officer of a billion-dollar company, with ~100 people at my charge. In the process, I grew teams from 0 to >100, and helped raise $500M. I know how to build tech companies and products.
Media: I’ve spent the last 6 years working in Uncharted Territories, where I’ve gone viral on all platforms: Medium, Substack, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram… I know how to make compelling content.3
I’ve decided to merge my two careers into one: building Uncharted Territories into a full media company, where we’ll combine the best of AI and humans to produce more, better ideas that reach more people, to help the world make better decisions and nudge it in a better direction.
Normally, you’d eye this graph, notice that AI-generated content now outpaces human content, and move on. But is this graph true? How do they know what is AI and what isn’t? Why did it slow down mid-2023? Is it simply that the algorithm can’t detect AI content anymore? Does that mean a much larger majority of content is now AI? Does it even matter how much? How will graphs and their underlying data validity evolve in a world of AI?
With the average probably better than with humans, as the average human creator is not that interesting, but AI has some minimum standards.
Other relevant experience: Before tech, I got my MBA at Stanford and two MSc in engineering. I’ve studied scriptwriting, communication, and public speaking. I wrote a book on storytelling structure.
2026-03-26 06:55:57
One of my most successful articles now has a YouTube version. If you want to see why warm countries are poorer, go watch it!
Now today’s article, which I had a lot of fun writing, full of crazy facts. Enjoy!
After 1300 years as the largest dome in the world, Rome’s Pantheon was replaced by Florence’s dome in Santa Maria del Fiore. To this day, it remains the biggest masonry dome ever built.1 What?!
In a span of 100 years, the same city would birth an endless list of history-making figures: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Raphael, the Medici, Machiavelli… What’s going on?!
What was in the water? I’d like to know, to brew it again. Florence or Silicon Valley can’t have been pure serendipity. How do we replicate them?
To answer that, the best place to start is a cathedral that had spent 100 years with a massive hole in the roof that nobody could plug, much before Lorenzo de Medici, Leonardo, or Michelangelo were born.
The architect that originally designed the cathedral died, and he left no solution on how to build the dome.
After a century with that hole (!) came a goldsmith (!!), Brunelleschi, who built the biggest dome the world had ever seen! And he did it without the cement used for the Roman pantheon, as its recipe had been lost in time!
Even harder, since the rest of the cathedral was already built when he arrived, he couldn’t change the shape of its walls, reinforce them, buttress them, or anything like that. He had to work with what he had! And he did it without scaffolding! And he did it without ribs!2 This is crazy.
The key challenge was to prevent the dome from falling. The first thing there was to adopt the insight of Gothic architecture that taller arches are stronger than circular ones. So the dome is not a hemisphere, it’s a bit more vertical.
The second was to make it light by emptying it. The structural force is carried by the inner dome (red), and then there’s a space and an outer shell (green).
You can see the space between the roofs here:
Even then, it would have fallen.
Brunelleschi needed a way to pull the top outward and push the bottom inward. He solved it with stone and wood rings around the dome!
The other thing Brunelleschi had to figure out was how to build this thing without a wooden scaffolding inside (it would have required too much wood!). He solved that by building the entire structure ring by ring, using herringbone bricks, crossing the bricks so that they would support each other.
OK hold on. What’s going on here? Why, after 1300 years, out of nowhere, is a goldsmith that doesn’t even have the materials necessary for replicating the Ancient Rome Pantheon able to build a bigger one?! That we’ve never replicated?!
Brunelleschi lived in Florence, a city with plenty of Ancient Rome ruins. I think it’s hard for us to understand what living among these vestiges of a better time felt like.
From Petrarch, a Tuscan from the neighboring city of Arezzo3 who visited Rome in the mid-1300s:
[Rome is a] broken city, the remnants of the ruins lay before our eyes. [...] Who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?
Every day, you’d be reminded that your civilization is inferior to the one that came before.
Brunelleschi, inspired by these ruins and by some people before him like Petrarch, who had visited Rome, decided to make a trip to Rome too. Ruins were everywhere. He spent two years there, studying its remaining architecture. He studied the Pantheon to replicate its dome in Florence, and got the idea for the herringbone bricks by observing brickwork there.
He didn’t go alone; he was accompanied by the famed sculptor, Donatello, who was inspired to sculpt a David, the first freestanding nude male sculpture since antiquity. Together, they excavated buried structures and measured monuments like the Pantheon, the Baths of Caracalla, Roman basilicas…
Around that same time, another Florentine, Bracciolini, rediscovered4 Vitruvius’s De Architectura, the only architectural treatise that has survived from antiquity to this day.
Other Florentines like Michelangelo, Raphael5, and Leonardo da Vinci traveled to Rome to form the ninja turtles squad study it.
Between De Architectura and visits to Rome, architects and artists started noticing that Roman buildings used modular, proportional systems and strict rules of geometry: harmonious numerical ratios (1:1, 1:2, 2:3, etc.), room height related to width, temple column spacing based on column diameter… These ideas gave Renaissance architects something medieval builders lacked: a theoretical mathematical framework for beauty.
Brunelleschi came back from the trip with a firm idea of what the dome should look like, and all the other Florentine visitors came back with specific ideas of proportions and classical elements.
So why did the Renaissance happen in Florence? Well, it couldn't have happened much farther from Rome. Think of the experience of these Florentines, growing up among substantial Florentine ruins from the Ancient Roman Empire, and close enough to visit Rome and witness the massive beauty that had been lost. The farther you were from Rome, the fewer the ruins, the harder it was to get to Rome, and the less inspiration Rome would have provided.
This probably explains why the Renaissance had to happen close to Rome, but not specifically in Florence. Why not Siena, Pisa, Naples, Milan, or even Rome? Why then, and not 200 or 300 years earlier or later?
In the Dark Ages, as the Roman Empire fell and law and order withdrew, cities decayed and many disappeared. But not so in Italy. Cities like Milan, Florence, Verona, Bologna, Ravenna, Pisa, Venice, Genoa, and Siena remained populated. By the 11th century, they had merchant classes, bishops, courts, guilds, militias… They were already institutionally capable of governing themselves. This independence of communities happened everywhere in the former Roman Empire, but it was especially true in the Holy Roman Empire, modern-day Germany and Italy.
This is Italy in 1500. Chaos!
I explored why this happened in Why Were Germany and Italy the Last European Countries to Unify? The short answer is that Italy was the battleground between two dimensions of power: the temporal and the spiritual.
This was Europe around 1200 AD:
For centuries since the creation of the Holy Roman Empire in the 10th Century, the Emperor and the Pope fought for power and influence, like who would appoint the powerful bishops. Around 1200, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II had just united the northern part from his father with the Kingdom of Sicily to the south from his mother. The Pope logically freaked out when he saw his Papal States surrounded, and stirred up revolts everywhere he could in Italy.
Crucially, Italy is separated from Germany by the mighty Alps, making it very hard for the Holy Roman Emperor (HRE) to have strong influence to the south.
And Italy is very mountainous, with lots of secluded valleys that birthed strong, independent cities. This meant that, in practice, local cities had been quite autonomous for a very long time, even if they were nominatively under the HRE.
So when the Pope stirred revolt all over Italy, different cities decided to support different sides. This is what’s called the war of the Guelphs and Ghibellines.
Notably, the closer you were to one of these big powers, the less likely you were to support it, because it’s better to have a distant lord than a neighboring one. This created a patchwork of alliances and counteralliances, of wars and betrayals. Over the centuries, the power of the HRE dwindled in the region, and the emperor became just a distant influence.
This is the context in which the Florentine Machiavelli thrives and writes his famous work The Prince in the early 1500s.6
So all this is why the Northern Italian region had many independent city-states:
The cities there remained inhabited since Roman times.
The area has many fertile valleys among mountains, allowing for many urban nuclei to sprout.
The region was separated from its rulers by the Alps, which meant little oversight.
This is at the border region between the HRE and the Papal States, so they became a proxy war battleground that exacerbated their differences and undermined the oversight of both on the region
Independent states were crucial to explore new styles locally and to push for their own architectural styles to differentiate from other competing city-states. But this doesn’t tell us why they were so rich, and you needed a lot of money to build such huge cathedrals.
At the time, Italy’s population was rebounding from the Black Death faster than in many other European countries.
And these people were rich! In the 1300s, Northern Italy was already the richest region in Europe.
One of the main reasons was urbanization. These were the main European cities in the early 1500s. Notice how many are in northern Italy!
We already explained why: They were already quite populated in Roman times, and they have some of the best plains in the Mediterranean, especially in the Po Valley.
A big population that could grow fast and was already urban meant a bigger share of the population lived in cities.
Of course, cities are more productive than rural areas due to their network effects. They become marketplaces, develop industries, invest in infrastructure, build industrial clusters…
Northern Italy also had another huge benefit: It was in the middle of global trade networks.
The richest regions at the time were Flanders, the Holy Roman Empire in general, the Byzantines, and the Muslims,7 and Northern Italy was in the middle of them all. This is why Venice and Genoa grew so rich as maritime trade republics.
And within Northern Italy, Florence was very well positioned.
If you wanted to move between the HRE and Rome, the best path went through Florence, which is a natural crossroads because Florence and Bologna flank the Apennine mountains.
So Florence, like only a handful of other Italian cities, had a unique confluence of assets:
It was in a populated region, because it has a good climate and great agricultural plains
This was in the richest region in the world, because it was at the crossroads connecting all the main kingdoms of the time
The region also contained many cities that had remained inhabited since Roman times, and Florence was one of the big, urbanized cities in the region
Situated between the two regional powers of the HRE and the Papal States, these cities had more independence than most
It was at a crossroads for internal Italian trade, making it uniquely rich as a marketplace
Close to Rome, to receive strong architectural influence from the Roman Empire
Still, it could have been Siena, Bologna, Parma, maybe Genoa or Venice. And sure enough, all of them have beautiful architecture. But something set Florence apart.
Money.
The best way to know who ruled back then is to look at who funded the biggest monuments. So who funded the cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore?
One tip is in the name: Santa Maria refers to Virgin Mary, and echoes the importance of religion. But fiore? These are flowers—like Firenze. This refers to the city: The cathedral was meant to represent both the church and the state. This was not a purely religious endeavor. In fact, it was anything but. It was the commune of Florence that financed it. And where did the money come from? The Wool Guild, Arte della Lana.
By the 1200s, the wool trade had become one of the city’s largest industries, among other things precisely because Florence was such a big city:8 Wool must be sheared, sorted, scoured, carded, drawn, spun, wound, warped, woven, fulled, sheared, pressed, dyed, sewn… There are many steps, but crucially, each step can be done by one single person or a few, with pretty basic machinery. So people across the city worked on different steps in their homes. The bigger the city, the more workers could be dedicated to each step, the more competition and learning between them, the more volume could be produced, and the bigger the industry. The bigger it is, the more it specializes, the better its products compared to the competition, the better the reputation, and you end up dominating a continent-wide market.
This industry became so big that local wool was not enough to feed it, so Florentines started buying wool abroad (in Spain, England, Flanders…), and finished it into high-quality cloth. They organized themselves into guilds, which helped them work together to promote the industry’s quality, its trade, its financing…
Financing! When you buy wool and sell cloth abroad, you need currency exchange. And when there are so many steps to the process, from so many workers, you must pay them a salary before you sell the cloth or garment, so you need a lot of working capital. So the Florentines also developed a very strong financial guild.
The financial guild minted the gold florin, which soon became a currency used across Europe thanks to its distribution through wool commerce and banking, and to its reliability, as ensured by the guild.
The power—and money—of the commune was concentrated in the hands of these guilds, and of course legislation favored them. Imagine what that did to the competition: Across most of Europe, industrialists, bankers, and merchants had to withstand the logic of Church and nobles. But Florence could do regulatory arbitrage, optimizing everything to support its trade; another advantage to pull forward.
Then the city had a lucky strike. Remember the Guelphs and Ghibellines? Florence supported the Guelphs (the pope), while its rival Siena supported the Ghibellines (HRE),9 and it turns out the pope won. Siena was stripped of its banking and tax collection monopolies, which went to Florentine families. Notably, the Medici created a bank that grew strongly throughout that time, was on the right side of the war, and was given the management of the Papal Treasury. Their good relationship also gave them a monopoly of alum mining, a product crucial for dyes that could only be sourced in mines near Rome.10 This is also the time when silver started flooding Europe, so banking became extremely profitable. Eventually, the Medici would take over the politics of Florence and convert it into a duchy.
Florence used this newly-found power to strengthen its position across Tuscany and conquered its neighbors one by one. When it took over Pisa, it acquired a port. When it took over Siena, it eliminated its main rival.
So we can add a few factors to our reasoning of how Florence became the cradle of Renaissance:
Thanks to its sizable population and perfect position at a crossroads within Northern Italy, Florence became wealthy in the pretty typical network effect of cities we’ve already seen elsewhere: first an industry developed (wool), which begat new industries (wool processing into cloth, finance). This made the city rich.
It was on the right side of a war, so it was showered with spoils, most notably lots of financial power and control over valuable commodities (alum was crucial for making colorful cloth).
But why push for a new art style? And why this one?
Power was conveyed through architecture. The Arte della Lana guild wanted to show its power in the city, and to other cities. Remember, there are dozens of city-states in Northern Italy, the competition was brutal! They had to stand out, establish themselves as the most successful, so they could have status and gain more business. That’s why they invested in Santa Maria del Fiore. But that cathedral is not yet Renaissance! It starts as a mix of Gothic and local Tuscan style. So what is the Renaissance style, and why does it appear here?
As we saw previously, the impetus behind Gothic was to go as high as possible, to reach the heavens. This pushed the boundaries of architectural technology of the time: verticality, pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses, detailed decoration for mysticism, and stained glass were the methods, and I think the goal was clearly achieved.
In the Renaissance, the idea was to go back to the wisdom of the more powerful ancient Roman Empire. Studying it, architects realized they followed some rules, and they decided to decode them and apply them. They decided that space should be graspable, measured, balanced, and ordered as a coherent whole. They did that by going back to columns, round arch, domes, volumes, horizontality, visual legibility, proportions, and a return to hard-coded classicism.
The love for proportion and precision could also be seen in small details like these:
Lines, squares, circles, crosses, mathematical curves… These textures are beautiful.
Of course, Rome and the popes loved the new architectural style based on their own city, so they funded and promoted it. They realized that Rome was a pile of ruins, but if they could rebuild it and make it even more beautiful, their power would radiate across Christendom. This is why Vatican City’s St Peter’s Basilica is of the Renaissance style, for example, and why the Renaissance became huge in general.
OK here’s my ignorant and probably unpopular opinion: Renaissance churches are beautiful but… underwhelming?
With Gothic, society had a clear goal: Convey their love of God by reaching upward and pushing the technological boundaries to make it happen.
The great thing that Renaissance does is rediscover domes, which are objectively awesome. It also recovered the pendentives (which were Eastern Roman, not from Rome…), and made proportions explicit. But does that mean you have to adopt all the other Roman stuff, too? Why go back to columns and rounded arches, when we’ve seen they’re objectively inferior, since they can only allow smaller spaces? Why go for horizontality, an architectural feeling that was already so pervasive in cities because houses were not tall? Why pretend an obsession with order that your predecessor didn’t have, when in fact Gothic architecture had a similar order that you just couldn’t read?
It feels like the Renaissance was trying too hard to define its path in opposition to what came before.
“Gothic” litearlly means from the Goths—the Franks and the Germans on the other side of the Alps. That style was born in France and spread to Germany. It makes sense that Florence, allied to Rome and against the German HRE, would define itself in opposition to that by getting inspiration from ancient Roman architecture. Of course, a city that is managed by merchants wants to define itself in opposition to pure religious piety too. But when you define yourself by opposition to others, how strong are your values?
It’s a bit like how Swiss handwatches tried hard to become precise and thin, and once the Japanese figured out how to do that better, most Swiss watchmakers went bankrupt and the few that recovered (and soared) did so not because their watches were better (not more precise, nor thinner), but because their cost and elaborate shapes became symbols of status.
This is the first time in all the architectural styles we’ve observed that the innovations are not done to improve, but just to be different.
Renaissance really shines outside of churches for me. Before, it seems like most architecture of beauty was concentrated into churches, but now it appears everywhere. Compare Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, built around 1300 just before the Renaissance, with the Medici-Riccardi, built around 1450, during the explosion of Renaissance in Florence:
The Palazzo Vecchio is basically a fortress!11 A small unassuming door without many indications that it is even the main door, small windows, stones of different colors, no texture between windows, the crenelated roof for defence, a single tower in one corner…
Now compare that to the Medici Riccardi. Still strong, but now the round arches with voussoirs on top make them taller and much more conspicuous. There are more, bigger windows,12 external decorated marks for each floor, the roof overhang is now beautifully decorated, dimensions feel harmonious…
And I think this becomes even stronger when you have several houses following this style, even when some of them mix with other styles.
Although I am lukewarm about Renaissance church architecture, this doesn’t take away from the improvement in non-Church architecture, and more importantly the amazing intellectual movement that emerged in Florence.
The Renaissance precursor Dante Alighieri revolutionized literature; Luca Pacioli, a collaborator of Leonardo da Vinci, became a ground-breaking figure of accounting; Piero della Francesca emphasized the divine proportions; Fibonacci13 discovered the Fibonacci sequence and popularized Indian numerals; Galileo the astronomer defended heliocentrism against the church; Botticelli, Boccaccio, and the aforementioned Michelangelo, the Medici, Da Vinci, Petrarch, Donatello, Raphael, Brunelleschi…
And now we know what the Renaissance is, and why it started in Florence:
Because of the mountainous terrain, the Alps, and the length of the Italian Peninsula, Northern Italy was distant from foreign centers of power, which gave them autonomy, especially given the contest between the HRE and the Church.
Northern Italy was rich because it was at the right spot in the Mediterranean, so it was the marketplace for Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
It also has highly fertile valleys, so the population grew fast.
A big share of that population was urban, which means network effects, more industry, trade, and money.
Within this region, Florence was rich as a crossroads between Rome and Northern Italy. It developed a wool industry, and from there other industries, including finance.
It was close enough from Rome to get its patronage, but not too close to be absorbed by it.
It was lucky to be on the winning side of the war between the Church and the HRE, and got a massive boost when the Church won, with financial and mining monopolies.
It was close enough to Rome to gain inspiration from Ancient Rome and be able to study it.
Once Florence had the money and the independence to go beyond the daily focus on war and survival, it could use the example of Rome to study it and replicate it. This meant massive investments in architecture, art, and all types of studies of Ancient Rome. This created a critical mass of thinkers who learned from each other, creating an explosion of knowledge across the disciplines.
In many regards, this reminds me of what I witnessed in Silicon Valley in the nearly 15 years I spent there: an incredible concentration of intelligent, ambitious people, all focused on pushing the boundaries of one new technology—the Internet. It’s difficult to get these network effects set up. Can San Francisco survive its current downfall? Where will the next Florence emerge? What type of endeavor can justify the massive investments that are concentrated in one place, to attract geniuses from everywhere? Can Dubai do it, or does it not have enough of a mission? Shenzhen fits the definition. Is it limited to manufacturing, or will it bleed into other types of innovation? What do you think?
This type of article takes blood and sweat, and they don’t leave me much more time to do other things. But I want to do even better ones! And more of them! Across more media! I hope you saw the video at the top. I want to do more of that too! But I can’t do this alone. So I am going to hire a team to help me research, write, and publish more articles, convert this content into videos, audio, and podcasts, translate them, make tools to make them interactive, and much more. But I can only do that if you help me pay for it. If you like articles like this one and you want to see more, I need you to fund it.
This claim sounded crazy to me, so I looked into it. The Florentine Duomo, built in 1436, apparently remained the biggest dome in the world for 450 years, until 1871, when it was replaced by the Royal Albert Hall dome. But all modern domes use steel somehow, either directly or as reinforced concrete. Brunelleschi’s Duomo in Florence doesn’t, it’s just masonry: a series of construction elements bound with mortar and working by compression.
Arezzo was absorbed into Florence soon after, in the 1380s.
Apparently it was already in circulation, and the original architect of Santa Maria del Fiore was inspired by it, but this rediscovery made its knowledge widespread.
The 3rd and 4th turtles. You didn’t think I had forgotten, did you? Although born in Urbino, Raphael became deeply connected with Florentine artistic circles before moving to Rome. Michelangelo was born in the Florentine village of Caprese.
There’s a fantastic write-up from Martin Sustrik about Ada Palmer’s class on Italian politics of the time. The gist of it is that this class puts the students in the skin of different characters, and they role-play the history, which is the closest thing we have to having randomized controlled tests in history, and what it finds is that some outcomes always happen, but some others change, and the details are always different. This is strong support for the theory that big parts of history are predetermined.
With Western countries like Castile, Portugal, Aragon, France, and England emerging. Flanders was part of the Holy Roman Empire and/or France depending on the moment. It’s in the area where France, the HRE, and the Hanseatic League overlap. I mean the HRE “in general” as it controlled Flanders, and many parts of HRE were rich, but not all.
I think the wool trade has not received the attention it deserves. It accounted for a massive share of GDP—I believe it was the second biggest industry after food. I hope to tackle it some day. If you know good sources, LMK.
Siena was closer to Rome than Florence, so it felt the Papal power more strongly. It made sense for it to oppose Rome, in hopes of the distant HRE suppressing Rome, which would have given Siena more autonomy.
Alum is a mordant, meaning it creates a chemical “bridge” between dye molecules and the fibre. There were no alum mines in Europe; it was all provided by the Ottomans in the 1400s, until an alum mine was discovered near Rome, in the Papal States. The Popes gave their mining rights to the Medici.
It had to be though because it wasn’t safe at the time.
Notice we’re still not very secure, as the windows had ironwork to fend off criminals.
From neighboring Pisa, which became part of Florence-controlled Tuscany.
2026-03-20 01:17:42
We saw in the previous article how the Romans developed the voussoir, barrel and groin vaults, domes, cement, plumbing, and heating to allow for space and comfort in their many buildings. Today, we’re going to see what happened afterwards: As the Roman Empire collapsed in the West, the Byzantines picked up the torch in the East and pushed its architectu…
2026-03-17 21:05:25
Geography has dramatically influenced architecture, but another force might have been even more important: technology. How has technology shaped architecture and our living spaces?
We’re going to answer this question today through a trip to the Roman Empire: What problems did the Romans try to solve? How did that influence the architecture that we know today?
In the next few articles, we’re going to explore successive architectural styles: Byzantine, Islamic, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, Historicist, Revival, Modernist, Contemporary… In the process, we’re going to see how geography, culture, and technology have interacted to drive architecture.
The Romans learned most of their architecture from the Greeks, and some from the local Etruscans. Here, the Hera II Paestum in southern Italy:
But this type of structure has two big problems that didn’t fit Roman goals:
The indoor part is too small to hold an event. The system of vertical columns with horizontal lintels was too heavy to allow for big indoor spaces.
They’re expensive to make. If you want to build many civic buildings (temples, forum, baths, basilica, market, theater, bridges, aqueducts, walls, gates…) across many cities in the empire, it’s hard to replicate this design: It requires too much stone that might be scarce, or skilled craftsmen to cut, carry, and assemble the stone.
There’s a third problem that Romans wanted to solve: comfort in private homes. They wanted the entire city, including many residences, to have running water, drainage, and heat.
Romans adopted a few technologies that allowed them to increase indoor spaces. One is the voussoir arch.
The voussoir arch transfers weight sideways, preventing collapse and allowing a much wider space between columns.
The Romans didn’t invent either of these arches; they took them from the Etruscans, who probably took them from around the Mediterranean (Mesopotamia and Egypt). But the Romans perfected them.
If you take an arch and extend it along a corridor, you get the barrel vault. Again, this already existed around the Mediterranean, but not extensively, and the barrel vault is quite limited to single corridors anyway. The Romans learned to combine two of these into groin vaults.
You can see the type of result that arises from this as you scale it:
Instead of projecting the arch in a single direction, you can rotate it in a circle and create a dome.
Rome’s Pantheon, with a span of over 43m, was the largest dome in the world for 1,300 years! And you can see the transition from Greek to Roman style when you view it from outside:
Imagine that you come from a Greek world where virtually all social life happened outdoors, and suddenly you can create these huge indoor spaces that had never existed before. Big events and social life can now happen indoors!
Notice, though, that neither the dome nor the groin vaults from before are solely made of stone. They require a lot of cement.
Like the previous technological improvements, cement already existed before the Romans: It was made through a process that took limestone, changed its chemistry to reshape it, and then reconverted it into limestone.
Yes, cement used to be basically limestone: Both were calcium carbonate, CaCO3. When heated, CO2 is released and what is left is quicklime, CaO. Add water, it becomes slaked lime Ca(OH)2. Now wait for long enough, and it will capture some CO2 from the air and eject the water, creating CaCO3 again. The problem with this is that it takes a long time, and you can’t have much water around or your slaked lime will not dry out.
If you add sand to the cement, you get mortar. Add stones to the mortar, and you get concrete. Previous civilizations used mortar and concrete, but not as much as the Romans, because their version was weaker for building, longer to set, and couldn’t be done around water.
The Romans were lucky to discover that mixing the lime with volcanic ash (pozzolana, very common around Naples, added silicon and aluminium to the mix) made a much stronger cement that could even set under water, and became stronger with time rather than weaker. The Romans mixed elements in such a way that cement could actually heal over time, something we’ve only recently understood.
There is a kind of powder which from natural causes produces astonishing results. It is found [...] about Mt. Vesuvius. This substance, when mixed with lime and rubble, not only lends strength to buildings of other kinds, but even when piers of it are constructed in the sea, they set hard under water.—Vitruvius, De Architectura, Book 21
Only with this superglue could the Romans make the dome and the other types of buildings we’ve seen.
This is all Roman concrete: Roman cement with sand and aggregate (e.g. sand, stone, pieces of brick…) that serves as a skeleton. The mix was lighter at the top, with pumice stone (volcanic stone with bubbles in it) and became heavier and heavier as it went down, closer to the walls. The dome width is also thicker towards the bottom.
Note the squares throughout: They are coffers, which enabled reduction of material (and hence weight). At the top, a hole further lightened the structure, while also allowing for a beautiful play of light and shadow.
Small holes in the floor allow for drainage.
You really see the progress when you compare it with what came before:
But concrete is a bit liquid; you can’t just place it in a specific shape. It needs formwork: a frame to hold it until it hardens.
Romans used wooden molds, just as we do today, and poured the concrete inside. They used it for everything, from domes to walls to columns.
With the discoveries of voussoir arches, groin vaults, domes, and cement, building became much easier. Romans didn’t need to source good stone and even better craftsmen. They could simply crush and transport limestone and brick, mix them with sand, aggregate, and water, pour the result into wooden formwork, and erect their buildings.
This means construction became much cheaper and easier than in earlier days, giving Romans a solution to their second problem, which meant they could build many more buildings across the empire. Of course, these two things go together: It’s not like the Romans figured all this out and then started to build. Rather, all this building allowed them to iterate and figure out better and better construction techniques.
Romans built aqueducts to bring drinking water to their cities. Once they could build huge indoor spaces, they could bring water to indoor buildings, and baths became possible.
Once you start bringing water indoors for baths, you might as well start bringing water to other buildings, including private ones. This requires channeling water through small tubes in walls. But with what type of material? As we saw in How Ancient Metals Started Civilization, Romans had way too much lead from their silver mining, and lead is easy to work with, so they built their plumbing with it. Plumbing comes from plumbum, Latin for lead.
Moving water requires pressure, so Romans built water towers to store the aqueduct water. Water is generally cold, though, so Romans had to warm it up. They didn’t just face the challenge of water management, but heat management, too. For that, they needed cauldrons, some fuel, chimneys, all incorporated into the building.
And once they did it for the communal baths, they began incorporating it into housing, starting with the rich.2
And this is how Roman architecture solved their problems:
Huge enclosed spaces thanks to arches, vaults, domes, cement
The ability to build them at scale thanks to the easier processing of limestone and clay, the standardization of shapes, and the use of wooden formwork for pouring concrete
The ability to provide services like running water, drainage, and heating at scale, by applying the learnings from construction of many public buildings to that of private homes, and by taking advantage of the critically wide availability of lead.
What’s striking about Roman architecture is that a lot of it was extremely practical: They had convenience problems and they wanted to solve them, so they developed the corresponding technology. I always heard that Rome was a civilization of engineers rather than philosophers, but this was the first time it gelled for me. They had the benefit of an empire that kept expanding, so more and more buildings to build meant much more experience through iteration, and more technological development.
Most other ancient architectures stemmed from a cultural desire that translated into the technological progress that enabled it. We’ll see those in the next few articles, where we cover the Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic architecture. After that, we’ll examine Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, Historicist, Revivalist, Modernist, Contemporary, etc. All, to understand how architecture got where it has, and how we can improve it.
The rest of the quote is also super interesting: Vitruvius was trying to understand chemically how this could happen.
My guess is: If the Roman Empire had continued expanding, some of these technologies would have become cheaper and cheaper, and enter the homes of poorer people.
2026-03-14 00:52:43
In the previous article, we visited Britain, Egypt, and Greece. Today, we’re going to journey through India, China, and Japan, and see how their different geographies pushed their architectures in different directions compared to those around the Mediterranean and in Britain.
Whereas all of Egypt’s water comes from one single river, India’s water comes from one single season, the monsoon.
This has determined India’s architecture. A big chunk of its land (and most of its population) is in the Ganges Valley:
That valley is criss-crossed by the Ganges and its tributaries. When the monsoon floods the rivers, they bring sediment with them to fertilize the land. Water and sediment mean lots of people, and the rivers allow for cheaper trade. So many cities emerged on their riverbanks.
In the dry season, waters go down tremendously, though. So how do you make sure you can access the river at all times?
So water in India arrives dramatically, it leaves dramatically; it structures trade, it structures agriculture; it determines good years and bad years; it determines survival. Water cycles mean life and death. So they drive religion, pilgrimages, life and death rites.
In places where water is scarcer, it’s even more important. So people store it.
If you build storage for water, and water is holy, you end up building a decorated, inverted pyramid.
But you can only do that when it’s easy to carve into the ground.
There are also temples carved into stone from the ground. They are not built by adding material, but by subtracting. In the case above, it’s carved inside a mountain from the Deccan, a massive volcanic plateau made of basalt. It can be extremely hard, but here it has joints and planes that can be exploited for carving.
As with pyramids, one of the reasons to do this is that it makes the building very bulky, which means temperature will be stable and fresh—ideal in the scorching heat of India.
These structures still need to stand, but they’re heavy, so we see small indoor spaces and lots of columns again.
Have you seen this type of video? Same energy.
This video is from tropical Australia, where extreme weathering by constant rain and heat makes laterite, a certain type of soil that hardens with air. People can make bricks out of it.
West Bengal, which has lots of this laterite, uses bricks for its temples.
The result of these types of stone (laterite, sandstone, limestone, soapstone…) is that it’s not strong enough to create big indoor spaces without arches, but carving is easy, so decorations are extreme.
You combine these elements, and you get things like the inverted temple stepwell of Rani-ki-Vav:
However, not all India is like this. In some areas, it rains a lot more:
In Kerala, you need tiered slopes on your roofs that carry the water off, and since this is a mountainous area, timber is more available to make those. Since you don’t want this water to run on the walls, you’ll add cornices that eject the water out.
But in this area, the climate is very hot and humid, and you want air to circulate all the time to refresh you and to avoid mold, so houses have a central opening.
The Nalukettu was born.
It evolved into a system of courtyards surrounded by homes, so that extended families could live under one roof, each with their own space.
So you can see some of the elements that have driven Indian architecture:
Water is sacred
Access to fluctuating river water levels requires ghats
In drier areas, people dug wells that could also capture monsoon water, and since they’re sacred, they became temples like inverted pyramids
Carve structures into the ground to protect against temperature swings
Where it rains the most, protect your head and your home with slanted roofs, especially with tiered slopes, so that the cascading water doesn’t accumulate too much energy and make holes in the ground
Have an internal courtyard to make sure air circulates well
We see similar patterns in China. In the Loess Plateau, where stone is easy to work, people would carve decorations and homes into the mountain.
This protected from the extreme temperature swings throughout the year and between day and night.
Kerala’s Nalukettus are mirrored in the Chinese siheyuan.
They also have homes around a central courtyard, made to optimize airflow and allow for a central common area.
Now take this concept and bring it to the mountains, where harder transportation means less communication and trade across valleys, more cultural distance with your neighbors, less political unity, and more conflict. You get the Tulous, semi-fortified community homes with a central courtyard.
The Forbidden City, in Beijing, uses the same logic, just on a bigger scale.
We see:
Axial distribution, to wow visitors
North-south orientation
Walls and a moat, to protect against intruders
The closer to the center, the more intimate the dwelling
Social courtyards
The nesting from outside to inside is continued through the Imperial City and the Inner City.
Unlike in India, however, Chinese architecture stands out for its use of wood:
Why so much more wood?
India’s civilization emerged across the Indus and Ganges River Valleys, which have access to sandstone (e.g. in Rajasthan). It also spread quickly across the Deccan Plateau—the mountains in the center—where stone is available, which is very useful to avoid rot and insulate against the heat.
China originates in the North China Plain, an alluvial plain made by the sediments brought by the Yellow River. This means rock is under a deep layer of soil, hard to reach. But there was a lot of timber here.
This region is much farther north, so it’s colder, and timber is better at trapping and storing heat. Also, stone can trap water and break with too many cycles of freezing and thawing (because water takes up more space as ice, and pushes against the stone), but timber is flexible, so it doesn’t break as easily with these cycles.
Also, the North China Plain has many more earthquakes than India, and stone is bad for earthquakes since it can’t flex at all. Stone buildings tend to crumble during earthquakes, while timber ones survive.
For all these reasons, China used much more timber in its architecture. And that has its own sets of challenges.
For example, when you’re making your walls in stone, they can carry the weight of the entire structure. It would be expensive to do the same with timber, so instead, timber architecture tended to have strong wooden columns to carry the weight and light timber for the walls.
Look at the beams, columns, and wooden roof of the Shanhua Temple:
One of the positive things about wood, of course, is that it’s lighter, so indoor spaces could be bigger.
But you don’t want your wooden walls to rot, so they should avoid contact with monsoon rains. The answer is a roof with long eaves that allow for a deep overhang:
That way, water is ejected far from the wall and doesn’t touch it. It’s also why the Chinese roofs are curved, as you can see in the background in this pic. This allows water to run out fast and be projected outwards, farther from the wall.
Curbing the wood had another advantage: Over long periods of time, gravity makes wood sag downward. So to avoid that, the Chinese curbed wood upward. Once you start doing that, it makes sense to push it for aesthetic purposes, to make the roof “reach for the sky”.
Notice what’s below the roof? That’s called a dougong, and is very typical of Chinese architecture. It’s to support the weight of the roof. Why?
With big indoor spaces, roofs are heavy.
But they can’t rest on walls like in Europe, because they’re made of light timber instead of stone. So they must rest on the timber columns.
They must support the eaves, which have a deep overhang as we just mentioned.
Architects needed a system made of interlocking timber that could be flexible during earthquakes.
The dougong was the solution—nested brackets that could reach far into the eave to support it.
Of course, once you have this type of structure, you might as well decorate it:
And it’s not just for dougongs. Anything, really. Columns? Roofs? All of it. Because timber is super easy to carve, so it’s easy to decorate.
And roof tiles are all mass-produced, so the casting mold can make them pretty.
You might have noticed that there’s a lot of red in here. That’s because, after all we’ve done to protect our wood, it still needs protection from the Sun and rain, so it must be coated. Some of the coats don’t have much color, but those that did were frequently red, as it’s the most common dye color that exists. Imperial buildings used the less common cinnabar, which you might associate with opulent traditional Chinese buildings.
Of course, there are a million other specificities of Chinese architecture, but what I find fascinating about all of this is that so many of these specificities are the result of simple geographic differences—in the case of China, the widespread use of timber instead of stone.
2026-03-12 05:57:02
All buildings everywhere are the same—the International Style.
Towers of concrete, steel and glass. We mourn for the traditional architectures of yesteryear, without realizing why.
Why are these buildings the same everywhere?
And why were they so different before? Is it just a matter of globalization, or is there something more?
Here’s a little known fact: A lot of the world’s architecture was the consequence of geography.
In some cases, it’s easy to see, such as steep roofs in places with heavy snowfall.
But the depth of the influence of geography is hard to grasp. So today, we’re going to take a trip across different world architectures to see how geography influenced them: Egypt, Ancient Greece, India, China, Japan, and Britain. As we do, we’re not just going to learn why things are the way they are, we’re also going to understand what elements we could bring back to our architectural styles today.
Here’s a map of Britain’s soils, along with some of its most notable architecture.
The island’s geology changes strikingly, from oldest in the north to youngest in the south. Every type of stone gave birth to a different type of architecture.
Aberdeen is famous for its dark granite. We can also find granite in southwest England around Dartmoor, and sure enough, there, homes tend to be made of granite. Edinburgh has sandstone, evident in its sand-colored buildings. Golden limestone is common around Bristol, and old country houses are golden as a result. The soil in the surroundings of London is the result of sediment accumulation, so there’s much less stone to go around. But there’s clay, which can be made into bricks. Sure enough, London is full of brick buildings. The chalk in South and East England is too brittle for walls, but use timber frames, fill the wall with twigs, wet soil and straw, and then whitewash it with a solution made with chalk, and these homes can last centuries if well maintained. For the roof, use thatch.
Once the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, the cheapness of canal and train transportation meant bricks for walls and Welsh slate for roofs could be used everywhere, so they were.1
So stone is important. But it’s not all-encompassing. What else matters? Let’s travel far back in time to Ancient Egypt to figure this out.
What do these have in common?
Big monuments
Bold geometric lines
Light brown color
Lots of rows of things, notably columns
For temples and tombs
Why?
The Egyptian government always had massive power because it controlled the Nile and knew how much food it would grow, so it could tax it precisely. The farmers couldn’t escape because the country is surrounded by desert and sea. So the government was extremely powerful and had lots of resources at its disposal.
If you want to project power, the best way to do that is to build big things.
But building technology is not very advanced. If you make a big column of stuff, it falls. How do you build a huge thing so that it doesn’t break and fall apart? You pile matter into a mountain.
Stacked mass is the simplest way to create stable height. That’s why we find it across the world, not just in Egypt.
Stacked mass has another benefit: If you can make an indoor space inside, It protects you from temperature swings because of the thermal mass stored in the stone/dirt.
But these spaces must be small: All that mass risks collapsing on you. As a result, no grand indoor halls, only small rooms.
With flat roofs, because why would you slant them? It’s difficult and expensive, and unnecessary in places with little rain like in Egypt.
The rooms you do have need plenty of columns to support them.
But you want to make lots of big columns, so everybody knows you’re such a powerful ruler! So you’re going to use your millions of minions to build many rows of these columns. Except how do you coordinate these minions? You need to standardize. Most columns, or rows of stuff, need to be as similar as possible.
You haven’t learned yet how to do arches well, so the moment your windows are too big, your walls fall. So small windows.
Notice how it’s also very axial: Lots of these buildings are constructed along a main line (axis).
Axial architecture is meant to wow you as you arrive and follow the line towards the entrance. These structures tend to be organized along cosmic lines, like cardinal directions, solstices, etc.
If you’re aligned with the stars, your architecture is cosmic, it has meaning tied to the sun, the moon and the stars, so you as a ruler surely must be cosmically ordained.
Since you have constructed lots of big buildings and columns, you now have all these surfaces. What can you do with them? Maybe depict your grandiosity and how cozy you are with the gods. And since you have plenty of money and workers available, you can arrange this:
Notice how there’s plenty of carving? Stone is normally hard to carve. But not all stone. Most Egyptian architecture is made of limestone and sandstone, which is relatively soft.
Why? It’s what Egypt had available. Carrying big blocks of stone is not easy, so Egyptians mostly quarried them close to the Nile and used the river to transport them.
And Egypt used to be a shallow ocean—Tethys. This is why today it has some of the biggest depressions on Earth, enough to make them into seas again.
As a shallow seabed, it teemed with life, so its floor got covered by those sediments: shells. As they compressed, they became limestone. As sand compressed, it became sandstone. They are both a similar white-brownish color.2
Both are easy to work with copper tools, and hold up well when compressed, so they’re ideal to cut and stack as blocks to form shapes. Which is why Egyptian blocks are so geometrically accurate, unlike those in Mycenae:
The grandiosity, the connection with the seasons and the cosmos… all of this fits well with the Ancient Egyptian mindset—a civilization that lasted thousands of years with very little change, because the geography is so stable:
The Nile’s annual flooding, which was measurable, cyclical, drove all work, and generated the most wealth (and the food needed to survive!)
Isolated from other civilizations through desert and sea
Strong governmental control because it’s so easy to tax the Nile’s production, so state stability
And that’s how you get the Egyptian Aesthetic:
Mostly limestone and sandstone, and their ochre colors
Their tech was ideal for compression, not spanning, so no windows, no big indoor spaces
But lots of resources, so just pile up stuff and create many of the same thing
Focus it all on your grandiosity: big piles of stuff, long lines of columns/decorations, all along a strong, impressive line, aligned with the cosmos to create a sense of godlike legitimacy
Flat roofs: just protect against the Sun and its heat, not rain
Market yourself through messaging on the walls, mostly through carving, adding color when possible
It all fits the philosophy of the place: not dynamism, progress, or experimentation, but permanence, continuity, and repetition.
While Egypt is flat and desertic, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Greece is extremely mountainous.
This is because Africa subsided for a long time below Eurasia, and pushed the mountains up on the European and Asian side.
With so many mountains, Greece has abundant workable stone, including limestone, but also another type that was uncommon in Egypt—marble.
Marble starts as limestone: shells and tiny marine organisms that are compressed together, with other particles that cement them and some void that forms between them. That makes it easy to carve, but you can’t use too much detail or your edges will round or chip.
When limestone goes deeper down inside the Earth, it gets more compressed and heated. These particles fuse into interlocked crystals. These are much harder to separate, so the stone is harder and breaks more cleanly, as crystals remain together. You can polish these crystals into a very smooth surface, and their varying angles will scatter light in different directions, making the stone shiny and luminous.3
Naturally, the Greeks played with the ability to finely shape the marble and with its light. For example, notice the vertical lines on these columns? They’re called flutes.
In hard Mediterranean light, small changes in depth create strong shadows. Since the flutes surround the columns, the sun will hit different flutes differently, creating different shadows. Together, all these alternating lights and shadow lights give a sense of vertical elegance to the temples, multiplying the effect of the columns themselves.
Marble allows you to play with light and shadow much more than other types of stone.
Columns shouldn’t be perfectly straight, though, because the base carries more weight than the top, and the center tends to bulge because it’s not as supported as the top of the bottom, so the Greeks used entasis:
Notice the pediment, the triangular shape on top of the columns three pictures back? Why triangular? Because it had to hold a slanted roof to evacuate rain—something that was not needed in Egypt because it basically never rains there, given the difference in latitudes.
Thankfully, Greece also has access to plenty of clay that could be fired for roof tiles, something that temples had at the time, which many people don’t realize because roofs crumble more than columns, so most Greek architecture doesn’t show them anymore.
You need something to support that roof and pediment—the lintel, that horizontal beam that spans across columns.
And since we’re in the mountains here in Greece, the ground is uneven, so you need to place your temple on top of a platform to even it out, the stepped platform.4
We have now rebuilt from first principles the most iconic aspects of Greek architecture.
Notice another detail about this type of architecture:
Marble can be cut with extreme precision. When two marble blocks are perfectly dressed, the contact surface is large, the friction is high, and compression loads transfer cleanly, preventing blocks from sliding.
Stonemasons realized they could make do without cement, which added a paste that was less elegant, uneven, and was actually bad for earthquakes—of which there are a fair amount in the region, if you recall the tectonics. With sufficient precision, dry contact is stronger than cement.
You can’t just pile blocks and hope they don’t move at all, though, especially during earthquakes, so masons carved a hole in the blocks and placed iron clamps to hold them together.
The post-and-lintel structure (columns with a beam on top of them) doesn’t allow for big indoor spaces, so these temples were not designed to hold lots of people, just the statue of the temple’s god and a few other artifacts.
As a result, congregations happened outdoors. Altars were in front of the temples, and that’s where animal sacrifices were held.
Why have a temple at all then? First, because it provided shade on hot days and cover on rainy days. Second, it was a way to convey wealth and success. This meant that the external appearance of the temple was more important than the inside. Hence the flutes and the entasis, and also all other kinds of decorations.
Early on, the style of column tops was pretty basic (Doric), but as time went by, the Greeks explored ways to decorate them further without jeopardizing temple integrity. With the Ionic, and later Corinthian styles, they achieved thinner columns and added more flutes and decorations. The same was true of the friezes above the columns.
These styles evolved relatively fast, because architecture was one of the ways to compete with other Greek city-states, and there were many.
With so many mountains, Greece couldn’t connect overland easily, and ended up with lots of small valleys developing semi-independent cities in each.
You can see some of them if you zoom in on the region:
I assume that most architecture at the time was trial and error, but errors in architecture are bad, so when builders found new, better shapes, others would adopt the same recipe without questioning it too much, and this resulted in pretty standardized sizes for any architectural element: column height, width, spacing, size of pediments, of friezes… everything.
We can see how so many aspects of Ancient Greek architecture are direct results of the region’s geography (and the technology they had at the time): mountains, sunlight, and infrequent rains:
Mountains provided lots of stone, including marble, which promoted the development of precision masonry
Mountains are also uneven ground for construction, so Greeks developed bases (crepidoma) of one or more levels for their buildings
The harsh sun necessitated shade, which required columns to support a roof
The harsh sun, together with precision masonry, pushed the aesthetic limits: flutes, capitals, friezes, perfect stone blocks, waiving cement
But since there’s also rain in the region, roofs had to be sloped, with tiles, which begat the triangular pediment
The technology was not advanced enough to allow for big indoor spaces though, so most ceremonies still happened outdoors.
In other words: Although Greece is just across the Mediterranean from Egypt, its slightly different geography (more mountains, more rain)5 brought a different architectural language.
This is enough for today. We’ve seen how geology determines the stone available, and how that drives the type of architecture that is possible and unfolds. In the next article, we’re going to move to Asia, and cover India, China, and Japan, and then we’re going to bring it home: Why are all buildings the same now, and how can we do them differently, if we wanted?
I got the idea for this section from Lewis Dartnell and his great book Origins.
We now mostly just see their structure, but in the past, some parts of the Egyptian sandstone and limestone walls were heavily decorated and colored. This detail has mostly washed away over time.
Many of the typical Greek structures were first developed with limestone, and marble only helped push them to the extremes of perfect cut, perfect alignment, no need for cement, or perfect polish.
The crepidoma was a base made of three steps
And slightly more advanced technology on average, as Egypt had been building temples and pyramids for literally thousands of years before Greece started building its most beautiful temples. For example, the time between the Giza Pyramids and the Parthenon is the same as the time between the creation of the Roman Empire and us. So the most famous Egyptian buildings used old technology. The Greeks inherited and then improved upon this type of Egyptian know-how.
