The ruins of the Parthenon are 2,479 years old. Part of the Tower of London dates from A.D. 1076. The Great Wall of China was completed in 221 B.C.
Architecture - the creation of buildings meant not only to be serviceable, but to appeal to the eye - took decades and decades to finish. Architects could design a project, begin construction during their early 30s, and still not live to see it completed. If they were lucky, it was mostly finished before they died and they could see the fruits of their labor.
We marvel today at the endurance of ancient structures - look at the fascination people have with the Egyptian pyramids, the Mayan ruins, Assyrian architecture. Age (in artifacts, anyway) intrigues in an epoch where young is in vogue and fast equals good.
I moved off campus in January, into the Colonie Apartments. Every day, I drive to campus and pass the construction of the new Creekside Village apartments.
Since Jan. 1 - only about two months ago - the apartments have sprung up out of nowhere. Half seems all but complete from the outside and the other half appeared in the space of a month. It doesn't surprise me, given the overall cardboard-box feel of the on-campus apartments I've visited, or even our Spectrum offices in 132 Student Union, but it makes me wonder whether we're really getting our money's worth these days in construction.
When I was in high school and we were learning about medieval architecture, my teacher paused and asked us to think about something.
"Do you think," he asked, looking at us in his characteristic slightly amused way, "that in a thousand years, IHS will still be standing? Will it be a monument?"
We laughed, of course. Ithaca High School wasn't built from spit and toilet paper, but it came pretty close. It's one of the buildings built in the time when the craze was (and still is, for that matter) for quick construction and even faster results. One of my other professors once said that you can tell a lot about a culture from the legacy it leaves behind, and it's certainly true.
What will we leave behind? Our sporting arenas, perhaps. They're certainly large enough and substantial enough, but they don't have a very permanent feel to them. Our colleges and universities? Probably, although sometimes I wonder if that's a good thing. Do we want our descendants to look at Fronczak Hall and think, this is what our ancestors dedicated their lives to building?
Americans don't have the dedication necessary to take on long-term plans any more. We've been spoiled by years of instant gratification. Rather than take the time to create a masterpiece, we throw together whatever will serve the immediate need and do patchwork later. We've seen it time and again, not just in construction, but in planning, government, education and more. It's like treating the symptoms of an illness without treating the cause; yes, you solve what appears to be the problem, but the true problem is only further obscured by your actions.
For the capitalist society that we are, it means we can pride ourselves on how quickly we're able to meet supply and demand. At the same time, however, we've lost the patience and dedication that any one of those ancient civilizations showed in the construction of their monuments. Would President Bush okay an order to build a memorial if the memorial would taken over a century to complete? Doubtful at best. Even if he had, the American people would never be satisfied with that; our attention span is far too short.
