for Thomas Sliwowski
For more than 300 years, the only bridge
that spanned Istanbul’s Golden Horn
could be found in Leonardo’s notebook.
The Monument to the Vanquished Peasants,
a stone totem pole in which a kneeling man
with a sword plunged into his back
was stacked atop an upside-down kettle,
a cheese bowl, thick plates, a chicken basket,
a keg of butter, a lard tub, farm implements
and livestock, was likewise nothing but
a sketch in Dürer’s treatise on measurement
for 500 years. When it was finally built
in Bonn to commemorate the anniversary
of Thomas Münzer’s uprising, it toppled
over. With hindsight, Tatlin’s sublation
of Eiffel’s Tower, which was never built
in the city that is no longer Petrograd,
has become as virtual as the International
it was supposed to honor. The painting
on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition
of Thomas More’s Utopia is van Cleve’s
Bouw van de toren van Babel. The ziggurat
on which the tower is thought to be based
would have been no taller than the PNC Center
in Akron, Ohio. With its honeycomb-shaped
rooms containing copies of every book
that has ever been or could ever be written,
including all the titles found on the shelves
of Thomas Browne’s Musaeum Clausum,
the Library of Babel is a website. Walt Disney,
Orson Welles and Sergio Leone were all real,
but unlike the fictional Pierre Ménard
they could not claim to have authored a Quixote.
In the watery part of the world, a white whale
swims on. Today, Astana, Las Vegas and Stockholm
all have spheres, but Newton has no cenotaph,
and the internet does not say where the tomb
of Étienne-Louis Boullée is. A century after Gaudí
was hit by a tram on Barcelona’s Gran Via,
the Segrada Familia was finally completed,
becoming the world’s tallest church. The same
cannot be said for his work on the Colònia Güell,
of which there is only a crypt. No one is buried there,
nor is anyone buried in the Metropolitan Sepulchre,
Thomas Wilson’s 90-story “pyramid of death,”
that was supposed to provide enough space
for the eternal repose of 5 million souls
in London’s Primrose Hill. On Primrose Hill,
William Blake conversed with the Spiritual Sun
and fought, albeit only mentally, to build Jerusalem
in Englands green & pleasant Land. Alec Garrard
died before he was able to complete his model
of Herod’s Temple in Norfolk. If anyone tries
to build Herod’s Temple in actual Jerusalem,
we will all die. O Midtown Manhattan,
you would have been enclosed by a geodesic dome
had your Commissioner of Parks and Recreation
been Buckminster Fuller instead of Robert Moses!
There would have been no “second plane”
if Minoru Yamasaki had gone with his first design.
It took 97 years for the Second Avenue Subway
to get from 96th Street to 72nd Street. Meanwhile,
Los Angeles and San Francisco remain unconnected
by hyperloop, as do Busan and Seoul. As of 2025,
construction on The Line, the apartment building
that was to have stretched over 100 kilometers
from the Gulf of Aqaba into the Arabian Desert,
has been suspended. Named for the earthly paradise
ruled by Calafia, the black Muslim warrior queen
from Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo’s novel
Las sergas de Esplandián, California did not
turn out to be an island, nor were any griffins
discovered there. The 55 cities Marco Polo
describes in Calvino’s 1974 novel are invisible
and female. The 17th is named for Hypatia,
the last director of the Library of Alexandria,
who was dismembered by a Christian mob,
and only met Christine de Pizan at Judy Chicago’s
dinner party in 1979. Enrico Caruso serenaded
the rainforests of Peru on Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald’s
phonograph rather than in his opera house,
but have we failed to hear the Harmonice Mundi
because it is a musical concept,
because it is an astronomical concept,
or because it is a political concept?
Piranesi’s prisons remain imaginary,
but Bentham’s panopticon has become a metaphor
with listings on the S&P500. In Spandau Prison,
Albert Speer thought of all the Heil Hitlers
that would never be said under the dome
of his Hall of the People and cried
the least sympathetic tears in human history.
Of the 4000 stelae planned for Peter Eisenman’s
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,
only 2711 fit in the space zoned for it in Mitte.
Despite numerous petitions, there is no memorial
there to the Roma and Sinti who were murdered
in the Samudaripen. The Monument to Humanity
in Kars was demolished mere months
before its completion by Recip Tayyip Erdoğan,
who called it “monstrous” and “freakish.” The futurist
Antonio Sant’Elia was killed in the 8th Battle
of Isonzo, leaving his plans for La Città Nuova
without a future, though they inspired
Le Corbusier to design La Ville Radieuse,
which also went unrealized. All that exists
of Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis
is a yellow lightbulb that Joseph Beuys
plugged into a lemon on Capri. Currently
there are two fully operational space stations,
neither of which looks like Wernher von Braun’s
rotating wheel. No one has traveled to space
in the elevator of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky,
but neither has anyone taken the elevator
to the top of Pyongyang’s Ryugyong Hotel,
a 330-meter-tall trident used as a backdrop
for LED lightshows. Myrna Loy’s Lunar Baedeker
has been lost, which may explain why no one
has ever fucked in the white-light district
on the moon. Not a single photon has ever pierced
the glass buildings of Paul Scheerbart’s dreams.
The Great Year has never been celebrated.
The Clock of the Long Now has never chimed.
Ryan Ruby is the author of The Zero and the One: A Novel (Twelve Books, 2017) and Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry (Seven Stories Press, 2024). The recipient of an Einstein Fellowship and the Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, his writing has appeared in such venues as Harper’s, Bookforum, and the New Left Review. His history of Berlin’s Ringbahn is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in early 2028.
