Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the architectural element known as the skyway or skybridge – typically an enclosed bridge connecting the upper stories of two buildings or skyscrapers. (orignally published 07/12/2022)
Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it is Saturday. Time to go into the vault for an episode of Days Past. This one originally aired on July twelfth, twenty twenty two, and it was part one of our series on the Skybridge.
Yeah, I remember. We did this series after my family went up to visit Chicago for a week and I got inspired by all the wonderful skybridges up there. And it's timely that we're recording this vault intro now because my family just got back from a trip to Manhattan where we went on another architectural boat tour and got to see a whole bunch more skybridges along the way. And yes, it's pretty magic. I'm still a huge sucker for any skybridge.
Which city has better skybridges?
Oh, you can't go. You can't compare, You can't compare. But I'm not going to get into a battle between Chicago and New York City over skybridges. Have some real beauties. But if anyone out there has an opinion, feel free to vote. Will we can discuss this on listener Mail.
Episodes Tired, the Pizza Fight, Wired, the Skybridge Fight.
Yes, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. So I've been kicking around the idea of doing a skybridge episode for a while. These have always captivated me whenever I've looked at city scapes, both real city scapes and cities that I've visited or lived in, but also just imagine cities, fictional cities, futuristic cities that one encounters in various films. These are, of course, we're talking about skybridges or sky walks or you know, there are various terms one might use for these. We're talking generally about enclosed bridges of metal and glass or stone or other materials that connect artificial heights to artificial heights. And I don't know about it about you, Joe, if I don't think we've ever talked about this. See if you share my interest in skybridges, If you ever gaze up at a skybridge in a city and just try and imagine what it would be like to be up there in it looking out.
Oh absolutely, I mean there are a number of these around the world, but they're rare enough that they still they stick out when you see them, I guess, unless you're in a city that has a lot of them, like Calgary or something. But yeah, they look like something that's the kind of obvious solution that you would expect to see more of in the city that's full of tall buildings.
Yeah, yeah, that we can. We'll certainly get into the practical sides of the skybridge, but there's also something there's something attractive about it that I find almost hard to to put into words because on one level, yes, there's a view that is available to one in a skybridge, and generally speaking, you can often look in two directions at once, and that's that's pretty neat. But by and large, there's not a tremendous amount of difference between being on the tenth floor of a building and looking out at the city as opposed to being on a tenth floor skybridge and looking out of the city. But for some reason, if you gave me the choice between the two, the skybridge, of course, is tremendously more attractive as an opportunity.
Well, and in a lot of recent sky bridges they've started doing the thing where they make the bottom out of transparent materials, you know, sometime tough glass, and of course you know, the kids like to jump up and down on it. That's always fun.
Yeah, And I think maybe with skybridge is too a lot of a lot of what makes the skybridge attractive and interesting, it's also it's actually wrapped up in a deeper understanding of bridges, Like we're essentially taking our already existing excitement for bridges, even though we see bridges all the time, and maybe that gets kind of like pushed down in our consciousness, but then it becomes new again when we look at something like a skybridge, and also skybridges kind of I think serve to exaggerate the feats of skyscraper building. Like, for instance, if I'm looking at just a normal skyscraper, it may be really impressive, but if I see a little i don't know, like a gargoyle up there or some sort of like little space where a human being could potentially stand for some reason, it draws me in more. Maybe look, there's an artificial mountain aspect to it, and then seeing the bridge up there kind of does much the same thing. Yeah, So in this look at skybridges, we're gonna draw several different sources. One of the main sources that are going to keep coming back to, though, is a wonderful history overview of skybridges titled Skybridge is a History in a View to the Near Future by Anthony Wood and Daniel Sapharik the Council of Tall Buildings in Urban Habitat, published in twenty nineteen in the International Journal of High Rise Buildings. The authors here define a skybridge as quote a primarily enclosed space linking two or more buildings at height, and they make a point of looking at structures that are at least six stories in high to set them apart from other mere pedestrian bridges and overpasses, because I guess truly the skybridge, or at least modern skybridges, have a different feel altogether. Though some of the especially older examples we're going to look at are not necessarily going to be that high in the sky.
Yeah, especially a lot of the publicly accessible skybridges or lower whatever you'd call the lower versions of them that aren't like connecting two towers of essentially the same building or buildings that have the same owner. Instead, they're forming a walkway for people or pedestrians along a sort of maybe like second story level in the city. I mentioned the example of Calgary earlier. Calgary and can It has an extensive network of what have sometimes been called skybridges or skyways, but I think they're mostly on more like the second story level, and and they're open to the public. You know, people can walk all around in them.
Yeah. When you look at the overall history of skybridges, it's a mix of of passageways for the elite, passageways for everyone and uh and and sometimes you have kind of like double deckers where well one floor is for the residents, but the other floor is for tourists, so that sort of thing. Also you have a mix of some of some of these are still very much in operation, some are not accessible currently. Now I was I was recently in Chicago, and while I was there, this was probably one of the reasons that I decided, Yeah, I think now it's the time to go ahead into the skybridge episode. Because I took one of these architectural tours by boat in the city, which which I highly recommend. It's a it's a city that's it's uh, it's steeped in in architecture, and therefore, or if you understand the architectural history of the city at least just a little bit, you have I think, a much better understanding of what Chicago is when you walk around it, drive around it, et cetera. And one building in particular that you can't help but notice is, of course, the Wriggly Building. And indeed you have this beautiful fourteenth story skybridge connecting the two sections, and at first glance you might think it's made out of aluminum, but it's actually made out of Allegheny nickel. So that's pretty interesting. But yeah, if you look up pictures of the Wrigley Building, yeah you'll definitely see this impressive skybridge.
It's trying to remember if this shows up in The Fugitive, which is a movie that I deeply associate with Chicago architecture, though I'm not quite sure why. I mean, obviously it's in Chicago, I don't know what the architecture connection is.
I remember as a kid, I would look at pictures of skybridges and think also, watching a lot of action films back in the day, I kept thinking that there had to be like a great action sequence where the hero has to run through a skybridge, and maybe a helicopter is firing at him in the skybridge, or maybe there's a fight on top of the skybridge, and maybe my memories faint on this. Maybe these things actually happened in some movie or TV show. But if they didn't, I'm surprised it never happened. It seems like the most logical place, like a weird place, for some sort of a fight to take place. Like why didn't we see this in Highlander?
Right?
The answer is insurance problems. That was a scene they wanted to shoot but they couldn't.
Probably, now, if anyone, if you're a New Yorker, or certainly if you've even visited New York, you've seen multiple examples of this. There are some great examples of both old school and modern skybridges. You can look up lists of these. I think there's at least one really picturesque one that's the viewable from the high Line there. But then, of course we don't have to go to New York in order to experience a sky bridge, because Joe, we live in Atlanta and we have a pretty noteworthy example of skybridges or skyways as well, and that's Peachtree Center, designed by Atlanta architect John C. Portman Junior. Portman lived nineteen twenty four through twenty seventeen, and he's famed for popularizing the atrium as well as just leaving a profound mark on downtown Atlanta. And one of the things that he also did is, especially again with Peachtree Center here is we see this almost excessive use of skybridges and skyways connecting these buildings to each other.
Yeah, if you drive around the city center streets, you will see a number of these.
Yeah, they have a very seventies modern look to them, so they're not the classical skybridges. They're not these super modern looking ones you'll see in many of the examples today. But this, this is an example we're going to come back to later because it's actually with Portman's work that we see some of the more pronounced social criticisms of the basic concept of the skybridge, which are interesting to get into. Now, another local example here in Atlanta, the High Museum of Art has some great skybridges part of the Rinzo Piano designed addition to the Core Museum in two thousand and five. Joe, I know you've walked.
Through these oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there you always get some some brilliant sunlight. There's all that beautiful white architecture going on.
I think I associate them with the sudden feeling of being irradiated.
Because you've been in the climate because the climate control galleries, and then suddenly, yeah, here's the sun now. Would in Sopharik point out that the most common function of the skybridge is of course, to convey traffic from one building to another without forcing individuals to descend down to the ground level or even below ground level, potentially exiting and re entering the building, which, of course, if you're dealing with special with a building that has some sort of a security system in place and security check ins and checkpoints, we can see where that would that could become problematic. Easier to have people enjoy access to both buildings via the bridge, and you also have situations where okay, maybe we don't want people having to cross the street, deal with traffic or adverse environmental conditions.
Yeah, I was trying to think what would be the main factors motivating somebody to connect buildings via skybridge versus just having people you enter an exit at the surface level like they normally would. And yeah, those are some of the main things that came to mind for me. Bad weather and climate, that's got to be a motivator, which is also true of places that have more underground tunnels connecting buildings together. But then yeah, also bad traffic and like thoroughfares that are hard to cross. So for example, this would also include places where the where the streets are not always streets, where there's not ground on the streets, such as cities with canals sometimes skybridges to cross those. And then of course security concerns like if you have i don't know, high security government buildings or something imagined, they try to limit the necessity to go outside and enter a different door and do that whole thing all over again.
Yeah, so obviously there are some basic reasons why you might have a skybridge connecting to buildings. However, the authors here also classify some skybridges as quote enclosed programmatic skybridges, meaning that there's something about them, something inside them to draw people to them beyond just mere conveyance. For example, the one example they give is the American Copper Buildings in New York City, built in twenty sixteen, which feature a robust, two story skybridge full of common rooms and swimming pools for residents.
It's a great place to go swimming.
Yeah, it's an interesting choice. I mean, it looks like it has a tremendous view.
Though, I would imagine, yeah, view and just sort of novelty has got to be one of the main points for these enclosed programmatic skybridges, because again, they're not so common connecting American buildings in American cities that you're just numb to them. Now, like going into skybridge is kind of interesting and unique, unless you know, you just happen to be one of the few people who lives or works in buildings where you cross one every day.
Yeah. Now, they also bring up a few additional expansions on the form. One is something they called the sky plane, and this is essentially a shared horizontal roof structure for two or more buildings. And the example they bring up is Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. Joe, you should probably just look up a picture of Marina Bay Sands and just take this in because I would have to say, I mean, I'm no judge of architecture here, but it looks almost a little bit ridiculous. It looks like there is a ship perched atop three identical skyscrapers.
Yes, it's a cruise ship. There is a cruise ship on the buildings.
Yeah, which I mean. I guess it looks really cool up there. It makes me a little bit queasy to look at some of these aerial shots of it for some reason. But yeah, it looks it looks very nice, and I guess, and certainly we can imagine so that we may come back to this one as we think about some arguments to be made for similar structures. They also bring up the idea of building as skybridge. So this is when the horizontal bar of the skybridge is so massive in comparison to the rest that it is more of a defining part of the building itself rather than something that bridges it. And this also is a statement one could make about like the nature of the skybridge. One of the examples will come to in a minute. Either the skybridge is not really firmly set in place. It's kind of setting in there, kind of slotted into place, whereas building a skybridge, it's like it's all one structure. Sure. The example they bring up is the CCTV headquarters in Beijing. This is a building I believe it was built in twenty eleven, and it looks basically like a really boxy upside down you very cool design.
Yeah, i'd characterize it as it looks like it was built out of the out of giant versions of the L shaped Tetris blocks and they're connecting above the ground way, you know, many many stories up. But yeah, it's clear that this is not just a little hallway connecting the upper levels of a skyscraper. A substantial portion of the occupied part of the building is hanging over air.
Yeah. Yeah, And it also looks like it could walk like two legs and a pelvis, but like they walked out of the Tron universe or something.
If you offend the master control program, this building comes walking at you.
It probably does.
Yeah.
Now you might be wondering, well, what's the highest skybridge in the world. Well, I believe if the Guinness Book of World Records is correct on this, it is the Patronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. This is a quote a double deck bridge at the forty first and forty second floors. It's one hundred and seventy meters or five hundred and fifty eight feet above the ground and measures fifty eight meters or one hundred and ninety feet in length, weighs seven hundred and fifty metric tons, and this building opened in nineteen ninety four. This one is really cool looking.
This is one of the ones I was talking about earlier where it's essentially it's a connector between two towers that are the same building. Like it's all one complex, but the complex consists of like a you know, a lower level thing, and then two towers going straight up and they're connected in the at the middle of their height by this skybridge.
Yeah, this one's an interesting one to look at too, because first of all, it's so high up and at the fortieth floor, you can imagine a good case being made, like what if you need to get to the next tower, you don't want to go down forty floors and then up another forty floors, what if you could just walk over And of course you can adjust the math based on what floor you're trying to get to in each tower.
And I think it's an area of the complex that has increased foot traffic because there's sort of a sky lobby concept, like you go halfway up the towers and there's it's not just more regular office occupancy. There are I don't know, lobbies and things for people to hang out and walk around and do at that level.
Yeah, and apparently one whole floor of it is is open to tourists and as you know, part of this lobby concept. The other is apparently closed off and more for residents or businesses, what have you. But it's neat that on top of this, not only is it mirror conveyance, but also it adds at least a little bit of structural support as well as a possible means of a evacuating individuals from one tower into the other during an emergency. Maybe not a primary function, but one that they've apparently looked into, Like what if there was an emergency in one tower but the other tower was still viable, That's one way you could help get people out. It's also interesting that this bridge is not directly connected to the buildings. It's designed so that it can shift or slide in and out of them to counterbalance building sway from the winds. So that's I mean, this is something that I always forget about skyscrapers and then I'm told about skyscrapers, and it kind of wigs me out a little bit, the idea that, yes, they're not just purely stationary. They have a little give to them. There's a little bit of sway involved, and certainly if you have a bridge connecting to skyscrapers, you have to take that into account, all right. So at this point I thought we might get into some of the history of the skybridge. I mean, one of the things about our look at skybridges here is we're not going to be able to look at every step in the We're not going to take you skybridge by skybridge through human history. But we thought it might be a good idea to hit on some key examples, some of which are more historical in nature, and before we get into some of the psychological aspects, before we get into some of the futurist ideas that are tied up with skybridges. And so a great place to start is to travel to Italy.
Surely, I think maybe we should start by taking a look at the Bridge of Size, or the Ponte de Sospiri in Italian. You know, Suspiri, like Suspiria, like the movie Size, the Size, This is.
A beautiful one. And this is one where if if you look it up, you'll instantly recognize that you'll instantly find yourself longing to be in a gondola with with your beloved or some imagine beloved, perhaps with the glass of wine in hand.
Very ironically romantic. I'll get to that. So the bridge of size is a really interesting landmark in Venice, a city that already is already unusual in many of its thoroughfares because many of them are not streets but canals navigated by boat. And one of these canals, known as the Rio di Palazzo, is crossed over by a totally enclosed limestone bridge connecting two buildings on either side. At the level of what looks like about the second story. It is covered with elaborate Baroque decorations, having been commissioned by the Doge Marino Grimani. And no doge is a word that had a meaning before before internet memes. It has nothing to do with dogs. It was an office in medieval and Renaissance Italy. It was like it was kind of like being like a lord or some other kind of executive. So it was this doge, Marino Grimani, who commissioned it. I think it came up in the early seventeenth century. Apparently it is tradition for couples to kiss as they pass underneath the bridge in a boat or I don't know if it's tradition, it's at least something a lot of people do, I think, especially tourists, and tourists are often taking pictures of themselves kissing with this bridge in the background. You can probably find plenty of those on the internet if you want. So, what is the purpose of this hallway in the sky over the canal that's causing people to spontaneously break out in kissing? You might wonder wha you know, was it connecting two wings of a library or an art museum, maybe so people could move priceless antiques and books and artworks back and forth in the rain without getting wet or something like that. No, not at all. It was a bridge connecting the Doge's palace and the inquisitors facilities within to the prison on the other side of the canal. And so it's called the bridge of size because of the size of the doomed prisoners who walked within. Apparently conditions in the prison were pretty nasty, so I've at least read the allegation that being confined there frequently resulted in death.
So you know, you.
Would sigh knowing your fate was sealed as you were taken across the bridge of size into the jail.
Well, that's not romantic at all.
That's horrible, and it makes me wonder. Okay, then why in particular was this enclosed and not just an open bridget I don't know this, but I wonder if the reasoning had something to do with like preventing prisoners from trying to escape by jumping over the edge into the canal and getting way.
Yeah, yeah, I mean also, I guess, given the nature of the work going on them, maybe you don't want them seen by anybody going by in a boat, that sort of thing. I also have to say, now that you reveal it's true nature, I kind of see a skull in this design. I don't know if that's I mean, granted, we tend to lean into anthropomorphic details of things anyway, but now that I know it's secrets, yeah, I kind of see these teeth and two eye sockets and a nose socket there.
Well, I can't find a close up shot to look at right now though I do think the bridge bears a certain family's coat of arms, it might have been the family of the Doge or someone else. Possibly that coat of arms looks like a skull.
I don't know, all right. Now, another interesting example from Italy takes this to Florence, and this is a sixteenth century example. This is Vasari Corridor. This was built in fifteen sixty five to allow members of the powerful Medici family to move freely between their residence and the governmental center there in Florence. So it's certainly an elevated, enclosed passageway reaching the full length I believe it's an entire kilometer in length. There's at least one section of it that is instantly identifiable as a skybridge, like there's a street below it, that sort of thing. But in other cases there are buildings or businesses beneath Vasari Corridor. It literally just cuts through the city, built over like in one case, it's apparently built over what was some riverside butcher shops, because you know, you want to dump all of that the leftovers, directly into the river. But that smelled too bad, and so with a little Medici finagling, they got some jewelers in there as well. There's also a tower that it goes around because there was one stubborn Florentine who would not sell and so they had to to make the their corridor go around this particular tower. And there's even a place where it basically it basically cuts through the Church of Santa Felicita, opening up onto the balcony into a balcony there so that the Medici could take their corridor attend Mass, and I guess keep on going all the way, enjoying a kind of privileged view of the city in places. You know, they get to walk from point A to point B in Florence without having to worry about their enemies trying to murder them. And over time, portions of the Quarriter have been been altered, destroyed, rebuilt, and I believe it was closed for a while and is once more open to tourists visiting the city.
You know, what I've always wanted is the ability to wake up, go to Mass without ever stepping foot outside.
Yeah, I mean, it's such a power flex right, Yeah, And it's definitely one to keep in mind when we talk about other examples and modern examples of skybridges and similar structures. It would be kind of like if you didn't want to leave your bedroom to go to work, and you didn't have tell a working technology, you could say, what if I were just to physically extend my bedroom across town to the office. How about that? And I mean that's essentially what the Medici did here.
Though to some degree, I think what we're thinking of as a skybridge really has more to do with just external appearance and like what is the stuff underneath it and how high is it and things like that, more so than function, because there are other things that don't quite look exactly like a skybridge, but they clearly serve the same function. I know, there's like a long elevated passageway in Rome connecting Vatican City to some chapel or palace or something there, and you can see it in pictures of the city, though I think a lot of it is uncovered, so it doesn't read exactly like like a tunnel in the sky that's fully enclosed all around. It's more like there's just sort of this elevated bridge going over the rooftops or over parts of the city.
Yeah. Yeah, to what extent do these examples feel like a bridge. Do they have this feeling of being above things or having some sort of privileged passage through things. For instance, we mentioned cold cities or cities that have cold winters. The Chicago Pedway is a strong example of a system like this. Parts of it are elevated, but then also parts of it are completely underground, so that you know you don't have to go out into the elements during the winter to move from one place to another Downtown necessarily, on my visit to Chicago, I wanted to go down and see it. Though it was it was very pleasant outside, so we didn't have to go down there. But I was reading some accounts of people who, of course really like it, some who think that parts of it need some work. I think some people think it is a bit dank and perhaps needs a facelift of some sort.
Well, that opens up a theme that I'm definitely going to get to it at some point, maybe later in this episode or maybe in the next one, but that when it comes to designing urban spaces, in many ways, I think form can be about as important as function, Like it doesn't just matter. Are these spaces traversible and do they get you where you're going? But like, there are pretty profound effects on our psychological well being depending on the various esthetic qualities of these thoroughfares and tunnels and traversal spaces, and it makes a difference in our lives what these spaces are like. Absolutely, if you're spending your life walking around and like just dank concrete with no you know, no plants and no natural light and stuff, that does affect people.
Or it's also like having super reinforced transparent flooring in your skybridge. I mean, that's fine for tourist scenarios, but if you're using this skybridge just as a daily way of connecting, say from from your office to the coffee machine in the other building, you don't necessarily want it to be a harrowing journey through the sky or at least not to get the coffee maybe on the way back. That would be impowerful. Now, if you look around at various articles about skybridges, particularly like even if you go to the wiki page for skybridges, you'll see some images of some examples, and there's a picture that is circulated a lot. This is a model that was found in an Eastern Hong tomb in a non province in China, and this is quite It's quite interesting to look at It is clearly a multi story building connected by an enclosed skybridge to another shorter tower or multi story building, and it's pretty cool to look at it. Again, this is quite old. I wasn't able to find anything to indicate that this is a model of something that was ever built in reality. Perhaps it was, or perhaps this was just a model that again went into a tomb. But I was able to look around, and I found some interesting things about skybridges and things like skybridges that were that were actually constructed in various Chinese palace complexes and gardens. So I was looking at the philosophical encounter embodied by Du Wangming by Wan hoy Zo published in Environmental Phlosophy, Volume seven, number one. This came out in spring of twenty ten. So the One Being Gone or the Summer Old Summer Palace in Beijing was a complex of elaborate gardens and palaces of the Qing dynasty built in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In eighteen sixty, during the Opium War, it was looted and destroyed by British and French forces. But according to Zoe here. The original gardens consisted of three Chinese gardens and a Western style garden that had been designed by Jesuits. The Chinese gardens were laid out with Daoist cosmology and fin Shue in mind, so that one stroll through these gardens was said to be one of contemplated depths. You know, it wasn't just you were just putting everything out of your mind as you strolled here. You got to contemplate the Tao.
Oh do images of these gardens remain, I would be really interested to see the difference between that and the Jesuit garden.
You can there are schematics of what it looked like, and the ruins still exist. I believe. I was looking at some photographs of this, and it's still a site that I believe can be visited.
But probably not with all the vegetation in the original place.
I don't think. So I didn't find and there may be some really robust recreations of what these would have looked like, but I was I didn't. They didn't come up in my research. But if anyone out there has seen such an image, I would love to look at it. So, in talking about this particular park, Zoe turns to some other examples. Zoe shares that the sheng Lin Park of the emperor Chinshi Wong of the third century BC Chin dynasty featured was said to feature covered double floor passageways that allowed the emperor to move from one grand palace to another quote through the wilderness, and in doing so, quote act mysteriously to avoid devils and meanwhile embrace virtuous individuals.
WHOA. Wait, so the skyways here were alleged to be so this emperor could keep his movement secret sort of? Is that? Am I understanding that?
Right?
Yeah? If? Well? So, first of all, these wouldn't have been skyways per se. I think these were maybe situated on the ground, but yes, they would have been enclosed so that nobody could necessarily see him moving around. He is an important guy after all. But also he could avoid devils and embrace virtuous individuals, which, you know, we can certainly lean into the supernatural interpretation of that. But also it sounds like not run into people who I don't want to greet, don't run into people who wish me harm, and also you know, only encounter people who are worthwhile for me. The emperor to run into But then Zoe turns to an example that I think we can properly think of as a skywalk. He says, quote in the Imperial while Lynn Garden in the capital of lu Yang of Northern Way, this is the fifth century, there was an island name on which buildings were connected by a rainbow skywalk, where walking was like flying to and fro. Visitors moved about in this garden like celestial birds up and down in a divine residence.
Okay, So when they moved about and it was like flying to and fro, does that just mean that they're crossing about in the air, they're high up and they can see all around, or is there more significance.
Like I think it's just a poetic way of saying that. Yeah, moving from one building to another via a bridge, that it creates this feeling of flying. Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't think they were on zip lines or anything like that. Yeah, nor were they dressed like birds. But but there's there's something, you know, almost supernatural about the experience of using these elevated walkways.
Yes.
So, and it gets a little more interesting when you look at some of the details here. So lil Yang is certainly a real place and it's one of the oldest cities in China, which is certainly saying something. But ping Lay is also the name of a mythical island, and in fact Pingley is said to be where the elixir of life and the eight immortals may be found. And the connection here is of course that gardens of this sort are meant to be quote unquote fairy lands, and in fact ping Lay can be translated as fairy land. So these are places of supernatural beauty that invoke different models of reality or in the earlier example that you're contemplating the Tao as you walk through it, and it's mentioned by Zoe, the tall buildings as well were thought to invite the spirits to reside in them. So it's it's neat to think of. Like I feel like these descriptions that he's discussing here, like they really draw in things that are certainly unique to like the poetic Chinese interpretation it seems, of these structures, but I think also they get at our universal attraction to these things. Like again, there's something about the skyscraper. There is something about not only the sky bridge, but bridge the bridges themselves that invite us to them you know, if you're in a little park and there are bridges, you got to walk across that.
Bridge, right, yeah, oh yeah, totally. I feel the same way. I'm always attracted to bridges and spaces that are not just normally readily accessible. Like you know, if I see an island in the middle of the pond, I do want to go to it. I want to stand there.
Yeah.
And of course the same applies to locations high up. And this is something that I think is a pervasive strain of thought in the ancient world. I guess maybe even not just the ancient world, but I would say the pre industrial world, the world before skyscrapers became common in city centers everywhere, or you know, you just have like secular urban density driving occupancy higher and higher. In the pre industrial period, I think there was a pervasive association between physical altitude and like I don't know, the spiritual elevation or holiness or the gods. I mean, I think about how many different types of like tower type structures are associated with either royalty or divinity, going all back, all the way back to like you know, the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia, where you know, it was literally believed that in some sense, the God resides on the top, or the god at least will come down to the top in some cases. And royal towers, royal palaces with you know, things reaching high up in the air. That that that's I think we're still impressed by tall buildings now, but I think it's lost some of the magical oomph that it once had in human minds.
Still there would be demigods of today like where do they want their offices? Where do they want their their apartments? They want they want to be at the top, right, Yeah, we're still drawn to that. Speaking of really tall buildings. One more note about Liu Yang here is that between five sixteen and five thirty four CE it contained the Young Ning Pagoda, which had an estimated nine stories in height. And I think there's some back and forth about exactly how tall it was, but read roughly nine stories in height. This was one of, if not the tallest buildings in the world at the time, according to the sources looking at here. It was destroyed by a lightning strike which then burned it to the ground. Now, I have not had the benefit of visiting any of these sites that I've mentioned, here. So certainly if anyone out there listening to the show has and certainly if you have photographs, I'd love to hear from you, so certainly right in, and of course that goes that goes to We can say the same regarding any of the sky bridges where we're discussing in this episode, or any that we don't mention. Yes, send in your skybridge experiences and photographs so that we may enjoy them as well. So that's it for this episode, but we will be back with a part two on this. We have much more to discuss regarding skybridges, but certainly go ahead and right in. We'd love to hear from you. As always, core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind publishing the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday we do listener mail. On Wednesday we do a short form artifact or monster fact that on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us, with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit.
The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Sat grit to try to write, to get to
