Building the Next Seven Wonders: The Landscape Rhetoric of Large Engineering Projects

Abstract

No aspect of macroengineering makes sense unless it is understood as part of a cultural landscape symbol system, as an element of the cultural messages seen throughout the human landscape. Investment in large projects is based not only on economic calculations, it is also investment in a message. As high cost productions of large corporate or state entities, megaengineering projects carry rhetorical content that is almost always about elaborating and sustaining the authority and power of those actors. The archetypal suite of historic landscape symbols of power and authority is the 2200 year old Hellenistic “Seven Wonders of the World” list. The Wonders are manifestations of a set of cultural landscape tropes still recognizable today in the political messages contained within large scale engineering projects. The Seven Wonders are landscapes of authority, demonstrating elements recognized by Hellenistic society as projecting and reinforcing political power. Engineering landscape symbol systems continue to evolve as the modern world is changed by globalization, geopolitical conflict, economic disruption, and environmental degradation, but the root meanings of large scale alterations of the landscape are still to be found on this short list of landscapes chosen as an allegory for the conquests of Alexander.