Why We Should Let the Pantheon Crack
John Ochsendorf wants to tear down Rome’s iconic Pantheon. He wants to pull apart its 2,000-year-old walls until its gorgeous dome collapses. Destroying it, he believes, is the best way to preserve it.
But the Pantheon that Ochsendorf, a professor of engineering and architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has in mind to destroy is less than 20 inches high, and it’s made of 492 3-D-printed blocks. It’s designed from laser scans of the real building. A gaggle of MIT engineering students will place it on a table with a sliding base and pull the walls apart, then put it back together and tilt it until it crumbles.
It’s hard to see how razing a doll-sized Roman monument will help protect the real thing. But Ochsendorf, whose easy smile and self-effacing humor belie confidence and determination, has a serious goal: to prove that historical structures like the Pantheon are more stable than we give them credit for. “By every measure of success of a building—from an architectural, from an artistic, and from an engineering standpoint—I would argue that the Pantheon is the greatest that was ever built,” Ochsendorf says. “There’s no greater definition of success for a building than it’s been standing for 20 centuries.”
It also represents a masterwork of engineering and a repository of ancient technical knowledge—the structural equivalent of the Mona Lisa. Ochsendorf is working to halt what he sees as unnecessary interventions in historical buildings, in which engineers try to fix cracked or slumping walls with steel bars and supports. “We see a crack in a structure and we do a major intervention, but that’s akin to dipping the Mona Lisa in epoxy because one section of the painting has faded a bit,” he says.
His work indicts the short-sightedness of today’s engineers as it underscores the wisdom of the past.
Some interventions, designed to keep today’s
