- 8 months ago
Could an advanced ancient civilization have built grand utopian cities all over the world—only to have them destroyed or covered up? In this video, we explore the real historical “cover-up” behind these provocative photos, focusing on the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Join me and architectural conspiracy expert Zach Mortice explore the iconic “White City” at the World’s Fair which birthed modern urban planning—and might have accidentally fueled the Tartarian conspiracy theories. We’ll take on why these grand structures vanished, the rise of the City Beautiful Movement, and how Parisian-style boulevards replaced entire communities in American cities.
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00:00Some people are trying to make the claim that an advanced ancient civilization built great utopian
00:04cities all over the world. If you look at the World's Fair of the early 1900s, there's some
00:09really weird around that. Want to talk about the Chicago World Fair? They said that they built it
00:13for the World Fair, but then after they just tore it all down. 72-year-old structure is being beaten
00:18to a pulp as 1800-pound ball crashes against its ancient but sturdy walls of stone. Have you looked
00:25into the Tartarian stuff at all? I was watching a video today about it. So it's suspected that
00:31it could have possibly been Tartaria. That's super strange. And while they sound totally
00:35paranoid, I do want to examine the real historical cover-up that these photos represent. So I
00:40enlisted the help of my favorite architectural conspiracy expert, Zach Mortise, to help navigate
00:44this serious question about our cities and where they come from. The QAnon of architecture.
00:50Of course. So Tartarian theory is the idea that thousands of years ago, a world-spanning hyper-technologically
00:58advanced global empire spread throughout the entire world, disseminating basically all pre-modern
01:06types of architecture. So particularly with this image, which you see all over Tartarian theories,
01:11there's really kind of the grand oversized scale. Some people believe that the Tartarian empire
01:17was populated by giants, right? So that's why the doorway is just so big. That's why the promenade
01:21is so wide. We can start by analyzing exactly what's going on in this particular image, which
01:26everyone seems to be so up in arms about. It's taken right here in Chicago in the south side area
01:31known as Jackson Park. This is what it looks like today. Not quite as impressive as that the photos
01:37promised. That's because this was taken during the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, which
01:42captivated the Western world from May to October of 1893. The image focuses specifically on the
01:48administration building that's sitting in the background just behind the enormously beautiful
01:54Grand Basin. To the left is the Agricultural Building, which held exhibition spaces for agricultural-like
02:00displays. And on the right is the Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building, and it was used for
02:05manufacturing demonstrations and things like that. This is just one single view from a full
02:10690 acres of similarly impressive planning. Not only that, the expo brought together the
02:16most innovative technology of the time. Inventions like the Ferris wheel and the electrified street
02:22lamps. They fascinated Victorian tourists who saw this for the very first time right here.
02:27But curiously, the buildings themselves presented a vision for the future that was made of buildings
02:32from the past, which I think is a little bit strange. We know about all this because documents
02:37and souvenirs survived until today. But sadly, none of the buildings have survived in their
02:43original state. Even though they look timeless and everlasting in photographs like the one we just
02:48looked at, they were part of a temporary spectacle. A fantasy city crafted to impress visitors who had
02:54only really known cities as dirty industrial centers of commerce. So while some of the technology that
02:59we have from this fair still lasts until today, none of the buildings do. One of the lesser known innovations
03:05though, presented here was the pneumatic paint sprayer. This allowed workers to quickly apply paint over large
03:11surfaces. Yeah, the White City, this nickname that it earned from all of its gleaming white structures, was only
03:17possible because of spray paint. Most people accept this explanation. And of course, the Tartarians, they question it.
03:23And I do have to say that I don't believe that these buildings were just here one day and then gone the
03:28next either. And in fact, I believe that the ghosts of these buildings, they're responsible for the exact
03:34kind of cover-up and the exact kind of destruction that we're worried about happening to the Tartarians.
03:40Today, the Tartarier subreddit has over 52,000 members and Tartarian Architecture has 14,000. And every time here
03:47the Columbian Exposition comes up, it's pretty much the same thing.
03:51So for most Tartarians, research is being on the internet. It's finding imagery,
03:59stringing it together, putting it on YouTube, tossing it on Reddit. It's kind of basically the
04:04the process of any kind of internet-borne conspiracy theory.
04:07They argue that it makes no sense that something so beautiful and grand could be just thrown away.
04:12Debates flare over its 19 million dollar price tag, which seems exorbitant for just a six-month
04:17installation. That's almost 600 million dollars today. But you know, modern events like the Olympics,
04:23they cost billions of dollars. And the Columbian Exposition attracted over 27 million visitors,
04:29which is a staggering number for the time. Another point of contention is just how convincing
04:34that these buildings are at looking real. But I think that's due to the fact that they were made in
04:39a way that we just don't see that much of today. They're made of cast plaster hung over wood scaffolding.
04:44If they were permanent, they would have likely been built out of stone, like marble.
04:48Marble buildings are made like sculptures. Each piece is carved painstakingly by hand,
04:53and then each highly crafted piece is assembled into place. Unlike stone, plaster is light,
04:59and it's brittle, and it can be cast instead of carved. This allows for really intricate and
05:04repeatable designs at a fraction of the cost and the time that it takes to carve it. And that's why we see
05:10such elaborate, repetitious ornamentation everywhere in the exposition. Plaster has a totally different
05:15economy to it, where the more that you make actually makes it cheaper to do because a single mold can
05:20produce dozens and dozens of copies. You can buy a plaster version of priceless Michelangelo's David
05:26head right now on Amazon for 20 bucks. But at the heart of this, and the reason that we're talking about
05:31any of it, is because people feel a certain kind of loss when monumental buildings are demolished.
05:36That's what the Tartarian story helps everyone to make sense of. While facts provide clarity in
05:41contexts like this, they don't necessarily address how buildings capture our emotions and our imaginations.
05:46Folks are concerned that demolition denies a sense of continuity and access to experiencing
05:52cultural constructions from our past. There's a sense that we deserve a right to maintain our
05:57connections to the cultural aspects of buildings, despite the fact that they're owned as real estate,
06:03or they're boned by the government, or the buildings maybe don't even function anymore.
06:07That cultural aspect still remains. And when they disappear, it feels like that we're losing a
06:12piece of ourselves, or we're losing a piece of our collective memory that we can't access anymore.
06:17What seems sacred and enduring all the time about our place is actually revealed to just be pretty
06:21fragile, able to be wiped away and then replaced much, much faster and easier than we'd like.
06:27The Tartarian believers latch onto this. If you're tearing down big swaths of the city, that's a big,
06:31big project. A lot of people are going to feel burned, they're going to feel outside the system,
06:35and that's going to build resentment and it's going to curdle, and then it might turn into something
06:41kind of weird like Tartaria. They exaggerate and distort and dramatize this loss of destruction,
06:48tapping into our fear that some hidden power is controlling which parts of history that we're
06:52allowed to remember. But in many ways, this is exactly what's happened because of the
06:57Columbian Exposition, not to it. That, I think, is the big tragic irony here. The architect behind the
07:02Columbian Exposition, Daniel Burnham, he was a fantastic salesman. With this spectacular chunk of
07:08pop-up urbanity, Burnham presented a vision of urban beauty that fundamentally reshaped expectations
07:14of what cities could become. But Burnham didn't use a real city to show us this dream of his.
07:20Instead, he built a theme park. And because ever since people have been fooled into believing the
07:25theme park could become real, they saw the installation and the photos like this as a
07:29proof of concept. So it became a kind of Pinocchio version of architecture and cities. When the wealthy
07:35and the politically elite who visited the expo returned home to places like Detroit and Cleveland,
07:40Philadelphia, Washington DC, and of course other parts of Chicago, they sought to bring a piece of
07:46Burnham's dream home with them. They wanted their cities to be beautiful, just like the fair. And
07:51this became known as the City Beautiful Movement.
07:54City Beautiful is a pretty incredible moment in the history of architecture and urbanism because it's
07:59sort of the moment where urban planning coalesces as a field.
08:03It was fundamentally an attempt to remake American cities in the image of the exposition by inserting grand
08:09boulevards, stately Beaux-Arts structures, plazas, fountains, and parks into our existing cities.
08:16That all sounds great, but as you can probably tell, there's a few problems. The first one is pretty
08:20obvious. If these existing cities are going to become more beautiful, we need to demolish what's
08:25there and make way for these beautiful makeovers. Take the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia,
08:30for instance. Today, it looks like this. A majestic boulevard lined with museums and cultural
08:36institutions. It's so well organized and the buildings are so grand that it seems like maybe
08:40it's always been there. But before it became this, it was a dense urban neighborhood. Over 1500 homes
08:46were cleared, starting in 1907, so that we could have a place for Rocky to run up and to snarl traffic.
08:51Now I'm all for big ideas, and I know that ambitious projects come with significant costs to existing
08:56communities. So let's focus just on the design parts of this for a minute. When an area of a city grows
09:01over time, most of it's not pre-planned or controlled. There are all sorts of strange
09:06little details and things that pop up, and things that maybe just don't make all that much sense,
09:10but give it a lot of character. And with this, in these pre-1900 cities developed a sort of human
09:16scale that you can see in this part that was eventually removed. But projects like the Franklin
09:21Parkway are planned from the top down, and they can never have the kinds of character of what it replaced.
09:27It just can't. The moves are too big, and they come all at once. So to compensate,
09:32these grand plans dress up the buildings inside of them as a substitute for the character that had
09:37developed there organically. Sure, these new buildings are well built, and they have all kinds of
09:42pretty ornamentation and craftsmanship, but these are being imposed onto this place. And to do that,
09:48it had to erase what was there before. The Tartarians believe that buildings like this,
09:52and maybe even this exact building, come from a distant and mysterious culture. And in reality,
09:58for people in Philadelphia, they do come from another distant culture. But their origins,
10:03they're not mysterious at all. In reality, the model that the Colombian Exposition and the City
10:08Beautiful Makeovers, the model that they're emulating, it comes from France during the Second
10:12Empire. In fact, the aesthetic category of beautiful, just as a category of landscapes,
10:17comes from there too. You can think about the exquisitely manicured gardens of Versailles and
10:22Louis XIV. When it comes to cities, we can look to Paris as the original model from which Daniel
10:27Burnham was inspired or copied. You can see some pretty obvious similarities in the axial alignments
10:32of monuments and the types of architecture that are here. And while the origins aren't mysterious
10:37at all, how they were translated and how they were applied to American cities,
10:41I think deserves a hard look. At the time of the Colombian Exposition, Daniel Burnham had actually
10:46never been to Europe. So he strategically hired plenty of architects who trained in Paris
10:50at a special school called the École des Beaux-Arts. Their training allowed them to make pretty
10:54convincing replicas of what you'd find around Paris at the time. The designer of the Benjamin Franklin
10:59Parkway in Philadelphia, for instance, trained there. And it's where Edward Bennett went to school.
11:04Bennett was the co-author of the 1909 plan for Chicago with none other than Daniel Burnham himself.
11:10That 1909 plan, which you might have seen pictures of from before, is the City Beautiful
11:15movement's attempt to turn Chicago into what was called the Paris of the Prairie. The comparison
11:21between the two cities is pretty clear. You're making the city much more legible, kind of more
11:26sequential, more readable. So my question is, why are Americans so eager to make their cities more
11:33like Paris? Sure, it's a beautiful city, but all the parts that we're trying to copy were maliciously
11:39carved into the city by a power-hungry emperor, trying to show off his power. Napoleon III ordered
11:45engineer George Houseman to replan the city to make it impossible for citizens to take it back
11:51from the emperor. Unlike Americans who were sold that this beauty would enrich everyone's lives,
11:56the Parisian beauty was imposed on the city as a weapon to manage and control the people of it. The
12:01wide boulevards made it harder for rebels to erect barricades and easier for troops to move through,
12:06making military rule of the city possible. Then the emperor lined those boulevards with endless rows
12:12of Beaux-Arts style or Second Empire style buildings. Not only did this provide visual order to the
12:18chaotic city, it brought people in line too, like literally. And that's the dream that we were sold
12:24by Daniel Burnham. Critics of the City Beautiful movement called it an architectural cult.
12:28The adoption of City Beautiful was a pretty obvious ploy to instill obedience and discipline in the
12:35citizenry. This theme park convinced us to demolish our cities to make way for displays of beauty taken
12:42from a tyrant. So in the end, the Tartarian believers, they're totally right. Except the
12:47buildings that they are worried about losing are the exact ones that actually took their buildings
12:51in the first place and are the ones that are trying to control them. They're worried about a powerful
12:55entity denying access to history. But the reality is that we've been duped into believing a fake history
13:01all along through architecture. So skeptics, they have a point. Our cities are constantly being
13:06reshaped. But we should not fall prey to equating architectural style with permanence or authenticity.
13:12There's a real opportunity here to appreciate and preserve our architectural heritage and I'm
13:16excited that people are getting excited about it. But don't be fooled into thinking that a building
13:21with columns and gilded domes are timeless. It might just be a cheap plaster knockoff.
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