MAKE CITIES MONUMENTAL AGAIN ============================ Written: August 30, 2026 America should be building like Ancient Rome was pissing around with Lego. Move mountains. Build bridges that make people stop the car. Dig canals, raise towers, carve roads through impossible places, and pile so much stone, steel and concrete into the landscape that somebody a thousand years from now can stand there and say: THEY WERE HERE. Not because every building needs to be covered in gold. Not because the past was perfect. Rome had slavery, corruption, violence, bad plumbing and a political class that could turn a republic into a knife fight. But Rome also understood something that modern developers seem to have forgotten: A city is not just a stack of rentable rectangles. A city is a declaration. It tells people what a society believes it can do, what it considers worth preserving, and whether it expects to still be here in a hundred years. Look at the old civic buildings. Courthouses, libraries, train stations, post offices, bridges, water towers, theaters, museums and city halls. They were built to perform a public function, but they were also built to give that function a body. A library was not merely a warehouse for books. It was a temple to the idea that knowledge belonged to the public. A train station was not just a place to wait for transportation. It was the front door of a city. Now we get glass buildings. Glass buildings everywhere. Blue glass, gray glass, black glass. Glass boxes with a lobby that smells like expensive soap and a sign in a font designed by somebody who has never once felt joy. They are efficient, shiny and replaceable. They look exactly like the office building in the next city, which looks exactly like the office building in the city after that. The problem is not modernism. The problem is surrender. Modern materials can do extraordinary things. Steel, glass, concrete, composites, lighting, elevators and computer-controlled fabrication give us more possibilities than any previous civilization had. We could build cathedrals with new materials. We could make public buildings that glow at night, collect water, produce energy, open into parks and become landmarks without pretending to be medieval. Instead, we keep building sealed investment products with windows. WHAT SHOULD WE BUILD? --------------------- Build a central library that is so beautiful teenagers take pictures of it before they go inside. Build a rail station with a ceiling that makes a person look up. Build a public market that feels like it belongs to the whole region. Build a courthouse that looks like justice is supposed to matter. Build a bridge with a name, a silhouette and a story. Build a monument to the workers who made the city possible. Build a giant public clock that keeps accurate time and becomes the place where people meet. Build something that will still be interesting after the developer's quarterly report has been recycled. And stop thinking small about the landscape. A country that can move cargo across an ocean, put machines on Mars and run fiber-optic cables under the sea can probably build a few things that are meant to outlast a warranty. I want a larger Columbia region built for the next thousand years. Not a theme park and not a fake ancient empire. A real civic landscape: monumental roads, public halls, museums, reservoirs, observatories, bridges, gardens, archives and works of engineering that tell future people what kind of country this was trying to become. Let the buildings be ambitious enough to become ruins someday. That is the part people understand when they look at ancient Rome, even if they do not know the construction details. The ruins are not just old stone. They are evidence of organized labor, public money, engineering knowledge, political power, religious belief, civic pride and a willingness to spend more than was strictly necessary in order to make an idea visible. America does not need to copy Rome. America needs to recover the nerve to make its own century visible. Give us buildings that say America. Give us a skyline that belongs to the place it stands in. Give the future something better to dig into than the foundations of another glass building that was considered obsolete before the lobby furniture arrived. Make cities monumental again.