Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
—William Gaddis, The Recognitions
In 1949 an architect in his late forties—a man with a messy personal life—was fading into obscurity. His banal and unextraordinary work included a series of housing projects in his hometown of Philadelphia. But in 1950, as an architect in residence at the American Academy in Rome, this man, far past his prime, decided to tour the ancient ruins of the world. Starting in Rome with sights like the Colosseum, he went on to explore the wonders of the world in Egypt and Greece. In what should have been the winter of his career, Louis Kahn transformed himself into what many consider to be the most influential American architect of the twentieth century. Kahn’s work would eventually show how Blocks hold the same undeniable force as gravity. They capture attention and do not let us go or give us a choice.
In 2003 Nathaniel Kahn, Louis Kahn’s son from one of three separate families—which he kept secret, supporting each individually—made a film about his quest to learn more about his mysterious, masterful father, today recognized as a towering figure in the annals of architecture. (My Architect: A Son’s Journey would go on to receive universal acclaim and was nominated for the Academy Award for Documentary Feature.) While some of the greatest architects of the century would eventually hail him as a genius, back in 1950, the still-unextraordinary Louis Kahn found himself packing off to Rome after the birth of another child under scandalous circumstances. Though he was almost fifty years old, it was this trip to Rome that altered the course of his life’s work. Kahn’s encounter of the Colosseum likely led him to tour more of the world’s wonders.
Kahn’s tour of these ancient wonders directed him toward a distinct and deeply personal style—a profound marriage of the complex and the monolithic. Mirroring aspects of the ancient ruins he visited, he worked with simple geometric shapes on a massive scale, but his structures revealed a staggering amount of complexity when the viewer came closer to them or stepped inside.
In his film, Nathaniel Kahn interviews modern master architect I. M. Pei. He asks Pei why he considers Louis Kahn to be the greatest of his time, especially considering that Pei himself had been so prolific, designing dozens and dozens of buildings across the globe, while Kahn only created seven significant buildings in his post-wonders rebirth.
Pei responded, “Three or four masterpieces [are] more important than 50 [or] 60 buildings . . . architecture has to have the quality of time.” In other words, it’s about quality, not quantity.
Throughout history, the Egyptian pyramids have been held as one of the great wonders of the physical world. The fact that the pyramids are literally wondrous helps; they are an engineering feat, constructed with limited technology, and how exactly the huge blocks of stone were hauled into place remains somewhat of a mystery. However, their simplicity is far more important than their wonder when it comes to why they stand out and endure in our collective consciousness.
These structures are an excellent example of how Blocks (simple large shapes) can become Icons, a touchstone held in our collective minds. An examination of all the Seven Wonders of the World is a remarkable way to illustrate this.
Interestingly, it is almost impossible to get any type of expert to agree on what the “Seven Wonders” actually are. Here are some of the more common and obvious contenders: the Great Pyramids of Egypt, Stonehenge, the mammoth Moai heads of Easter Island, Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis, the Great Wall of China, and the Tomb of Mausolus. For anyone who wasn’t counting, that’s thirteen contenders for the list of seven, and there are more.
Go online and you will find many more lists and “scientific experts” staking claims or having disagreements as to what the “real” Seven Wonders are. It seems laymen and scientists all have their own ideas as to what truly makes something “wondrous.”
One appealing solution to the argument has been to put the Seven Wonders in subcategories such as the Seven Natural Wonders, the Seven Ancient Wonders, the Seven Medieval Wonders, or even the New Seven Wonders. USA Today and Good Morning America coined that last list in 2006 after redefining what we might consider truly “wondrous.” It even included the readers’ choice of an “eighth wonder,” the Grand Canyon.
There may be a few places on the USA Today list that you have never even heard of; it was developed by a group of scientists and cultural observers from various fields. The panel included experts like marine biologist Sylvia Earl, theologian Bruce Feiler, international travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer, global explorer Holly Morris, high-altitude archaeologist John Reinhard, and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Most, if not all, of the examples in the USA Today New Wonders list do not resonate with the average person in terms of what they collectively understand to be the Seven Wonders (except for the readers’ choice of the Grand Canyon). The Hanging Gardens of Babylon don’t exist anymore, and the internet and the Great Migration in the Serengeti are somewhat intangible in terms of a visual image or picture in the mind.
The Seven Wonders of the average woman or man on the street—the pop culture list—are a simple and fair-minded, if not definitive, list:
The Great Pyramids are immense 
triangles.
The Colosseum is a massive 
circle.
Stonehenge is a display of giant 
rectangles or a huge circle, if you happen to be the aliens that built them. 
The Great Wall is a series of colossal interlocked rectangles and 
squares.
The Moai heads of Easter Island are enormous rectangles with 
faces carved into them.
The Taj Mahal is a gigantic 
rectangle with a circle on top of it.
And the Grand Canyon is simply HUGE and visually extreme in its gargantuan contrast to the environment surrounding it.
Give any man or woman on the street an impromptu quiz, and he or she would likely name items from this same list of wonders—and only one of the experts’ seven.
The question is, Why does the “expert list” vary so widely from the generally understood Seven Wonders within our pop culture? Well, these experts are likely more concerned with the literal concept of the greatness of something and are less likely to be taken in by a surface notion, which is exactly the point. It is the wonders with simple shapes on the surface that we most remember. This simple surface notion makes them endure in our minds—in short, it is what makes them iconic.
The common denominator of the pop culture list has more to do with these wonders’ simplicity, not the degree of awe they inspire. Each wonder’s design can be easily distilled into a basic shape. Of them all, the Taj Mahal has the most complicated structure, and it is essentially just a rectangle with a circle on it.
Iconic wonders endure because they are physical, visual Blocks—their basic form readily gives us a clear image that endures in our brains. So even though many of the new wonders put forth by experts may be much more incredible in their intricacy of design, scale, or cultural significance, the primal brain in us all will latch on to and instantly recall the Icon or Block. We associate a tremendous amount of knowledge with these images, but it’s the simple shape that first tends to come to mind.