Examples of Long-Term Projects?

February 21, 2009 12:07 PM

I'm looking for examples where people invest work in projects that they know they will never live to partake in the outcome.

I am already familiar with the Long Now Foundation and many examples mentioned in Stewart Brand's book, so as much as I'm awed and inspired by all of that, I'm looking for a larger universe of examples. Historical examples would be especially prized. Also if there is some sort of terminology/theory/readings about this from other perspectives -- anthropological, psychological, what have you, I'd love to hear about them.

posted by theefixedstars to society & culture (13 comments total)

sorry for the awkward construction of the question. I may be interested in the future but I'm rooted in the present by an ache-y cold that's left my mind cloudy and dull.
posted by theefixedstars at 12:09 PM on February 21

La Sagrada Familia is a cathedral in Barcelona, it has been in construction since 1882.

The architect Gaudi spent the last 15 years of his life devoted to a project he knew would not be finished for hundreds of years.
posted by chrispy108 at 12:13 PM on February 21

Washington National Cathedral or Mt Rushmore?
posted by fixedgear at 12:28 PM on February 21

The Crazy Horse Memorial is a mountain monument under construction in the Black Hills of South Dakota, in the form of Crazy Horse, an Oglala Lakota warrior, riding a horse and pointing into the distance.

The mountain carving was begun in 1948 by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who had worked on Mount Rushmore under Gutzon Borglum in 1924. Ziolkowski died in 1982. The entire complex is owned by the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation. Ziolkowski's wife Ruth and several children remain closely involved with the work, which has no fixed completion date.
posted by netbros at 12:40 PM on February 21

The Pitch-Drop Experiment, begun in 1927, is expected to last for at least another century.
posted by Rhaomi at 1:03 PM on February 21 [2 favorites has favorites]

The reasons certain hardwoods are so expensive is that it can take 75+ years to mature, so no one wants to plant them. Anyone who farms black walnuts plants them for their grandchildren to profit from.

Would other charitable foundations count? Or wills? Certainly something like the MacArthur Foundation or the Nobel Foundation have had great, long term benefit and were created specifically to outlive their progenitors.
posted by Ookseer at 1:09 PM on February 21 [1 favorite has favorites]

There is a John Cage piece designed to play for 639 years.

John Simon, Jr. also create the every icon project that is " ...an algorithmic composition that will take billions of years to display every icon configuration in a 32 x 32 grid."
posted by nimsey lou at 1:23 PM on February 21

Cathedrals are the proto-typical example, with most taking several generations. (Koln's Domkirche racked up a fantastic 632 years, though for different reasons.) However, I think with them (and perhaps with other examples) the process is/was very much something which would be an outcome in itself, regardless of eventual - sometimes ahistorical - outcome. Adding to the glory of your god must have felt like a pretty good reason to engage in the building of a cathedral. Our outcome, a place of worship or a pretty building, was never going to be the same as theirs, a life spent doing work for god. Perhaps such projects make sense when looked at back to front like that.

Long Now projects are less about the outcome of having X or Y in the future, but presenting a participant as a person with a better understanding of the implications of time in the present. Similarly, planting trees for coming generations isn't necessarily about their future prosperity, but about the creation of the planter as an individual with certain values and beliefs in his own lifetime. On a smaller scale, grandparents plan to leave money to their descendents in order to 'become' grandparents.
posted by Sova at 1:48 PM on February 21

There's some very nice discussion of this wrt to cathedrals in the book Between the Dreaming and the Coming True.
posted by alms at 5:36 PM on February 21

This isn't exactly what you are looking for, but I was reminded of how John Cazale participated in the film The Deer Hunter. Director Michael Cimino knew Cazale was dying of cancer and so re-arranged the shooting schedule so that Cazale's scenes could be filmed before it was too late. Cazale passed away shortly after filming, but before the film was ever completed.
posted by atmosphere at 9:26 PM on February 21

There are many examples in mathematics of people making conjectures that were proved (or not) long after their death (eg Fermat and his "last" theorem). One of the most famous examples of a mathematician laying out a program for others to investigate is David Hilbert's problems, given in 1900. However I can't find evidence showing that he believed all of them would be solved before his death (or not). Some of his questions are still unresolved.

John Roebling helped to design the Brooklyn Bridge but died while surveying for its construction.

On a lighter note, someone who definitely fits your criteria would be Hari Seldon from Asimov's Foundation series.
posted by A dead Quaker at 9:43 PM on February 21

I've always thought that the parkland landscapes that were created around British stately homes in the 18th Century, most notably by Capability Brown would have an element of this. Capability Brown's parks were designed to make it appear as if the house and grounds were surrounded by thick woodland, and they feature lots of trees, lots and lots of trees. His landscapes now are beautiful, but it must have been decades before they actually reached that point, when the trees reached maturity.
posted by Helga-woo at 5:10 AM on February 22

From Marco Polo's Description of the World:

Let me tell you further that in this province, in a city called Tinju, they make bowls of porcelain, large and small, of incomparable beauty. They are made nowhere else except in this city, and from here they are exported all over the world. These dishes are made of a crumbly earth or clay which is dug as though from a mine and stacked in huge mounds and then left for thirty or forty years exposed to wind, rain and sun. By this time the earth is so refined that dishes made of it are of an azure tint with a very brilliant sheen. You must understand that when a man makes a mound of this earth he does so for his children.

posted by severalbees at 10:39 AM on February 27