April 27, 2021 Ι Bloomberg’s CityLab In 1908, architect Ern…

April 27, 2021 Ι Bloomberg’s CityLab
In 1908, architect Ernest Flagg completed the Singer Building in Lower Manhattan, a Beaux-Arts showstopper made for the Singer sewing machine company. From a wide base, a slender 27-story tower rose, topped by a mansard roof and a delicate lantern spire.
Every inch dripped with sumptuous detail inside and out; vaulted roofs, marble columns with bronze trim, window mullions with spiral fluting. The lobby was said to have a “celestial radiance.” A book was written just about its construction. For a year, it was the tallest building in the world at 612 feet, and a celebrated landmark for decades after that.
But not for too much longer. Despite its great height, the pencil-thin tower lacked office space. In the 1960s the company sold its ornate headquarters; demolition proceeded in 1967. It’s the tallest building to ever be peacefully demolished.
By any account, it’s a fantastical tale: Once the tallest building in the world and a New York icon, knocked down in just a handful of decades.
For some, it’s too fantastical to believe … or perhaps not fantastical enough. A dedicated group of YouTubers and Reddit posters see the Singer Building and countless other discarded pre-modern beauties and extant Beaux-Arts landmarks as artifacts of a globe-spanning civilization called the Tartarian Empire, which was somehow erased from the history books. Adherents of this theory believe these buildings to be the keys to a hidden past, clandestinely obscured by malevolent actors.
Who? Why? To what possible end? As in many other, more high-profile conspiracy theories, this baroque fantasy doesn’t offer much in the way of practical considerations, logic or evidence. But it’s grounded in some real anxieties, pointing toward the changes wrought by the modern world in general and modern architecture specifically — and rejecting both.
Tartarian-themed content is produced for YouTube videos that get picked over on Reddit. The r/Tartarianarchitecture sub, which began in December 2018, has 3,300 members, though not everyone who posts and comments appears to be a true believer. A larger and more general sub that appeared around the same time, r/Tartaria, has 8,700 members. As conspiracy theories go, Tartaria remains obscure; Twitter user @cinemashoebox brought it to many people’s attention last year with this thread, and pseudoscience-debunking writer Brian Dunning recently devoted an episode of his podcast, Skeptoid, to the Tartaria theory, which appears to have first emerged in 2016 and 2017.
The Tartaria storyline is not directly related to the adrenochrome-harvesting Satanic-pedophile cabal that lies at the heart of QAnon, the unfounded conspiracy theory that crashed into the real world in 2020. But it shares some of what Peter Ditto, a social psychologist at the University of California-Irvine who specializes in conspiracy theories, calls QAnon’s “cafeteria quality:” There’s no overarching narrative or single authorial voice interpreting events. It’s just a gusher of outlandish speculation; adherents can pick and choose which elements they want to sign on to.
The overall premise is an alternative history. A vast, technologically advanced “Tartarian” empire, emanating from north-central Asia or thereabouts, either influenced or built vast cities and infrastructure all over the world. (Tartaria, or Tartary, though never a coherent empire, was indeed a general term for north-central Asia.) Either via a sudden cataclysm or a steady antagonistic decline — and perhaps as recently as 100 years ago — Tartaria fell. Its great buildings were buried, and its history was erased. After this “great reset,” the few surviving examples of Tartarian architecture were falsely recast as the work of contemporary builders who could never have executed buildings of such grace and beauty, and subjected them to clumsy alterations.
“I think that it was one worldwide civilization,” says Joachim Skaar, a 26-year-old Norwegian who runs The Tartarian Meltdown YouTube channel. “It was all based on unity, oneness, peace, love, and harmony, which we don’t see in today’s society.”
There’s an arch-traditionalism present in the theory, too. The pre-modern buildings that we venerate are sometimes said to be more than 1,000 years old. “The same people that built the Capitol in Washington built the pyramids in Egypt,” Skaar says.
Reached at his recording studio, Skaar, who works as a plumber, is not an architect or historian, but he has strong opinions on both disciplines. “We have two very different types of architecture,” he says. There’s modern architecture “with the name Brutalism,” which he describes as “square concrete boxes which are designed to be produced very fast, very cheap and very effective.”
And then there’s Tartarian architecture, a label that gets applied to anything that’s particularly ornate and pre-modern, encompassing many Western styles: Classical, Beaux-Arts, Second Empire. The term is also sometimes used for …