Great Monuments Today: Why They Take So Long, and What Project 108 Tries Instead

The Great Pyramid of Giza was finished around 2560 BCE, some four and a half thousand years ago. It is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one still standing. The youngest of them — the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Colossus of Rhodes — were built around 280 BCE. Every wonder on the classical list is more than two thousand years old.

In 2007 a global vote chose a modern list, the New7Wonders. Its youngest entry is Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, completed in 1931. Nothing built in the near-century since made the list.

It is fair to ask why. The modern world has more wealth, more engineers and better machines than any age before it. Yet it has become strikingly hard to build something great — and harder still to gather large numbers of people to build anything together.

Over budget, over time, over and over again

The Oxford scholar Bent Flyvbjerg has spent his career measuring what happens to big projects. His summary has become known as the iron law of megaprojects: over budget, over time, over and over again. Across a database of more than 16,000 projects, only about 8.5 per cent came in on budget and on time. Only about 0.5 per cent did that and delivered the benefits promised.

The examples are familiar.

• Berlin Brandenburg Airport was due to open in 2011. It opened in October 2020, nine years late, at a cost of about €7 billion against an original estimate of about €2 billion.
• California’s high-speed railway was put to voters in 2008 with about USD 9 billion in bonds and a completion date around 2020. The first phase is now estimated at USD 89–128 billion, with first service on an initial segment expected around 2032.
• The Sagrada Família in Barcelona, begun in 1882, reached a milestone in 2026 — the cross on its central Tower of Jesus Christ, making it the tallest church in the world — in the centenary year of its architect Antoni Gaudí’s death. Work on the building continues into the next decade.

Why building great things got harder

There is no single reason. Four stand out.

Labour is no longer commanded. Many of the great monuments of the past were raised with labour that was conscripted, owed to the state, or unfree. Even the Great Pyramid — whose builders, archaeology now shows, were fed, housed and cared for rather than enslaved — was raised by crews rotating through a quarter-century of work owed to a king. The best-known legend of monument-building — that Shah Jahan had the Taj Mahal’s builders’ hands cut off so they could never build its equal — is almost certainly untrue, but it endures because it describes a real relationship between power and the people who build for it. That is not a world anyone should want back. But it means a modern monument must be paid for, hour by hour, at the price free people rightly charge.

Projects outlive their sponsors. A pyramid served a pharaoh’s whole reign; a cathedral served a church that planned in centuries. Modern projects depend on governments and budgets that change every few years, and a project that takes longer than a political cycle is always at risk of losing the people who started it.

Complexity compounds. Modern building carries layers of engineering, safety, environmental and legal requirements, each individually reasonable. Together they add years, and every added year adds cost and risk — which is exactly the pattern Flyvbjerg found.

Shared purpose is scarcer. The great monuments were expressions of something a society already believed. In pluralist modern societies, agreeing on what a monument should say is itself hard.

Why gathering people got harder

The second problem is less about money than about people.

In Bowling Alone, published in 2000, the political scientist Robert Putnam documented a long decline in American civic life since the 1960s: fewer people joining clubs, attending meetings or giving time to their communities. His emblem was bowling — more Americans were bowling than ever, but fewer in leagues. They bowled alone.

The numbers have not recovered. The share of Americans doing formal volunteering was 30 per cent in 2019. During the pandemic it fell to 23.2 per cent in 2021. By 2023 it had rebounded to 28.3 per cent — the largest rise on record, and still below where it had been.

In much of the world, the old traditions of communal labour — the shared harvest, the village building day — have given way to wage work and paid contractors. The barn raising, in which a whole community puts up a barn in a day or two, survives mainly among the Amish and Old Order Mennonites, where every able-bodied member is still expected to come.

What Project 108 tries instead

Set against all of this, Project 108 looks less like a megaproject and more like an answer to the problems above.

It stays small where it can. Each chorten is about fifteen metres tall — a size Bhutanese builders know well. The ambition lies in the number and the day, not in any single structure pushing the limits of engineering.

It does the long work first. The corridor was walked in March, the ground blessed at all 108 sites in June, the sacred relics prepared through the summer, the land cleared by volunteer programmes. The single day is the barn raising at the end of a long preparation — not a gamble in place of one.

It is funded before it is built. By late June, Kuensel reported almost all 108 chortens had secured sponsorship — before the first one rises.

It asks for time, not only money. Close to 40,000 volunteers are expected — about one in twenty of Bhutan’s residents. The labour is neither commanded nor bought. It is offered, through zhabtog, Bhutan’s tradition of voluntary service for the common good. What that means is its own story.

It has a shared purpose. A line of 108 Jangchub Chortens is not a contested symbol in Bhutan. It is a prayer the country already knows how to say — the number itself explained in The Number 108

What the world will be watching

Project 108 is not a pyramid, and it does not claim to be. Its fifteen-metre chortens would fit many times over inside any of the wonders. What it tests is the other half of what made those wonders possible: whether a people can still be brought together, at scale, freely, for a single purpose.

In most of the world the honest answer has become rarely. On 1 November, along the Mau Chhu, Bhutan will offer its own answer. How that one day compares with the centuries others have taken is charted in Project 108 by the Numbers.