The Longest Construction Projects in History: Why Sagrada Família, the Milan Duomo, Greek Temples & Other Famous Structures Took Generations to Complete

Public-transit projects are the religious building endeavors of twenty-first century America, less because they’re motivated by the belief in any particular deity than by how much time and money they now require to complete. Take New York’s Second Avenue subway, whose less than two-mile-long first phase opened in 2017: its construction had cost $4.45 billion, and the line itself had first been proposed 97 years earlier. That’s nothing by ancient standards: the Temple of Apollo