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Earlier this year, after the Taliban blasted into dust two giant statues of the
Buddha that had stood for the better part of two thousand years in Bamiyan,
Afghanistan, a Swiss filmmaker and entrepreneur named Bernard Weber met with
Paul Bucherer, the director of the Afghanistan Institute and Museum. The museum,
which is based in Bubendorf, Switzerland, houses cultural treasures salvaged
from Afghanistan; Weber is the founder of new7wonders.org, an Internet project
that invites participants to cast votes to nominate the seven wonders of the
contemporary world. Although the Bamiyan statues had not registered
significantly in voting patterns--the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, and
Chichén Itzá were among the leading contenders, nominated by more than five
million voters--Weber nonetheless asked Bucherer whether there was anything he
could do to help restore the statues, or, at least, preserve their memory.
As it turns out, there was: Bucherer had in his possession a set of precise
photogrammetric measurements of the statues, which had been taken in 1970 by a
scientist named Robert Kostka. Using these, and other photographic evidence,
Weber and Bucherer intend to create a three-dimensional image of the Buddhas,
which will be made available on the Internet. Next, they hope to rebuild the
statues at a tenth of their original size, and install them at the Afghan museum
in Bubendorf. They expect to draw on the resources of a prominent Afghan
construction engineer, who, along with several other members of the pre-Taliban
ruling class, lives in Switzerland. Fund-raising for the project will be
conducted through the New7Wonders database of voters, and the virtual statues
are expected to be completed by early next year. Speaking last week by telephone
from Switzerland, Weber said, "I am sending a million people E-mails."
Weber says he came up with the New7Wonders concept a couple of years ago, while searching for a suitable subject for an Imax film. He consulted with officials of unesco's World Heritage program and historians of art and architecture to create a list of seventeen of the greatest man-made structures; then he invited visitors to his Web site to make suggestions, as well as to vote for their top seven. (Once the voting has been completed, in 2003, Weber intends to produce or license New7Wonders merchandise, television programming, and books.) Among U.S. architectural achievements, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty both made the shortlist. The World Trade Center did not, though Weber says that since September 11th he has received a number of messages urging him to include it.
Weber, who is forty-nine, says that his interest in the Buddha statues was
prompted in part by memories of unesco's successful effort to save the Abu
Simbel temples in Egypt, which were to have been flooded during the building of
the Aswan Dam, in the nineteen-sixties. (To thank the United States for its role
in the preservation project, Egypt made a gift of the Temple of Dendur to the
Metropolitan Museum.) Weber and Bucherer's plan is that the third and final
stage of the Buddha-statues project will be a full-scale reconstruction in
Afghanistan. "Two months ago, people would ask me about this, and say I am being
naïve to think this," Weber said. "Now, after all this tragedy, maybe in two or
three years, the situation will be such that the people of Afghanistan will
invite us to build these statues back." Weber added that the rebuilding would
have not merely a symbolic value but a practical one. "In the Bamiyan Valley,
the people had an infrastructure to live on, because the few tourists who went
to Afghanistan went to see these statues," he said. "If we rebuild them, I think
that, with all the media attention, we can create a very good incentive for
people to go and visit what is actually a very beautiful country."
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