The myth of Babel is an allegory that contracts the slow decay of systems and values into a single, catastrophic event. In architectural terms, it is something like the symbolic skull: a memento mori. Yet, more significant than material ruin (a death from which there might be some possibility of redemption) is the tower's irrevocable abandonment and redundancy: the first, and the ultimate, folly.
The Tower of Babel is not so much an updating of the myth as a translation of it: a heap of cliches whose obsolescence is inevitable and imminent. It is a life-mask of historical pessimism, tarring the glittering future with the same brush as the corpulent and bloated past.
