bottom were crushed. However, by making the walls taper towards the top they ... could well have been built to a height where the men of Shinnar would run short of oxygen and had difficulty in breathing before the brick walls crushed beneath their own dead weight." In popular culture Pieter Brueghel's influential portrayal is based on the Colosseum in Rome, while later conical depictions of the tower (as depicted in Doré's illustration) resemble much later Muslim towers observed by 19th-century explorers in the area, notably the Minaret of Samarra. M.C. Escher depicts a more stylized geometrical structure in his woodcut representing the story. The composer Anton Rubinstein wrote an opera based on the story Der Thurm zu Babel. American choreographer Adam Darius staged a multilingual theatrical interpretation of The Tower of Babel in 1993 at the ICA in London. Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, in a flashback, plays upon themes of lack of communication between the designers of the tower and the workers who are constructing it. The short scene states how the words used to glorify the tower's construction by its designers took on totally different, oppressive meanings to the workers. This led to its destruction as they rose up against the designers because of the insufferable working conditions. The appearance of the tower was modeled after Brueghel's 1563 painting. The political philosopher Michael Oakeshott surveyed historic variations of the Tower of Babel in different cultures and produced a modern retelling of his own in his 1983 book, On History. In his retelling, Oakeshott expresses disdain for human willingness to sacrifice individuality, culture, and quality of life for grand collective projects. He attributes this behavior to fascination with novelty, persistent dissatisfaction, greed, and lack of self-reflection. A.S. Byatt's novel Babel Tower (1996) is about the question "whether language can be shared, or, if that turns out to be illusory, how individuals, in talking to each other, fail to understand each other". The progressive band Soul Secret wrote a concept album called BABEL, based on a modernized version of the myth. Science fiction writer Ted Chiang wrote a story called "Tower of Babylon" that imagined a miner's climbing the tower all the way to the top where he meets the vault of heaven. Fantasy novelist Josiah Bancroft has a series The Books of Babel, which concluded with book IV in 2021. The Tower of Babel appears in the 47th