possibly not paying attention

CORUSCANT’S UNDERWORLD: OKAY, THIS HAS BEEN BUGGING ME.  I have had trouble figuring out Coruscant’s Underworld for awhile now, we know that it’s kilometers below the main “surface” world, we know that it’s something that’s been built on for tens of thousands of years, but how does it work?  Is it just that the other skyscrapers are so tall that no light reaches the bottom because of the shadows they cast? Or is it a literal shell with the upper cities built on top of them? Most of these images are centered around the Underworld portal, so this may not apply everywhere, but my feeling is:  Why build the portal this way if it’s not something of a literal shell?  Why go to all that effort for something that could just be gotten with a few bulldozed buildings around it instead?  Why was the Underworld Portal a ventilation shaft if it wasn’t an enclosed world? But I looked closer at these screencaps and concept art (for Star Wars Level 1313) and one thing always sticks out at me:  There are buildings attached to the “ceiling”, like stalactites.  Whatever that platform is–and I believe TCW shows us that there are landing bays all along that Underworld Portal, that there are drainage pipes running through them and possibly other apartments or places of business strewn throughout those levels.  Or, as the Illustrated Star Wars Universe says, there are massive pipes bringing in Coruscant’s water from the polar ice caps and it’s likely they’d be routed through those “middle” parts. Then I was reading the Wookieepedia entry and it mentioned that Coruscant was built on platforms–I don’t have a source for this, but it got me thinking and looking again at these caps.  Especially this part of the first screencap:

Some of those buildings don’t have ending points as far as I can tell, but instead seem like they might be more like pillars supporting the giant platform over the Underworld. Huh, I thought. Then I looked closer at the 1313 concept art and:

That absolutely looks like one giant support pillar.  I mean, it’s still kind of unfathomable how strong those pillars would have to be to support the sheer weight of what we see on Coruscant’s surface!  But, maybe?  You could certainly see what look like potential support pillars in every single image here! I kept looking around and the Coruscant and the Core Worlds’ RPG guide book had this to say:

“Advanced architectural technology” sounds about exactly what I was wondering about! It’s not hard to think of Coruscant–which has been building for tens of thousands of years–which has consistently been described as having already covered the surface of the planet, so they just kept building up and up and up, that they started building over the ruins beneath them, that maybe they said, okay, we have to pipe in water from the polar icecaps, let’s build a platform strong enough to support them and then, well, might as well build on top of that, since we need the space, too.  Or maybe two to five buildings were owned by the same people or those who made deals with each other and they said, okay, let’s build a platform between our two buildings, about at the midpoint, and then we can use that space for other things, maybe landing bays or maybe some more apartment buildings or maybe some nice shopping districts. And then they just kept building and building and building until there was a shell around everything.