pplpod

In the 1920s San Francisco was the largest American city still dependent on ferries, and the Southern Pacific Railroad's monopoly charged a dollar per car for a 20 minute crossing. The railroad sued to stop a bridge, and experts called the 6,700 foot, 372 foot deep strait unbridgeable. Engineer Joseph Strauss, who had proposed bridging the Bering Strait, promised to do it for 17 million dollars ag...

A company town makes your employer your landlord, grocer, school board, and mayor. In the 1880s George Pullman built a planned town outside Chicago for about 6,000 employees of his railway car company, some 12,000 people with families, complete with brick houses, indoor plumbing, a library, churches, and a theater. When the Panic of 1893 hit, he cut wages and hours but kept rents and store prices...

Westminster Abbey began on Thorny Island, a marshy gravel bank in the Thames, where a fisherman claimed a vision of St. Peter. The Fishmongers' Company still presents the Abbey with a salmon every year. St. Dunstan and King Edgar settled Benedictine monks there around 959, and in the 1040s Edward the Confessor rebuilt it as England's first cruciform church. It was consecrated in December 1065, and...

Construction at Karnak, near modern Luxor, began around 1970 BC under the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Senusret I and continued until the Ptolemaic era around 30 BC, with roughly 30 pharaohs adding, altering, and erasing work. The Egyptians called it Ipet-isut, the most select of places, while the modern name comes from the nearby village of El Karnak, Arabic for fortified village. Its centerpiece, the...

The Transamerica Pyramid at 600 Montgomery Street in San Francisco sits on layered history: the shoreline of Yerba Buena Cove, where a Mexican pueblo was founded in 1834, the buried hull of the 1849 whaling ship Niantic, and the Montgomery Block, which survived the 1906 earthquake before being torn down for a parking lot in 1959. After 1906, A.P. Giannini ran his Bank of Italy from the site. CEO J...

After developer Floyd Brown defaulted on plans for a 25-story office building on the old Waldorf Astoria site at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, a group including John J. Raskob, Pierre S. du Pont, and former New York governor Al Smith took over. They gave architect William F. Lamb of Shreve, Lamb and Harmon a 50 million dollar budget and 18 months from first sketch to opening. The 1916 zoning resol...

On Kizhi Island in Lake Onega, in Russia's Republic of Karelia, the Church of the Transfiguration was begun in 1714 to replace a church destroyed by lightning. It rises 37 meters with 22 cascading domes, making it one of the tallest wooden buildings in northern Europe. Its main frame of Scots pine uses no nails: carpenters scribe fitted each log to the one below, packed moss between layers, and lo...

Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto traces its founding to 711 CE and the Hata clan, immigrants from the Korean Peninsula who brought irrigation, silk farming, and sake brewing to Yamashiro province. The founding myth in the Fudoki tells of Hata no Irogu shooting an arrow at a rice cake that turned into a white bird, flew to the peak of Mount Inari, and made rice grow where it landed. The clan's private...

In spring 2000, developer Irvine Sellar met Italian architect Renzo Piano in Berlin to discuss replacing the 1970s Southwark Towers near London Bridge. Piano said he hated conventional skyscrapers, then sketched a tapering spire on the back of a menu, inspired by ship masts and Canaletto's church spires. English Heritage called it a shard of glass through the heart of historic London, and the deve...

For centuries Brazil's people and wealth clung to the Atlantic coast, first in Salvador and from 1763 in Rio de Janeiro. In 1827 José Bonifácio, an advisor to Emperor Pedro I, proposed moving the capital inland and suggested the name Brasília. In 1883 the Italian saint Don Bosco dreamed of a promised land between the 15th and 20th parallels beside a man-made lake. The 1891 Constitution mandated th...

In 1631 Mumtaz Mahal, chief consort of the fifth Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, died delivering their 14th child, a daughter named Gohara Begum. The emperor shut down his court for a week, banned music for two years, and set out to build an earthly replica of Jannah, the Islamic paradise, on the Yamuna River in Agra. He traded Raja Jai Singh I a palace in the center of the city for the riverfront plot...

Venice's stone palaces do not rest on bedrock. They stand on thousands of alder trunks driven through lagoon mud into hard clay, topped with Istrian limestone. In the oxygen-free mud, bacteria could not rot the wood, and mineral-rich salt water slowly petrified it. The city began in the fifth century as a refuge for people fleeing Attila the Hun and other invaders who sacked mainland cities like P...

Nobody knows what the builders of Teotihuacan called the Pyramid of the Sun; the Aztecs named it after arriving centuries after the city was abandoned. Standing on the Avenue of the Dead between the Pyramid of the Moon and the Ciudadela in modern Mexico, it is the third largest ancient pyramid in the Americas after La Danta in Guatemala and the Great Pyramid of Cholula. Its base measures roughly 2...

Kyoto's Golden Pavilion, officially Rokuon-ji or Deer Garden Temple, began when shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu bought a statesman's villa in 1397 and built the pavilion around 1399 as part of his retirement complex. His son turned it into a Zen temple after his death, as Yoshimitsu had wished. The gold leaf on the top two floors was meant to purify negative thoughts about death, catching sunlight off...

Along State Highway 165 southwest of Pueblo, in Colorado's San Isabel National Forest, stands a 160 foot stone castle with towers, wrought iron walkways, and arched windows, built almost single handedly by Jim Bishop. Born in Honolulu in 1944, Bishop bought the land at 15 for $450 saved from mowing lawns and delivering newspapers. In 1969 he and his wife Phoebe began building a one room family cot...

Creating New York's Central Park took more gunpowder than the Battle of Gettysburg. In the 1840s Manhattan had only about 165 acres of public squares, and figures like William Cullen Bryant and Andrew Jackson Downing pushed for a park to rival London and Paris. A plan to buy the 160 acre Jones's Wood was struck down in court, so the city turned to a 750 acre site around the Croton Aqueduct's recei...

Beneath Cologne Cathedral lie a late antique Christian meeting house, a sixth century Merovingian church, and the Carolingian Hildebold Cathedral of 870. Everything changed in 1164, when Emperor Frederick Barbarossa took the bones of the Three Magi from Milan and gave them to Archbishop Rainald of Dassel. Housed in the golden Shrine of the Three Kings, built from 1190 to 1225, the relics drew so m...

Brutalism has nothing to do with brutality. The term began as nybrutalism, coined in 1950 by Swedish architect Hans Asplund to describe Villa Goth, a modest brick house in Uppsala with exposed steel, brick, and board-marked concrete. British architects Alison and Peter Smithson took it up, and critic Reyner Banham's 1955 essay tied it to beton brut, the raw concrete of Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habit...

Rockefeller Center sits on the site of the Elgin Botanic Garden, which physician David Hosack opened in 1801 as the country's first public botanical garden. The 20 acres passed to New York State and then, by 1823, to Columbia University, which kept the land as an investment after moving to Morningside Heights. In 1928 the Metropolitan Opera, outgrowing its home at 39th Street and Broadway, recruit...

According to NASA, the water held back by China's Three Gorges Dam lengthened the day by 0.06 microseconds and made the planet slightly rounder at the middle. The idea dates to 1919, when Sun Yat-sen proposed a dam of about 22 gigawatts in The International Development of China. The Nationalist government began preliminary work in the 1930s and brought in US Bureau of Reclamation engineer John L....

Todai-ji in Nara, Japan, was born out of catastrophe. After an alleged coup in 729, a smallpox epidemic from 735 to 737 killed roughly a third of Japan's population, followed by famine and rebellion, and Emperor Shomu moved the capital four times. In 741 he ordered provincial temples built nationwide with Todai-ji at their head, and two years later he commanded a colossal bronze Daibutsu. To avoid...

Christopher Wren was born in 1632 in a Wiltshire village to a royalist clergyman who became Dean of Windsor, and he grew up a sickly child as the English Civil War turned against his family's side. At Oxford he joined the Invisible College, the circle of Robert Boyle and John Wilkins that later became the Royal Society. He invented a tipping bucket rain gauge, ground telescope lenses, studied Satu...

Bucharest's Palace of the Parliament is the heaviest administrative building in the world, weighing over nine billion pounds, sinking about six millimeters a year, and costing over $6 million a year to heat and light. With 365,000 square meters of floor space, eight underground levels reaching 92 meters deep, and a volume 2 percent larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, it began after Nicolae Ceau...

Built in France's Loire Valley from 1519 to 1547, the Chateau de Chambord was a hunting lodge for King Francis I, who already had palaces at Blois and Amboise and wanted to impress his rival, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. It has 440 rooms, 84 staircases, 282 fireplaces, and a moat and bastions useless against attack. Francis spent only about seven weeks there. His entourage of up to 2,000 people h...

George Washington chose the design and laid the cornerstone but never spent a night in the White House. After dismissing Pierre-Charles L'Enfant, whose palace would have been five times larger, the government held a competition won by Irish immigrant James Hoban, whose Palladian plan drew heavily on Leinster House in Dublin. Scottish masons raised the walls from porous Aquia Creek sandstone quarri...