pplpod

Imhotep, whose name means the one who comes in peace, lived in the 27th century BC during Egypt's Third Dynasty. He was chancellor to King Djoser, high priest of Ra at Heliopolis, and the architect of Djoser's Step Pyramid at Saqqara, credited with the first known use of stone columns at a time when kings were buried under flat mud brick mastabas. Two inscriptions from his own era prove he existed...

In 1945, as firebombing burned the city of Himeji, a bomb struck the top floor of the castle's main keep and failed to explode. The site on Himeyama Hill was first fortified in 1333 by Akamatsu Norimura, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi added a three-story keep in 1581. After the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu gave it to his son-in-law Ikeda Terumasa, who tore down the old keep and rebuilt th...

In January 532 the Nika revolt, a chariot racing riot turned rebellion, burned half of Constantinople along with the second church on the site. The first, the Magna Ecclesia consecrated in 360 by Constantius II, had burned in 404 during riots over the exile of John Chrysostom, and Theodosius II's replacement of 415, whose lamb frieze was excavated by Alfons Maria Schneider in the 1930s, went up in...

The man behind the most famous symbol of France was not legally named Eiffel until he was nearly 50; for five decades he was Alexandre Gustave Bonickhausen. Born in Dijon in 1832, he grew up watching his mother turn a modest charcoal business into a lucrative coal distribution operation, and his uncle Jean-Baptiste, a chemist, filled his head with science. He graduated 13th in his class from the É...

The word Gothic began as an insult. The 16th century Renaissance critic Giorgio Vasari popularized it to link the style to the Goths who sacked Rome, while the medieval builders called their work opus Francigenum, French work, or opus modernum, modern work. Born in the Île de France around Paris in the 12th century, it replaced dark Romanesque barrel vaults and fortress walls with three upgrades:...

At about 8,200 feet in Ethiopia's Amhara highlands, Lalibela holds 11 monolithic churches carved downward into volcanic rock. Tradition credits King Gebre Meskel Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty, who ruled roughly 1181 to 1221 and was said to have been shown Jerusalem by Jesus in a vision. After Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187 and cut off Ethiopian pilgrimage, the king built a second Jerusalem, ev...

People built tall long before the skyscraper. The Great Pyramid of Giza stood 146 meters and held the height record for thousands of years, while Roman insulae reached 10 stories or more despite Emperor Augustus trying to cap them at around 20 to 25 meters, with the poorest tenants on the exhausting top floors. Families in 12th century Bologna raised 80 to 100 towers, some over 90 meters, Shibam i...

In 1898, surrounded by the coal smoke, cholera, and tuberculosis of industrial cities like London, Manchester, and Chicago, Ebenezer Howard set out to cure the modern city. Influenced by utopian books like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, he published what became Garden Cities of Tomorrow, with a rigid plan for exactly 32,000 people on 9,000 acres: central parks ringed by a glass arcade, concent...

In the 27th century BC, the Third Dynasty king Netjerikhet commissioned the first monumental stone building in Egypt, yet history knows him as Djoser, a name New Kingdom visitors scratched into his monument more than a thousand years later. His architect Imhotep was later deified by the Greeks as a god of medicine and healing. Until then Egyptian royals were buried in mud brick, and switching to s...

In the early 2000s Dongsheng, the urban center of the Ordos prefecture in Inner Mongolia, was booming on coal, but its water was running out and the Ordos Desert was creeping toward the city. In 2003 officials decided to build a new city for a million people on a 355 square kilometer site about 25 kilometers away, chosen because it sat next to three reservoirs, paving over two former villages to l...

Chichen Itza rose on the dry limestone plain of the northern Yucatan, a region with no surface rivers. Its water came from cenotes, sinkholes that line up with fractures along the buried rim of the Chicxulub crater, where a freshwater lens floats over oxygen-starved saltwater that preserves wood, cloth, and rubber. In 2015 electrical resistivity tomography revealed a hidden cenote directly beneath...

In 1294 Florence, jealous of the cathedrals of Siena and Pisa, approved Arnolfo di Cambio's design for Santa Maria del Fiore to replace the crumbling Santa Reparata. The first stone was laid in 1296, di Cambio died, the Black Death struck in 1348, and the Wool Merchants' Guild pushed the nave to completion around 1380. In 1367 the city rejected flying buttresses as ugly and northern, committing to...

Today about 2,200 brick temples, stupas, and monasteries rise from the dry plain of Bagan in Myanmar, but at its peak more than 10,000 monuments stood in about 104 square kilometers. The city was founded in the mid to late ninth century by the Bamar people in the Irrawaddy Valley and flourished between 1044 and 1287 as the capital of a kingdom that unified the region. It drew monks and students fr...

In 122 AD, Hadrian's Wall was likely plastered and whitewashed, a gleaming 73 mile barrier across northern England from the River Tyne to the Solway Firth. Emperor Hadrian took power in 117 AD with the empire overextended by Trajan and rebellions in Egypt, Judea, and Britain, so he chose defensible borders. With no coast to coast river in Britain, 15,000 soldiers of the Second Augusta, Sixth Victr...

Antoni Gaudí was born in Catalonia in 1852 and suffered rheumatism so severe as a child that he spent long stretches resting at the family summer home in Riudoms, studying plants, insects, and rocks and learning that nature solves structural problems without straight lines. He moved to Barcelona in 1870 to study architecture and took eight years to graduate, slowed by poor health, military service...

The Space Needle began as a napkin sketch by Edward E. Carlson, chairman of Seattle's 1962 Century 21 Exposition, who drew a tethered balloon inspired by a broadcast tower in Stuttgart. Architect John Graham Jr., fresh from the revolving restaurant at Hawaii's Ala Moana Center, added a flying saucer, and Victor Steinbrueck contributed the pinched hourglass tripod, meant to echo Seattle's isthmus b...

The word bedlam comes from Bethlehem Royal Hospital, founded in London in 1247 under King Henry III. After Turkish forces took Bethlehem in 1244, bishop-elect Goffredo de Prefetti lost his income and persuaded alderman and former sheriff Simon FitzMary to donate property outside the city wall for the Priory of the New Order of Our Lady of Bethlehem, an alms collection house whose brethren wore a s...

In Whittier, Alaska, nearly the whole town lives, works, and goes to school inside the Begich Towers, an accidental small version of the arcology. The word was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, blending architecture and ecology, for a dense megastructure aiming at autarky: internal power, climate control, vertical food production, and water and sewage treatment in a closed loop. Soleri pit...

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in rural Wisconsin in 1867, though he spent most of his life claiming 1869. His father William, an itinerant preacher and musician, moved the family constantly and walked out when Wright was 18. In 1876 his mother Anna bought him a set of Froebel gifts, maple blocks meant to be arranged on a grid, and Wright said the feel of them stayed in his fingers for life. After dr...

Frank Gehry was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929 and spent hours with his grandmother Leah building imaginary cities on the floor from wood scraps out of his grandfather's hardware store. His mother pushed him toward art and concerts while his father dismissed him as a dreamer. Fleeing anti-Semitism in Canada, the family moved to Los Angeles in 1947, where he drove a delivery truck, f...

Long before it became an interior design trend, feng shui began around 4000 BC with the Yangshao and Hongshan cultures of ancient China, who relied on naked eye astronomy. At Banpo, dwelling doors were aligned to the Yingshi star cluster just after the winter solstice, catching the lowest sun for warmth, and a grave at Puyang holds clam shell mosaics of the dragon and tiger star clusters and the B...

The Gotthard Base Tunnel runs 57 kilometers beneath the Swiss Alps from the canton of Uri to Ticino, the longest railway tunnel and deepest traffic tunnel in the world, with up to 2.5 kilometers of rock overhead that would bake at 46 degrees Celsius without ventilation. The Gotthard Pass has linked the Rhine and the Po since the 13th century, but in the 1840s a five horse stagecoach took 23 hours...

Big Ben is not the tower but the great bell inside it. After fire destroyed the old Palace of Westminster in October 1834, architect Charles Barry won the rebuild and turned to Augustus Pugin, who designed the Gothic clock tower before his mental collapse and death. Completed in 1859, the 316 foot tower of brick and Anston limestone leans about 20 inches to the northwest on London clay, a tilt wor...

When Eastern State Penitentiary opened in Philadelphia in 1829, it was the largest and most expensive public structure in the United States and a model copied by more than 300 prisons worldwide. Architect John Haviland designed a hub and spoke plan with seven cell blocks radiating from a central watchtower, hidden behind a neo-Gothic fortress with 30 foot walls. The Pennsylvania system rejected Ne...

Unveiled in May 2003, The World is an artificial archipelago off Dubai of 300 islands shaped like a map of the globe, spanning roughly 6 by 9 kilometers and adding 232 kilometers of shoreline at a cost of about 13 billion Canadian dollars. Dredging began four months later under Dutch firms Van Oord and Boskalis, the builders of Palm Jumeirah, using 321 million cubic meters of sand and 386 million...