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After German unification in 1871, the new imperial parliament spent 23 years working out of a former porcelain factory in Berlin while the government fought to clear a Polish Prussian aristocrat's palace off the Koenigsplatz. Frankfurt architect Paul Wallot won the commission in 1882 with a heavy neo-Renaissance design inspired by Philadelphia's Memorial Hall, its four corner towers standing for P...

In the mid 1550s, after capturing Kazan and Astrakhan, Ivan the Terrible ordered a stone church on Red Square to replace the temporary wooden churches he usually built to mark victories. He placed it outside the Kremlin walls in the muddy Kitay-gorod market, a deliberate move to connect with commoners rather than the boyars. Heritage records name the builders as Barma and Postnik Yakovlev, possibl...

In 1884 New Yorkers stepped over a small aluminum pyramid on the floor of Tiffany's so they could say they had stood above the top of the Washington Monument. Getting there took decades. Congress authorized an equestrian statue in 1783, but Jeffersonian Republicans resisted anything like a royal shrine. The private Washington National Monument Society, formed in 1833, picked Robert Mills's 1845 de...

Masada is a flat-topped rock above the Dead Sea with a 400 meter drop on its east side and a 90 meter cliff on the west. Between 37 and 31 BC, Herod the Great, fearful of his own subjects and of Cleopatra, ringed it with a 1,300 meter casemate wall and built two palaces, including the Northern Palace that steps down three cliff terraces. Cisterns cut into the rock held about 40,000 cubic meters of...

Louis Sullivan, born in Boston in 1856, entered MIT's architecture program at 16 and left within a year. After working for Frank Furness in Philadelphia until the Panic of 1873, he went to Chicago, then rebuilding after the 1871 fire, worked briefly for William LeBaron Jenney, and spent a year at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1879 Dankmar Adler hired him, and within a year they were partne...

Before the 20th century, only seven people were executed inside the Tower of London in about 800 years. The fortress began in 1066, when William the Conqueror starved London into submission and built a stronghold against what his biographer William of Poitiers called the restlessness of the huge and brutal populace. Around 1078 Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, began the White Tower in Kentish ragston...

In 1994 French divers in Alexandria's murky eastern harbor found nearly 50-ton granite blocks, sphinxes, and columns from the Pharos lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders. The Nile Delta coast was flat and hard to see from sea, its waters full of reefs, and legend says islanders on Pharos lit false fires to wreck ships. After Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in 332 BC, Ptolemy I Soter took Eg...

European sailors in the Bay of Bengal steered by a dark mass on the Odisha coast they called the Black Pagoda, paired with the whitewashed Jagannath Temple at Puri. It was the Konark Sun Temple, built around 1250 CE by King Narasimha Deva I of the Eastern Ganga dynasty as a literal chariot for the sun god Surya: 24 carved wheels nearly 12 feet across and seven straining stone horses, laid out on V...

In August 1944, American commanders suspected Germans were spotting artillery from the towers of Chartres Cathedral and ordered it destroyed. Colonel Welborn Barton Griffith Jr. instead slipped behind enemy lines with one volunteer, climbed the towers, found them empty, and rang the bells to call off the strike. He was killed in combat later that day in a nearby town. The cathedral he saved dates...

Mimar Sinan, chief architect of the Ottoman Empire, oversaw more than 300 major structures under three sultans and lived to nearly 100, yet his origins remain disputed. Born Joseph around 1490 in a small Anatolian village, he helped his stonemason father until 1512, when the devshirme levy took him to the capital, converted him to Islam, and trained him as a Janissary. He fought at Belgrade in 152...

In 1884 Chicago officials halted construction of the Home Insurance Building at LaSalle and Adams because it weighed only about a third of what a normal building its size should, and they feared it would collapse or blow over. Architect William LeBaron Jenney, an engineer at heart, had replaced thick load-bearing masonry with an iron and steel skeleton. He showed an investigating committee that ri...

The 60-story John Hancock Tower in Boston, designed by Henry N. Cobb of I. M. Pei & Partners, was meant to read as a single sheer plane of blue glass. Its problems started in 1968 in the Back Bay mud, where temporary retaining walls warped under the pressure of wet clay, damaging utilities and the historic Trinity Church across the street, which won an $11 million settlement. Once the facade w...

Antipater of Sidon said the sun never looked on anything so grand as the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, yet today it is a single reconstructed column in a marsh near Selçuk, Turkey. The site sat on a floodplain that Greeks linked to the Amazons and that was used for worship back to the Bronze Age. A clay-floored temple from the 8th century BC was buried by a flood in the 7th, leaving an ivory griff...

The Chrysler Building began with a broken partnership. In 1924 a magazine credited William Van Alen alone for work done with his conservative partner H. Craig Severance, and the split took more than a year of litigation. Severance went on to build 40 Wall Street, while Van Alen found his patron in 1928 when Walter Chrysler bought a Midtown project from developer William Reynolds for over $2.5 mill...

In the late 1960s, brokers for a major bank quietly bought 31 parcels on the Manhattan block between Lexington and Third Avenues and 53rd and 54th Streets. One owner refused: St. Peter's Evangelical Lutheran Church, a congregation of under 300 in a 1905 Gothic building on the northwest corner. The deal that followed had the bank buy the church's airspace, build it a new sanctuary on the same corne...

In 1981 French president François Mitterrand launched the Grand Louvre project to fix a museum that was really a former royal palace, a chain of disconnected wings where growing crowds jammed narrow doors. In 1983 he chose the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, whose answer was to dig under the Cour Napoléon and build one large underground lobby that sends visitors up into the three wings. To l...

Andrea Palladio was born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola in Padua in 1508, the son of a miller. At 13 he was bound to a six-year stonecutting apprenticeship under the harsh sculptor Bartolomeo Cavazza, ran away to Vicenza in April 1523, was dragged back under the guild contract, and returned to Vicenza for good in 1524. Around 1538, while working on a villa for the humanist poet Gian Giorgio Trissi...

30 St Mary Axe, the 41-story London tower everyone calls the Gherkin, grew out of a crater. In April 1992 a Provisional IRA bomb wrecked the Baltic Exchange, the historic heart of global shipping trade, along with the Chamber of Shipping at 24 to 28 St Mary Axe. English Heritage and the City of London Corporation first demanded the old facade be restored, but the damage was too severe, and the sal...

The man behind Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man was a Roman military engineer whose full name historians still are not sure of. Born around 80 to 70 BC, Vitruvius served Julius Caesar as a praefectus fabrum, building torsion artillery like the ballista and the scorpio, and likely served in North Africa, Hispania, and Gaul, including the siege of Alesia in 52 BC, where Roman double walls trapped V...

The Aqueduct of Segovia in Spain rises 28.5 meters over the Plaza del Azoguejo on 167 arches of granite blocks stacked without mortar, and it supplied the city with water until 1973. Its dedication inscription wore away, but Géza Alföldy reconstructed it from the anchor holes of its lost bronze letters, crediting Domitian and proposing completion in 98 AD. Evidence found in 2016 instead points to...

Ephesus, near modern Selçuk in Turkey, now stands about three miles from the sea it once ruled. People lived in the valley from around 6000 BC, and the Hittite city of Apasa, capital of Arzawa, was likely the same place. Greek legend credited either an Amazon queen or the Athenian prince Androclus, who followed an oracle about a fish and a boar. When King Croesus of Lydia besieged the city, Ephesi...

The Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo's Ginza district was the world's first example of capsule architecture, designed by Kisho Kurokawa and born from the Metabolist movement launched at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo. The Metabolists argued that cities should behave like living organisms, growing and replacing their parts, a hopeful answer to the destruction of World War II. After Kurokaw...

In the 1860s the Midland Railway was paying rival Great Northern tolls of one shilling and nine pence per ton to reach London, and its coal trains were jammed at junctions like Rugby. So it built its own 50 mile line from Bedford to Euston Road, demolishing the slum of Agar Town. Because the tracks had to clear the Regent's Canal, they arrived 20 feet up, and engineer William Henry Barlow, with Ro...

Filippo Brunelleschi was born in Florence in 1377, the son of a notary, and became a master goldsmith in the Silk Merchants Guild by December 1398. In 1401 he competed against Lorenzo Ghiberti to design a second set of bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery, casting a panel of the sacrifice of Isaac inside a quatrefoil frame. The judges, including Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, deadlocked and ask...

Erasmus Lueger was a 15th century knight born into privilege: his father, Nikolai Lueger, was imperial governor of Trieste. He was a close friend of the mercenary commander Andreas Baumkircher, and when Marshal Pappenheim, commander of the imperial army, insulted Baumkircher after his death, Erasmus killed him. That act made him a target of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, and he fled to his fami...