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Boston's Central Artery/Tunnel Project, the Big Dig, replaced an elevated six-lane highway built through downtown in the 1950s, a green steel structure that displaced 20 percent of North End businesses and was mocked as Boston's other Green Monster. Designed for 75,000 vehicles a day, it carried 190,000 by the 1990s, and planners predicted 16-hour jams by 2010. After protests in the 1970s killed t...

In June 1926 an elderly man in threadbare clothes was struck by a tram in Barcelona, and because he looked like a vagrant with empty pockets he was taken to a hospital for the poor. Days later a chaplain recognized him as Antoni Gaudí, the architect behind the city's skyline. Born in 1852 in Reus or Riudoms (he later claimed Riudoms, likely out of spite after Reus rejected one of his proposals), G...

The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur rose on the former Selangor Turf Club racetrack and were the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004, and they remain the tallest twin towers. The Malaysian government asked architect Cesar Pelli for an icon that reflected Malaysia's Muslim culture, and he based the 88-story floor plan on the Rub el Hizb, an eight-pointed star of two overlapping squares...

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum began with a conversion. Solomon R. Guggenheim, a Gilded Age mining magnate who collected old masters, met the artist Hilla von Rebay in 1926, and she turned him toward non-objective art, which she believed carried spiritual and utopian power. He bought works by Wassily Kandinsky in bulk and showed them in his apartment at the Plaza Hotel, then in 1939 opened the M...

In the late 1930s, archaeologists digging under a toppled stone at Avebury in Wiltshire found a crushed skeleton with a leather pouch holding three silver coins from the 1320s, iron scissors, and a lancet: a medieval traveling barber surgeon killed while helping bury one of the stones. Avebury is the largest megalithic stone circle in the world, so large that a village with a pub, thatched cottage...

In 356 BCE, on the same night ancient historians claim Alexander the Great was born, a man named Herostratus set fire to the wooden roof of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, near modern Selçuk in Turkey. The temple was said to be twice the size of the Parthenon and took 120 years to build, and the heat of the collapsing roof turned its marble to chalky powder through calcination. Almost nothing is...

The Temple of Heaven in Beijing was built in 1420 by the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty, the same ruler who built the Forbidden City, and renamed in 1534 by the Jiajing Emperor. It was the stage for a terrifying ritual: at the winter solstice the emperor, as the Son of Heaven, prayed for a good harvest, and a single stumble or dropped jade tablet was believed to doom the nation to famine. Befo...

In 1955 the New South Wales government launched an international competition for an opera house on Bennelong Point, pushed by Eugene Goossens, chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. It drew 233 entries from 32 countries. Danish architect Jørn Utzon submitted sketchy, diagrammatic drawings inspired by bird wings, clouds, walnut shells, and palm leaves, and the judges' own reports called...

Friedensreich Hundertwasser was born Friedrich Stowasser in Vienna in 1928, with Jewish heritage on his mother's side. To survive the Nazi regime, he was baptized Catholic in 1935, drawing on his late father's background, and joined the Hitler Youth, marching in straight lines while hiding who he was. After the war he lasted three months at Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts, then traveled Europe and N...

Zaha Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950 to an industrialist and politician father who served as Iraq's finance minister and an artist mother. Family trips to Sumerian ruins in southern Iraq, where sand, water, and mud brick seemed to flow together, shaped her lifelong interest in architecture that grows from the land. She studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, then in 1972 entere...

Shibam, a walled city in the Wadi Hadramaut of eastern Yemen, is called the Manhattan of the desert: about 7,000 residents live in roughly 500 mud brick tower blocks of 5 to 11 stories, the tallest over 98 feet. Walls several feet thick at the base taper as they rise, and date palm beams tie the floors together. The towers were packed tightly inside a fortified wall as a defense against Bedouin ra...

In December 1888 ranchers Richard Wetherill and his brother-in-law Charlie Mason, searching for stray cattle in southwestern Colorado, looked over a cliff edge and found Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America. The rock overhang had protected it for more than six centuries, leaving a stone axe with its wooden handle still bound and human remains in the open air. By March 1889 Wet...

Ulm Minster in southern Germany is often mistaken for a cathedral, but it was built by the town's own citizens. In the 14th century Ulm's parish church stood outside the city walls, exposed during a siege tied to Emperor Charles IV, and was controlled by the Reichenau monastery under an arrangement dating to Charlemagne in 813. The roughly 10,000 people of Ulm decided to fund a new church inside t...

Baalbek, in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley near the sources of the Litani and Orontes rivers, has been inhabited for eight to nine thousand years as an oasis on caravan routes from Tyre to Palmyra. Its Canaanite triad of Baal, Astarte, and Adon was absorbed after Alexander the Great's conquest in the 330s BC, when the city became Heliopolis, and later by Rome, which merged Baal-Hadad with Helios and Jupit...

In the mid 2000s Singapore offered two 30 year casino licenses for integrated resorts, where casinos had to fund convention centers, theaters, museums, and retail. The government fixed the Marina Bay land price at 1.2 billion Singapore dollars so bidders competed on design, and Las Vegas Sands won in 2006 with architect Moshe Safdie. The budget grew from 3.85 billion to 8 billion Singapore dollars...

Itsukushima, or Miyajima, in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan, was treated as a living god: an island dedicated to the three Munakata goddesses, daughters of the storm god Susanoo, beneath the 1,700 foot Mount Misen. To keep it pure, commoners were long banned, burials were forbidden, and pregnant, elderly, and dying residents had to leave for the mainland. A shrine existed earlier, with a first torii...

The Ishtar Gate was the eighth gate into the inner city of Babylon, built under King Nebuchadnezzar II in the 6th century BC. The double gate stood about 15 meters high on foundations sunk another 14 meters into the water table and sealed with bitumen. Its bricks were molded in relief, bisque fired, then coated in a cobalt frit glaze to imitate lapis lazuli, the stone that forms the goddess Inanna...

Milan Cathedral, the Duomo di Milano, was begun in 1386 under Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who needed a public win after the brutal rule of his predecessor Bernabò Visconti and whose family had moved its court to Pavia. The cathedral holds 40,000 people, has the highest completed Gothic vaults of any church, and is faced in Candoglia marble. When Visconti tried to make it his family mausoleum, the Fabb...

In 1969 Sears, then employing about 350,000 people, needed a single headquarters for 7,000 Chicago staff. Rejecting a suburban campus, the company had the law firm Arnstein, Gluck, Weitzenfeld & Minow quietly assemble a site on the western edge of the Loop using 90 day option contracts, securing 15 buildings from a block with over 100 owners, then paid the city 2.7 million dollars to close a b...

The so-called Obelisk of Axum is not an obelisk but a fourth century stele: a 24 meter, 160 ton block of phonolite, the sounding stone, carved with false doors, imitation locks, and rows of false windows like a multi-story building. In the kingdom of Aksum, in what is now Ethiopia, such steles marked royal catacombs, until King Ezana, taught by his tutor Frumentius, made Christianity the state rel...

Ise Shrine in Ise City, Mie Prefecture, is the holiest site in Shinto: a network of 125 shrines anchored by Naiku, the inner shrine, and Geku, the outer shrine, about six kilometers apart. According to the Nihon Shoki, the princess Yamato-hime no Mikoto wandered for 20 years seeking a home for the sun goddess Amaterasu before hearing her voice at Ise. Geku was founded after Emperor Yuryaku dreamed...

Prambanan, the Hindu temple compound in central Java, Indonesia, was inaugurated in 856 CE under King Lokapala as the Sanjaya dynasty reasserted power over the Buddhist Sailendra dynasty, builders of Borobudur and Sewu. Its 47 meter Shiva temple marked a shift in court patronage back to Shaivite Hinduism. The Shivagrha inscription of 856 records that the builders, fearing lahars from Mount Merapi,...

In 1199, on the ruins of Lal Kot, the citadel of Dilika, Qutbuddin Aybak began the Qutb Minar after the defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan, the last Hindu ruler of Delhi. Aybak was a deputy of the Ghurids, a nomadic clan from the mountains of western Afghanistan that unified, embraced Islam, and conquered Delhi by 1193. With Muslim communities fleeing the Mongols and moving east into India, the 72.5 met...

Habitat 67 began as Moshe Safdie's master's thesis at McGill University's School of Architecture, a stack of interlocking cubes modeled with Lego that failed to win the Pilkington Prize. After a stint with Louis Kahn in Philadelphia, his former thesis advisor Sandy van Ginkel brought him back to plan Expo 67, the Montreal World's Fair themed Man and His World. Safdie pitched the thesis as a pavili...

Mont-Saint-Michel began about 525 million years ago as Cambrian magma cooling into hard leucogranite, left as a 92 meter spike when softer rock eroded. Its bay off Normandy has tides of 14 meters, about 46 feet, that Victor Hugo said came in like a galloping horse, leaving quicksand at low water and earning the name Saint Michael in peril of the sea. Legend says that in 708 the Archangel Michael t...