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Meteora, meaning lofty or elevated, is a group of Eastern Orthodox monasteries on sandstone and conglomerate pillars up to 550 meters high in Thessaly, Greece. The rock formed about 60 million years ago in the Paleogene as streams dumped sediment into a lake delta, then tectonic uplift cracked the plateau and erosion cut along the faults. Nearby Theopetra Cave holds 50,000 years of human habitatio...

The Sassi di Matera sit in the Basilicata region of southern Italy, on the Murgia plateau near Apulia, where the Gravina River carved a deep ravine the locals call La Gravina. The name sasso comes from the Latin saxum, a rock or great stone, and the two ancient districts, the Sasso Caveoso and the Sasso Barisano, are dug directly into the ravine wall. The stone, locally called tufo, is actually ca...

A 2021 study of old maps and documents suggests the site was originally called Huayna Picchu or just Picchu. Hiram Bingham III, leading the Yale Peruvian Expedition in search of Vilcabamba or Vitcos, reached it on July 24, 1911, guided by farmer and innkeeper Melchor Arteaga. At the top he found two Quechua families farming the terraces, and an 11-year-old boy named Pablito showed him around. On t...

20 Fenchurch Street replaced a 1968 tower that had to be dismantled from the top down in the dense City of London. Developers Land Securities and Canary Wharf Group hired architect Rafael Viñoly, whose design widened toward the top, maximizing the high-rent upper floors on a small footprint and earning the nickname the Walkie Talkie. Heritage groups feared for protected views of St Paul's and the...

In 1072 the Norman bishop Remigius de Fécamp moved his seat to Lincoln and raised a massive church to project Norman power over a diocese stretching from the Thames to the Humber. He finished it in 1092 but died on May 7, two days before its consecration. Fire destroyed the timber roof in 1124, and in 1185 an earthquake estimated at magnitude 5 or more split the building from top to bottom. Bishop...

In central Scotland the Forth and Clyde Canal and the Union Canal sit 35 meters apart in height. Boats once crossed through an 11-lock flight that used about 3,500 tons of water per trip and took most of a day. Road and rail made it obsolete, the locks were dismantled in 1933, and parts of the Union Canal were filled in and piped under housing. The 78 million pound Millennium Link set out to recon...

In the winter of 1850 a storm stripped the grass from a hillside above the Bay of Skaill in Scotland and exposed stone houses with beds, shelves, and hearths. Skara Brae, occupied from about 3180 to 2500 BC, predates the Egyptian pyramids and is considered Europe's most complete Neolithic village. The laird William Graham Watt dug out four houses before giving up in 1868, looters struck over a wee...

Before it was suburbia, this stretch of Long Island was called Jerusalem in the 1600s and later Island Trees, farmed for potatoes and onions after the railroad arrived in 1837. Levitt & Sons, founded in 1929 by Abraham Levitt, built slow custom homes until William Levitt, born in 1907, returned from the Navy Seabees with a method for mass-producing buildings from uniform parts. With his archit...

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was born in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in the region known as Watch Valley, to a piano teacher mother and a father who enameled watch dials. With no formal architectural training and an early horror of the profession, he was pushed toward building by his art teacher Charles L'Eplattenier, who took him hiking in the Jura Mountains. His first house, built at 18...

Chand Baori sits in the village of Abhaneri in Rajasthan, India, and dates to the 8th and 9th centuries under Raja Chanda of the local Nikumbha dynasty. It drops 30 meters, about 100 feet or 13 stories, into the ground as an inverted pyramid of some 3,500 narrow steps in symmetrical double flights on three sides. The terraces act as retaining walls against the surrounding earth and let hundreds of...

In April 1819 a British cavalry officer named John Smith, out hunting tigers in Maharashtra, followed a local shepherd boy into a remote U-shaped gorge and found painted faces staring down from a vaulted ceiling. The local Bhil people already knew the site. Smith climbed a five foot mound of debris and scratched his name across a painted Buddhist figure, so after later excavation his graffiti now...

I. M. Pei was born in China in 1917 and grew up among his family's classical gardens in Suzhou, spaces built to steer how people move and feel. His mother died of cancer when he was 13, after he had prepared the opium pipes prescribed for her pain, and his banker father withdrew into work. In 1935 he left for America, drawn partly by Bing Crosby films about carefree college life, and clashed with...

The inscription on the Pantheon's portico credits Marcus Agrippa, but his temple on the Campus Martius burned in 80 AD, Domitian's rebuild burned in 110 AD, and the domed building standing today went up under Trajan and Hadrian between 114 and 126 AD. Hadrian kept Agrippa's name to signal continuity with Augustus, a move that fooled even Cassius Dio. Inside, the floor to the oculus and the width o...

In 1406 the Yongle emperor of the Ming dynasty moved China's capital from Nanjing to Beijing and ordered a new palace that took 14 years and more than a million workers to build. Its name, the Purple Forbidden City, tied the emperor's home to the North Star, the Ziwei Star, seat of the Jade Emperor. Builders dragged Phoebe zhennan logs out of malaria-ridden jungles in southwestern China and paved...

In September 1812 Napoleon's retreating troops rigged the Alhambra with explosives and blew up eight towers before a Spanish soldier, José García, cut the remaining fuses. The name comes from the Arabic for the red one, after walls of rammed earth made from iron-rich clay. The hill held Roman, Visigothic, and ninth century military works before Muhammad I, founder of the Nasrid dynasty, made it hi...

Pisa's bell tower started with a widow, Donna Berta di Bernardo, who left 60 soldi in her will in 1172 for its first stones. Construction began in August 1173 on a foundation just three meters deep, set in soft clay, sand, and shells, and by 1178 the tower was sinking at the second floor. Wars with Genoa, Lucca, and Florence then halted work for nearly a century, which gave the soil time to compre...

In 1812 the Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, disguised as a local and leading a goat to sacrifice at the tomb of Aaron, walked through the narrow Siq and into Petra. The basin gets only about 7.6 inches of rain a year, yet it was settled by Neolithic farmers at Beidha around 7000 BC and later by the Edomites. In the fourth century BC the Nabataeans, a nomadic Arab tribe, made it their city...

Around 1264 BC Ramesses II had two temples cut into a sandstone cliff in Nubia at the second Nile cataract, a statement of power over a region rich in gold and ivory. The Great Temple's facade holds four seated statues of the pharaoh, each 66 feet tall, with his family carved no higher than his knees. Its axis was set so that twice a year, on dates recorded as October 22 and February 22, the risin...

The story starts in the Circus of Nero, where tradition holds the Apostle Peter was crucified upside down around 64 AD and buried in a simple plot on Vatican Hill. Constantine built Old St. Peter's over the grave in the fourth century, and by the 15th century its walls were leaning. In 1505 Pope Julius II decided to demolish it for a new church big enough for the tomb he had commissioned from Mich...

The tower began in 1884 as a sketch by two engineers at Gustave Eiffel's firm, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, for the 1889 World's Fair marking the centennial of the French Revolution. Architect Stephen Sauvestre added the arches and glass pavilion, and Eiffel bought the patent and put up half the capital. One financier, the bank CIC, was profiting from loans tied to an indemnity imposed on...

The CN Tower was built for television, not tourists. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, new glass skyscrapers like First Canadian Place blocked the rooftop microwave links Toronto relied on and bounced broadcast signals into ghosting and static. The Canadian National Railway set out to build a communication hub taller than anything in the city. Construction began in February 1973 with 56,000 tons...

In 1910 Frank W. Woolworth, rich from his five and ten cent stores, planned an ordinary 12 to 16 story headquarters in lower Manhattan. Then on a trip to Europe, people kept asking him about the Singer Building instead of his stores, and his plans exploded to 30, then 45 stories, with a minimum height of 750 feet. His architect Cass Gilbert pushed it to 792 feet and 60 stories so the tower would n...

In the early 1900s, Pennsylvania Railroad passengers bound for Manhattan had to stop in New Jersey and cross the Hudson by ferry. Railroad president Alexander Cassatt, inspired by electric locomotives at the Gare d'Orsay in Paris, drove tunnels under the Hudson and East Rivers and claimed an eight acre site from 7th to 8th Avenues and 31st to 33rd Streets, condemning 17 city buildings and buying o...

Tikal, known to the Maya as Yax Mutal, grew to as many as 90,000 people in the Guatemalan rainforest with no river, lake, or accessible groundwater. Its builders plastered their limestone quarries into waterproof reservoirs and paved the plazas at slight gradients so every rainstorm drained into them. They kept the water drinkable with dot-leaf water lilies and, at the Corriental Reservoir, filtra...

In the Charanandri Hills of Maharashtra, artisans spent roughly 600 to 1000 CE carving more than a hundred temples and monasteries into a basalt cliff left by the volcanic Deccan Traps, with Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain monuments side by side. Nothing was built up; everything was cut away. The Kalachuri builders centered Cave 29 on the Velaganga waterfall so monsoon water pours over a carving of Shiv...