World Architecture

1. Benin, Africa The Royal Palaces of Abomey in the West African Republic of Benin formerly the Kingdom of Dahomey, on the Gulf of Guinea, are a substantial reminder of a vanished kingdom. From 1625 to 1900 Abomey was ruled by a succession of twelve kings. With the exception of Akaba, who created a separate enclosure, each built a lavish cob-wall palace with a high, wide-eaved thatched roof in the 190-acre 44-hectare royal grounds, surrounded by .....

Afsluitdijk

2. The Netherlands The 20-mile-long 32-kilometer Afsluitdijk literally,closing-off dike, constructed from 1927 to 1932 between Wieringen now Den Oever and the west coast of Friesland, enabled the resourceful Dutch to turn the saltwater Zuider Zee South Sea into the freshwater IJsselmeer and eventually to create an entire new province, Flevoland. Like their successful responses to similar challenges before and since, it was an audacious and farsi .....

Airplane hangars

3. Orvieto, ItalyThe Italian engineer and architect Pier Luigi Nervi 1891?1979 was among the most innovative builders of the twentieth century and a pioneer in the application of reinforced concrete. In 1932 he produced some unrealized designs for circular aircraft hangars in steel and reinforced concrete that heralded the remarkable hangars he built for the Italian Air Force at Orvieto. None have survived but they are well documented: more than en .....

Airship hangars

4. Orly, FranceThe French dominated the early history of human flight. In September 1783 the Montgolfier brothers launched a hot-air balloon carrying farm animals to show that it was safe to travel in the sky, and a few weeks later Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis dArlandes took to the air for a 5.5-mile 9kilometer trip over Paris. In 1852 another Frenchman, the engineer Henri Giffard, built the first successful airshipa steam-powered, 143-foot-l .....

Akashi Kaikyo Bridge

5. Kobe, Japan The graceful Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge, linking Kobe City and Awajishima Island across the deep straits at the entrance to Osaka Bay, was opened to traffic on 5 April 1998. Exploiting state-of-the-art technology, it formed the longest part of the bridge route between Kobe and Naruto in the Tokushima Prefecture, completing the expressway that connects the islands of Honshu and Shikoku. With a main span of 1.25 miles 1.99 kilometers and .....

Alberobello trulli

6. ItalyThe Murgia dei Trulli, with its communes of Martina Franca, Locorotondo, Cisternino, and Alberobello, is located in the Apulian interior at the upper part of the heel of Italy. Although trulli are scattered throughout the region, more than 1,500 of them are in the Monti and Aja Piccola quarters, on the western hill of Alberobello. This unique conical house form is significant in the history of architecture because it perpetuated well int .....

Alpine railroad tunnels

7. Switzerland Switzerlands governmentowned, 3,100-mile 5,000-kilometer railroad network is world renowned for its efficiency, despite the difficulties imposed by the mountainous terrain. Two of the four major rail links that pass through the small, landlocked country to connect northern Europe and Italy cross the 13,000-foot-high 4,000-meter Swiss Alps. That access was made possible only by the remarkable engineering feats embodied in the const .....

Amsterdam Central Station

8. The Netherlands Amsterdam Central Station is in fact geographically central in the city. Although it conformed to the general pattern of many metropolitan railroad stations before and after, it was an architectural and engineering achievement in that it was built on three artificial islands in the River IJ, supported by no fewer than 26,000 timber piles driven into the soft river bottom. That was a feat perhaps remarkable to the rest of the w .....

Angkor Wat

9. CambodiaAngkor Wat, a temple complex dedicated to the Hindu deity Vishnu, was built in the twelfth century A.D. in the ancient city of Angkor, 192 miles 310 kilometers northwest of Phnom Penh. It is probably the largest and, as many have claimed, the most beautiful religious monument ever constructed. Certainly it is the most famous of all Khmer temples. Angkor served as the capital of the Khmer Empire of Cambodia from a.d. 802 until 1295. Evid .....

Appian Way

10. Italy The Appian Way Via Appia, the oldest and perhaps most famous Roman road, was built by the Censor Appius Claudius Caecus in 312 b.c. Enlarging a track between Rome and the Alban Hills and forming the main route to Greece and the eastern colonies, this so-called queen of roads regina viarumeters ran south from the Porta Capena in Romes Servian Wall to Capua. It passed through the Appii Forum to the coastal town of Anxur now Terracina, 60 .....

Archigram

11. The Archigram group was established in 1961 by a few young British architectsunited by common interests and antipathies. Its founders were Peter Cook, Michael Webb, and David Greene, who were soon joined by Dennis Crompton, Ron Herron, and Warren Chalk. Archigrams international impactits architectural feat, so to speakwas significant. Other architects would give form to its notions. The Centre Pompidou, Paris, by Renzo Piano and Richard Roger .....

Artemiseion

12. Ephesus, Turkey The Artemiseion, a huge Ionic temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis, stood in the city of Ephesus on the Aegean coast of what was then Asia, near the modern town of Selcuk, about 30 miles 50 kilometers south of Izmir, Turkey. The splendid building was acclaimed as one of the seven wonders of the world, as attested by Antipater of Sidon:When I saw the sacred house of Artemis 1/4 the [other wonders] were placed in the shade, f .....

Aswan High Dam

13. EgyptThe Aswan High Dam, replacing earlier dams, contains the River Nile nearly 600 miles 1,000 kilometers upstream from Cairo by a massive embankment 375 feet 114 meters high and 3,280 feet 1,003 meters long, built of earth and rock fill with a clay and concrete core. It impounds Lake Nasser, one of the largest reservoirs in the world, covering an area more than 300 miles 480 kilometers long and 10 miles 16 kilometers wide, that holds enough .....

Avebury Stone Circle

14. EnglandThe Avebury Stone Circle, covering around 28 acres 11 hectares, is the largest known stone circle in the world. It partly embraces the linear village of Avebury, 90 miles 145 kilometers west of London in a part of England that is replete with prehistoric remains: Silbury Hill: the Sanctuary and the long barrows of East Kennet, West Kennet, and Beckhampton. John Aubury, who accidentally discovered if while foxhunting in the winter of 16 .....

Babylon Nebuchadnezzars city

15. IraqThe city of Babylon Gate of God once stood on the banks of the Euphrates River, 56 miles 90 kilometers south of Baghdad, Iraq. It was the capital of Babylonia in the second and first millennia b.c. In a.d. 1897 the German archeologist Robert Koldewey commenced a major excavation. During the next twenty years he unearthed, among many other structures, a processional avenue to the temple of Marduk and the legendary fortified city wall, whi .....

Banaue rice terraces

16. Ifugao Province, PhilippinesIn the Banaue municipality of the northern Ifugao Province on the Philippine island of Luzon, the indigenous Igorot people have constructed 49,500 acres 20,000 hectares of agricultural land upon the inhospitable bedrock of the steep Cordillera Central Mountain Range. For millennia, succeeding generations of farmers built and maintained 12,500 miles 20,000 kilometers of dikes and retaining wallsenough to stretch halfw .....

BART Bay Area Rapid Transit

17. San Francisco, California BART Bay Area Rapid Transit is a 95-mile 152-kilometer automated rapid-transit system, the first of thenew generation of such systems in the United States. By the end of the twentieth century there were thirteen in operation, including Washington, D.C. opened 1976, Atlanta 1979, and Miami 1986. BART has thirty-nine stations on five lines radiating out from San Francisco to serve Contra Costa and Alameda Counties in t .....

Baths of Caracalla

18. Rome, ItalyThe Baths of Caracalla Thermae Antoninianae were built between a.d. 212 and 216 by the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus a.d. 188 217, usually known as Caracalla. Although in layout the Baths of Caracalla largely emulated the model established about a century before in the Baths of Trajan, their massive scale and opulent internal finishes were without precedent. Their fully integrated plan and imposing scale and grandeur amply demo .....

The Bauhaus

19. GermanyThe German design school known as the Bauhaus literally, house of building, that functioned between 1919 and 1932, laid the foundation of a different kind of architectural education, one that was eventually adopted throughout the world. It restored the links between design and making that had been undermined during the Renaissance and virtually destroyed by the European academies. Much of the Bauhauss significance lies in the fact that .....

Bedouin tents

20. Middle EastThere are only three essential structural systems in architecture: the post and beam trabeated, the arch and its extensions arcuated, and those that employ stretched filaments and membranes tensile. Because durable tensile materials like steel and reinforced concrete were not developed until after 1865, and synthetic membranes, like fiberglass-Teflon laminate and Kevlar, until more than a century later, tensile technology was limit .....

Beijing Hangzhou Canal

21. China The Grand Canal Chinese, Da Yunhe in China is the worlds longest artificial waterway and the oldest canal still in existence. The 1,121-mile-long 1,794-kilometer series of linked channels extends from Hangzhou on the southeast coast to the capital, Beijing, in the north. As an engineering achievement of the ancient Chinese, the canal compares with the more familiar Great Wall. It passes through twenty-four sophisticated locks and is cro .....

Borobudur Temple

22. Indonesia Borobudur Temple stands on the plain of Kedu, about 25 miles 40 kilometers northwest of the modern city of Yogyakarta on the Indonesian island of Java. Its name is derived from Hhumtcambharabudara the mountain of the accumulation of virtue in the ten stages of Bodhisatva. Crowning a 150-foot 46-meter hill, this largest of all Buddhist buildings is a masterpiece of religious architecture. One of the worlds best-preserved ancient monu .....

Braslia

23. Brazil Braslia, the inland capital of Brazil, stands in a largely isolated region nearly 750 miles 1.200 kilometers northwest of Rio de Janeiro. The design and construction of the city in such a remote place, uninhabited before 1956, was a major logistical achievement in planning and urban design. Conceived on the scale and in the grand manner of LEnfants Washington, D.C., of 1789?1791, it followed in the tradition of such cities as New Delhi .....

Bricks

24. The Indus valley The humble brick literally shaped the face of world architecture. The Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, and Indus River valleys were the locations of what has been calledthe urban implosion, the sudden emergence of cities from the neolithic villages that lined the waterways. The alluvial expanses on whose agricultural produce the new urban centers burgeoned had little naturally occurring stone, so the city walls, the buildings within, .....

Brihadisvara Temple

25. Thanjavur, India The so-called Big Temple, the Brihadisvara at Thanjavur Tanjore in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, was built between a.d. 1003 and 1010. It is the epitome of Dravidian temple architecture and a wonderful gallery of South Indian art and craft. Vijayalaya Cholan a.d. 846 871, founder of the Chola dynasty, chose the well-established settlement beside the River Kaveri as his capital, and for four centuries Chola influence on Indi .....

Brooklyn Bridge

26. New York City, New YorkWhen it was opened on 24 May 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge, joining the boroughs of urban Manhattan and semirural Brooklyn across New Yorks East River, was the longest suspension bridge in the worldtwice as long as any previously built. More significantly, it was the first structure of its kind to be supported by cables of galvanized steel wire instead of the usual iron. From the early seventeenth century through most of t .....

Cahokia mounds

27. Illinois At a time when settlements in the Americas rarely exceeded 400 or 500 inhabitants, the Native American center of Cahokia was as large as contemporary London, a size that no other city in the United States would attain until the nineteenth century. The well-organized aggregation of mounds and residential districts had a population estimated at 10,000 to 30,000some sources claim 40,000. Cahokias distinctive earth mounds there were 120 of .....

Canal system

28. England The creation of Englands inland water-transport network during the 1700s was among the most important contributors to the Industrial Revolution. In the second half of the century, manufacturing, already transformed by entrepreneurial labor management, was shifting from cottage industry to factories, where machines mass-produced goods. A cheap, efficient transport infrastructure was vital to gather raw materials and distribute products. B .....

Cappadocia underground cities

29. Turkey Cappadocia, a region of central Anatolia in Turkey, lies within the triangle of Nevsehir, Aksaray, and Kayseri. It is bounded by the now dormant Mount Erciyes in the east and Mount Hasandag in the south. Prehistoric eruptions of these volcanoes blanketed a wide area with a 1,500-foot 450-meter layer of ash and detritus. The hardening tufa was carved by nature into thousands of distinctive pyramidal rock formations known asfairy chimneys, .....

Central Artery Tunnel

30. Boston, Massachusetts Toward the end of the twentieth century, Boston had traffic problems as severe as any city in the world. When the elevated six-lane Central Artery Highway, which ran through the downtown area, was opened in 1959, it quite easily coped with 75,000 vehicles a day by the early 1990s the traffic load had increased to 190,000effectively more cars per lane than any other urban interstate road in the United States. Movement was sl .....

Chandigarh

31. Punjab, India When India won independence from the British in 1947, Pakistan and India were partitioned. The Punjab was divided and its capital, Lahore, was lost to Pakistan. Soon, East Punjabs population was quickly doubled by the flood of refugees from Pakistan. In March 1948 the provincial government, in consultation with the Indian central government and the enthusiastic support of Prime Minister Pandit Nehru, approved a new 45-square-mile 1 .....

Channel Tunnel

32. England and FranceThe English Channel, known, to the French as la Manche the Sleeve, is a narrow strip of the Atlantic Ocean that separates England from the rest of Europe. It is at its narrowest at the hazardous Dover Strait, notorious for its strong tides, dense fogs, and frequent gale-force winds. The Channel Tunnel popularly calledthe Chunnelprovides a railroad connection between Britain and France under the Dover Strait and is one of the mos .....

Charlemagnes Palatine Chapel

33. Aachen, Germany The city of Aachen stands 40 miles 64 kilometers southwest of Cologne on the River Wurm, a tributary of the Roer, in the German stare of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Romans knew the place as Aquisgranum, famous for its health spas since the first century a.d. The Merovingian kings, who ruled the Franks from a.d. 481 to 751, held court there, but the town enjoyed great eminence during the Carolingian dynasty, especially under Charl .....

Chartres Cathedral Cathedral of the Assumption of Our Lady

34. France Chartres, capital of Frances Department of Eure-et-Loir, stands on the Eure River, about 60 miles 100 kilometers southwest of Paris. An important center in pre-Roman Gaul, it was one of the sacred places of the Druids. Overrun by the Normans, the region later settled down, and late in the thirteenth century it became the appanage of Charles de Valois, who was briefly 1284 1290 king of Aragon and Sicily. Fran .....

Chek Lap Kok International Airport

35. Hong Kong Hong Kongs new international airport at Chek Lap Kok is the product of what was at the time the worlds largest engineering and architectural projecta logistical marvel that developed designs in only twentyone months and managed a workforce of up to 21,000 to build the airport facilities as well as the island on which they stand and the extensive ground transport links, in only five years. In 1999, a convention of U.S. construction exec .....

Chin Shi Huangdis tomb

36. Xian, China In 1974, peasants digging a well in a field about 25 miles 40 kilometers east of Xian unearthed pits containing thousands of life-size, carefully detailed terra-cotta warriors, horses, and chariots. The soldiers were poised to defend the tomb of Chin Shi Huangdi 259 210 b.c.. Among the greatest archeological finds of the twentieth century, the ceramic army is but a small part of the great funerary monumenta necropolis with huge under .....

CIAM International Congresses of Modern Architecture

37. Founded in 1928, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture in French, Congres Internationaux dArchitecture ModerneCIAM was the chief propagandist of avant-garde notions of architecture and urbanismthe voice of the Modern Movementfrom 1930 to 1934 and again from 1950 to 1955. CIAM contended that architecture was inextricably linked with politics and economics and encouraged architects to turn from purely artistic endeavors to engage in s .....

Circus Maximus

38. Rome, Italy The Circus Maximus stood in the Murcia Valley, between the Palatine and the Aventine Hills, the largest and oldest of the four chariot-racing tracks in ancient Rome. It was extended under various administrations until the time of Julius Caesar 100 44 b.c.. His alterations, and those ordered by his nephew, the emperor Augustus reigned 27 b.c. a.d. 14, created a building about 2,035 feet long by 460 wide 620 by 140 meters, with an aren .....

Clifton Suspension Bridge

39. Bristol, England The River Avon rises in the Cotswolds and falls about 500 feet 150 meters in its 75-mile 120-kilometer course to the Severn Estuary at Avonmouth. Near Bristol it passes through a channel that was cut in the nineteenth century to give access to oceangoing vessels, and then through the steep Clifton Gorge, where it is daringly crossed by the Clifton Suspension Bridge, 245 feet 75 meters above the water. The iron structure, with a .....

Cluny Abbey Church III

40. France The town of Cluny in eastern Frances Burgundy region was important because of the Benedictine abbey jointly founded in 910 by Abbot St. Berno of Burgundy and William the Pious, Duke of Aquitaine. The third convent on the site, the great Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul known as Cluny III mainly 1088 1130, was the largest church, monastic or otherwise, in the world until St. Peters, Rome, was completed in the seventeenth century. Cluny I .....

CN Canadian National Tower

41. Toronto, Canada The CN Tower, next to the city hall on Front Street, Toronto, stands on the shore of Lake Ontario. It transmits television and FM radio for more than twenty broadcasters, as well as serving various other communications purposes. Including the masts, it is the tallest freestanding structure in the world the top of the transmission antenna is over 1,815 feet 553 meters high. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as tech .....

Colosseum Flavian Amphitheater

42. Rome The Flavian Amphitheater, now in ruins, towers over the southeast end of the Roman Forum, between the Esquiline and Palatine Hills. Its popular name, the Colosseum, was derived from the nearby colossal 120-foot-high, or 37.2-meter bronze statue of Nero, long since vanished. The most ambitious example of a new building type associated with urbanization, the Colosseum was an architectural feat, even by Roman standards. Its size is awesome, bu .....

Colossus Bridge Schuylkill River

43. Pennsylvania The Upper Ferry bridge built at Fairmount near Philadelphia in 1812 and tragically destroyed by fire in 1838 was the longest single-trussed wooden arch in the United States, spanning over 340 feet 102 meters. It caused a sensation in its day and was inevitably labeled a newwonder of the world,the Colossus at Philadelphia, andthe Colossus at Fairmount. This covered bridge, responding to new constraints, took timber engineering to its .....

Colossus of Rhodes

44. Greece One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the huge statue of the pre-Olympian sun god Helios stood at the entrance to the harbor of Rhodes on the Aegean island of the same name. The work of the celebrated sculptor Chares of Lindos, the giant figure, shown in some representations to be shielding his eyes as he looked out across the sea, towered 110 feet 33 meters above the entrance to the Mandraki harbor. According to Greek mythology, .....

Confederation Bridge Prince Edward Island

45. Canada The 8-mile-long 12.9-kilometer Confederation Bridge, which crosses the Northumberland Strait between Jourimain Island, New Brunswick, and Borden-Carleton on Prince Edward Island, is the longest bridge over ice-covered water in the world. Its daring conception, the quality of its engineering, and the logistics of its realization are among the factors that make it one of the great constructional feats of the twentieth century. The project i .....

Coop Himmelblau

46. Themaverick Viennese partnership Co .....

Crystal Palace

47. London, England The Crystal Palace, a vast demountable building designed by Joseph Paxton for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, London, was in many ways crucial in the development of architecture: it was the pinnacle of innovative metal structure, it revealed the exciting potential of efficient prefabrication, and it was an early demonstration of the modern doctrine that beauty can exist in the clear expression of materials and function .....

Curtain walls

48. Traditionally, the wall of a building served both structural and environmental purposes. That is, it carried to the ground the weight of the building and its contents and, while admitting air and light through openings, protected the interior from extremes of weather, noise, and other undesirable intrusions. The introduction of structures in which the loads are carried by beams and columns liberated the wall from load bearing, allowing it to func .....

De Re Aedificatora

49. Leon Battista Albertis theoretical treatise on architecture, titled De Re Aedificatoria About Buildings, was dedicated in 1452 but not published until 1485. What qualifies it as an architectural feat? It changed the understanding and practice of architecture in much of Europe and continued to influence developments there and in the New World for about 400 years. Although he was gathering the ideas for the book, Alberti 1404 1472 was not an archit .....

De Stijl

50. Founded in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1916, the group known as De Stijl was Europes most important theoretical movement in art and architecture until the mid-1920s, when leadership passed to Germany. In 1916 the architect J. J. P. Oud met the critic and painter Theo van Doesburg and soon introduced him to another young architect, Jan Wils. First forming De Sphinx artists club in Leiden, the three founded, with the railwayman-philosopher Anthony .....

Deal Castle

51. Kent, England Deal Castle, built in 1539 1540 to stand guard over the town of the same name on the Kent coast of southeast England, is a fine example of a new building type, created in response to major changes in politics and the technology of warfare. With others at Walmer and Sandown, it epitomized Henry VIIIs new forts by its assured and concentrated use of the design elements common to all. Deal is the largest, most impressive, and most c .....

Deltaworks

52. The Netherlands The Deltaworks comprises a series of audacious engineering projects that effectively shorten the coastline of the southwest Netherlands by about 440 miles 700 kilometers, seal outlets to the sea, and reinforce the countrys water defenses. Taking more than forty years to complete, the works involved the construction of huge primary dams totaling 20 miles 30 kilometers in length, in four sea inlets between the Western Scheldt and t .....

Ditherington Flax Mill

53. Shrewsbury, England The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a new building type: the factory, where a managed workforce could operate machines that were driven by steam power. The advent of machines also created a demand for iron to be produced on a large scale in addition to being used to build machines, it soon became apparent that iron could be used to construct industrial buildings. The forerunner was the prefabricated cast-iron bridge at Coa .....

Dome of the Rock Qubbat As Sakhrah

54. Jerusalem, Israel Jerusalem is a city holy to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At its center, the rocky outcrop known as Mount Moriah was the site of three successive Jewish temples, then a sanctuary of the Roman god Jupiter, before it was capped by the Arabic Dome of the Rock, which was for a short while Islams most important sacred site. During the Crusades it was commandeered as a Christian shrine before returning to Islamic hands. Today it .....

Dover Castle

55. Kent, England The science of medieval warfare and the design of castle architecture developed side by side until the latter reached its highest degree of sophistication in the almost impregnable concentric castle, exemplified in the royal castle at Dover, known as thekey of England, the first castle of its kind in western Europe. On a clear day the French coast, 21 miles 37 kilometers across the English Channel, can be seen from the ramparts abo .....

Durham Cathedral

56. England Durham Cathedral, built principally between 1093 and 1133 to house the relics of the Northumbrian evangelist St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne and the Venerable Bede, is the finest example of Early Norman architecture in England. Its significance in the development of Western architecture lies in the use of rib-and-panel vaulting, the pointed arch, and flying buttresses in the gallery roofsall prophetic of the elegant structural system that we .....

Eames House

57. Pacific Palisades, California The architect Charles Ormand Eames 1907 1978 and his designer wife Ray Kaiser Eames 1912 1988 moved to southern California in 1941 into a new apartment building designed by Richard Neutra. Between 1945 and 1949 they designed and built their family home at Pacific Palisades. Known simply as the Eames House, the unconventional residence can be considered an architectural feat in that it was economically constructed en .....

Eiffel Tower

58. Paris, France The Eiffel Tower was built between 1887 and 1889 as the entrance arch to the International Paris Exhibition, held to celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution. Conceived in 1882 by Gustave Eiffels chief research engineers Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier, and constructed in collaboration with architect Stephan Suavestre, the tower is a graceful and imaginative puddled iron lattice pylon. It soars to 1,020 feet 312 meters, .....

Empire State Building

59. New York City For forty-one years from 1931, the Empire State Building was the tallest tower in the world. That distinction has since been wrested and rewrested by a series of successors. The 102-story building, covering its 2-acre 0.8-hectare Park Avenue site and soaring to 1,252 feet 417 meters, was completed in the incredibly short time of 1 year and 45 days in fact, the time from the decision to build to the letting of office space was only .....

Engineering Building

60. Leicester University, England The Scots architect James Frazer Stirling 1926 1992 formed a partnership with James Gowan b. 1923 in 1955 after winning a commission for a low-rise housing development in Ham Common, Middlesex 1955 1958. The design started a trend in England for broadly finished brick and exposed concrete. There followed a couple of domestic scale projects, and in July 1959 their more influential work: the Engineering Building at Le .....

English landscape gardens

61. Most of Englands apparently natural countryside is in fact contrived, the result of a revolutionary movement in garden design, the discipline first namedlandscape architecture by Humphry Repton 1752 1818. The English eighteenth-century landscape garden, which would be internationally imitated, was possibly Britains main contribution to European esthetics. Unlike traditional gardens, it was distinguished by asymmetry and informality. It incorporat .....

Erechtheion

62. Athens, Greece The Erechtheion, built on the site of ancient sanctuaries on the Athenian Acropolis, is so unlike every other Greek temple that some have dismissed it as an aberration. Rather, it is the result of its architect, probably Mnesikles, applying inventive skill to accommodate a complex web of religious relationships. The Erechtheion provides evidence that the craft tradition of architecture, hobbled by convention, was giving place to a .....

Erie Canal

63. New York State The 363-mile 585-kilometer Erie Canal between Lake Erie and the Hudson River, New York, was opened in 1825. Compared with earlier U.S. canal projects, common since about 1785 none was over 30 miles long, it was a colossal enterprise, incontrovertibly the greatest public works project in the young republic. Despite criticism at its inception, when complete it was acclaimed as the worlds greatest engineering marvel. But great engine .....

Fallingwater

64. Pennsylvania The architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater 1934 1937 for the Pittsburgh department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann and his wife Liliane, on Bear Run, Pennsylvania, in the mountains southeast of Pittsburgh. The spectacular house cantilevers over a 20-foot 6-meter waterfall amidst a wilderness. Widely admired for over sixty years, Fallingwater has been calledthe most famous residence ever built in 1991 the American Institute .....

Fera Thera

65. Santorini, Greece Feraa town where no town should beis an architectural feat for just that reason. It has been achieved largely without architects, and its builders have developed a remarkable symbiosis with their dangerous host, an active and restless volcano. Fera, a comparatively modern town of about 2,000, picturesquely clusters at the edge of a 900-foot 275-meter cliff above its harbor. It is the capital of Santorini, the 28-square-mile 73- .....

Firth of Forth Railway Bridge

66. Scotland Nine miles west of Edinburgh, Scotland, the mouth of the River Forth is spanned by Europes first all-steel, long-span bridge. Completed in 1890 it was then the longest bridge in the world. Until 1917 it was also the largest metal cantilever, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century it remains the second largest ever built. It was a major accomplishment of Victorian engineering. The extension of the railroad along Scotlands east .....

Florence Cathedral dome

67. Florence, Italy The dome of the cathedral church of Santa Maria del Fiore St. Mary of the Flowers in Florence, Italy, was designed and built by Filippo Brunelleschi 1377 1446 in the beginning of the fifteenth century. Towering over the immediately surrounding buildings and still visible, almost 600 years later, from any part of the city, it is one of Europes greatest architectural and engineering achievementsa masterpiece of structural ingenuity .....

Foundling Hospital

68. Florence, Italy The Foundling Hospital known in Italian as the Ospedale degli Innocenti stands in the Piazza SS. Annunziata, Florence. As its name indicates, it was a refuge for abandoned or orphaned children. Around 1419, over a century after the foundation of the institution, the powerful Guild of Silk Merchants and Goldsmiths Arte della Lana funded a new building to house refectories, dormitories, infirmaries, and nurseries, all joined with c .....

Frederick C Robie House

69. Chicago, Illinois When it was completed in June 1910, one neighbor described the Frederick C. Robie House as abattleship another said it was adisgrace. But in 1957 its architect Frank Lloyd Wright, never known for his modesty, accurately claimed it to be thecornerstone of modern architecture. Many critics agree, and the building has been recognized by the American Institute of Architects as one of Wrights major architectural contributions to the .....

Galerie des Machines Gallery of Machines

70. Paris, France The Galerie des Machines was designed for the 1889 Paris International ExhibitionLExposition Tricoloreeby architect Ferdinand Dutert 1845 1906 in collaboration with engineer Victor Contamin 1840 1893. It was remarkable for its vast exhibition hall, made possible by exploiting a new structural innovation, the three-pin hinged or portal arch. Although used previously in bridge construction, this was the first application of the arch .....

Garden city idea

71. The garden city idea was conceived in late-nineteenth-century Britain by London-born stenographer and inventor Ebenezer Howard 1850 1928. A garden city movement emerged, inspired by his seminal text Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform 1898, revised as Garden Cities of Tomorrow 1902, and by the example of on-the-ground models. The movement supported Howards objectives of improved residential environments and social opportunity. It made an end .....

Gateway Arch

72. St. Louis Missouri The 630-foot-high 192-meter stainless-steel Gateway Arch rises from a wooded park within what became the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Park on the bank of the Mississippi in St. Louis, Missouri. Taller than the Washington Monument in the national capital and twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, the sleek and seamless Gateway Arch now known as the St. Louis Arch is a major achievement of twentieth-century architectur .....

Geodesic domes

73. A geodesic dome is a fractional part of a geodesic sphere, composed of a complex network of triangles. The archetypal geodesic sphere is made up of twenty curved triangles, each corresponding to one facet of the icosahedron, a twenty-faceted solid geometrical figure. The more complex the network that is, the smaller the triangles, the more closely the form approximates a true sphere. Using triangles of varying size, a sphere can be symmetrically .....

German Pavilion

74. Barcelona, Spain The German Pavilion at the Barcelona Universal Exhibition of 1929, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is the first built expression of what he calledthe architecture of almost nothing. About a decade earlier he had designed projects for multistory tower blocks, crystal prisms whose uninterrupted glass skins enveloped slender steel frames. They were just ideas, but the Barcelona Pavilion, as it is popularly known, set a standa .....

Golden Gate Bridge

75. San Francisco, California When it opened to traffic in May 1937, San Franciscos Golden Gate Bridge boasted the longest single clear span in the world, a claim held true for twenty-seven years. The center span, at 4,200 feet 1,285 meters, was three times longer than the Brooklyn Bridge and 700 feet 214 meters longer than the recently completed George Washington Bridge in New York. Including the two side spans of 1,125 feet 344 meters and the 90-f .....

Grand Buddha

76. Leshan, China Dafo Grand Buddha, the worlds largest figure of Buddha, provides tacit testimony to the engineering skills of medieval Chinese civilization. It is carved from the Xiluo Peak of Mount Lingyun, facing the town of Leshan in the Sichuan Province of the Peoples Republic of China. Work began on the 229-foot-high 71-meter seated figure in a.d. 713 and took 90 years to complete.Comparisons may give an idea of the ambitious scope of the pro .....

Grand Coulee Dam

77. Washington State Commenced during the Great Depression, Washington States Grand Coulee Dam, on the Columbia River about 88 miles 142 kilometers west of Spokane, is a monument to engineering prowess and to the resolve of those people who for 23 years fought for its creation. The key to the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project, it provides the region with electric power, irrigation, and flood control and contributes to wildlife conservation. The Gran .....

La Grande Arche

78. Paris, France La Grande Arche is the paramount landmark, the crowning monument of Pariss Place de la Defense. It is the eastern terminus of the monumental Voie Triomphale Triumphal Way, extending from the Cour Carree of the Louvre through the Tuileries Gardens and down the Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe the axis then continues for almost 4 miles 6 kilometers along the Avenue de la Grande Armee and through La place de la Concorde to cross .....

Great Pyramid of Cheops

79. Giza, Egypt In the western suburbs of modern Cairo, 130 feet above the Nile, stands a 1-mile 1.6-kilometer square artificial rocky plateau called Giza El-Jizah by the Arabs. It is the site of three Fourth Dynasty pyramid tombsCheops, Chephrens, and Mycerinussnamed by the ancients among the seven wonders of the world. The largest of them, built at the command of Cheops, has been called aunique monument because of its internal disposition. While i .....

Great Wall of China

80. The largest man-made structure in the world, the Great Wall once stretched more than 4,500 miles 7,300 kilometers from the Jiayu Pass in Gansu Province in the west to the mouth of the Yalu River in Liaoning Province in the east. The ravages of time and vandalism have reduced it to 1,500 miles 2,400 kilometers. It has been called anengineering marvel of stone, earth and brick. From 475 to 221 b.c., there were seven warring states in Chou dynasty, .....

Great Zimbabwe

81. Republic of Zimbabwe, Africa The ruins of Great Zimbabwe Bantu forstone house stand about 17 miles 30 kilometers southeast of the modern provincial capital, Masvingo, and east of the Kalahari Desert between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers. They cover about 200 acres 80 hectares. The largest of about 300 such sites in the region, Great Zimbabwe was once the greatest city in sub-Saharan Africa. Misguided and racist Victoriansand others sincethought .....

Hadrians Wall

82. Northumberland, England The most audacious building project among many initiated by the Roman emperor Publius Aelius Hadrianus known as Hadrian was the defensive rampart across the entire width of Britain that marked the northern frontier of the Roman Empire for almost 300 years. Started in a.d. 123 Hadrians Wall was about 73 miles 118 kilometers long, stretching from what is now the town of Wallsend Roman Segedunum on the River Tyne in the east .....

Hagia Sofia

83. Istanbul, Turkey The great Church of the Holy Wisdom, known as Hagia Sofia or Sancta Sofia, in Istanbul, is the high point of Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture, remarkable for its revolutionary dynamic structural system and the ingenuity of a plan that subordinates liturgy to form. It was dedicated by the Byzantine emperor Justinian in December 537. Like many churches, it was built on the site of former sacred structures, some of which preda .....

Halles Centrales Central Markets

84. Paris, France Once described by novelist Emile Zola as theventre de Paris belly of Paris, Les Halles, situated in a square northeast of the Louvre, was the popular and vibrant market quarter. It was alive during the day with merchants and shoppers and at night with vehicles bringing produce from the French provinces and other Mediterranean countries, night butchers preparing meat for the next days business, and inquisitive patrons from nearby re .....

Hanging Gardens of Babylon

85. IraqThe ancient city of Babylon stood on the east bank of the Euphrates River about 30 miles 50 kilometers south of modern Baghdad. Philo of Byzantium, writing in the third century b.c., listed so-called Hanging Gardens among the seven wonders of the world. Tradition has it that the gardens were built by King Nebuchadnezzar II ruled ca. 605 561 b.c. for his wife Amytis, because she missed the mountainous landscape of her native Media. They may ha .....

Hezekiahs Tunnel

86. Jerusalem, Israel Hezekiahs Tunnel, an eighth-century-b.c. subterranean aqueduct in Jerusalem, was a magnificent engineering achievement. Teams of stonecutters, working no more than two abreast and using hand tools, cut the 1,730-foot 576-meter passageway of bedrock, probably in about seven months. Starting from both ends, between 33 and 150 feet 10 and 45 meters underground, without sophisticated surveying instruments or contact with the surfac .....

Hippodamos of Miletus

87. The fifth-century-b.c. Greek architect Hippodamos of Miletus has long been known as thefather of city planning. Although the claim has been challenged by some historians, his contribution at least in the West was the notion of ordered city planning, as opposed to the uncontrolled growth of earlier times. For example, fifth-century-b.c. Athens, the dominant Hellenic city, was an undisciplined accretion of houses lining crooked narrow streets and l .....

Hydraulic boat lifts

88. When inscribing the Canal du Centre boat lifts in Belgium on its World Heritage List in 1998, UNESCO commented that theyrepresented the apogee of the application of engineering technology to the construction of canals. That holds true for each example described here. The boat lifts exemplify the seemingly limitless mechanical ingenuity of the Victorian Age. The Industrial Revolution, first in Britain and then in the rest of Europe and North Ameri .....

Industrialized building

89. In the second half of the 1920s the modernist architects of Europe, perceiving an urgent need to reform city planning and especially public housing policies, sought to address the social changes resulting from industrialization. At a 1928 meeting at La Sarraz, Switzerland, architects from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, and Switzerland formed the Congres Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne CIAM, agreeing that rationalization a .....

Inka road system

90. PeruThe brief but glorious ascendancy of the Inka lasted for about sixty years from a.d. 1476. At that moment their empire, Tahuantinsuyu Land of the Four Quarters, was the largest nation on earth. Ruled from the Andean capital, Qosqo, it covered 2,000 miles 3,200 kilometers north to south and 200 miles 320 kilometers inland. The empires northern quarter, Chinchaysuyu, extended beyond what is now Colombia the southern quarter, Collasuyu, reached .....

Inuit snow houses

91. The Inuitthe real peopleof Alaska, Arctic-Canada, northeastern Siberia, and Greenland sometimes build shelters out of water, or at least water in one of its solid states, snow. The highly sophisticated design and construction of that kind of igloo the Inuit word for house is a major architectural achievement, employing a technology that turns a challenging resource to creating a not merely adequate but ideal house form. The oldest identifiable l .....

Ironbridge Coalbrookdale

92. Shropshire England Coalbrookdale is regarded by many as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. The town of Ironbridge on the eastern bank of the River Severn is the location of the worlds first metal bridge. Designed in 1775, the gracefully arching prefabricated cast-iron structure, appropriately named Ironbridge, was fixed to its masonry abutments in the summer of 1779. Spanning 100 feet 30 meters, the bridge supports itself without a bol .....

Itaipu Dam

93. Brazil Paraguay border South America Built between 1975 and 1991, the Itaip .....

Itsukushima Shinto shrine

94. Miyajima Japan Miyajima is a mountainous island in Hiroshima Bay on Japans Seto Inland Sea, separated from the mainland by the 550-yard-wide 500-meter Onoseto Strait. It has long been a sacred site of Shintoism, and renowned for the Itsukushima shrine, built on piles over the water and dedicated to three sea goddesses, Ichikishima-Hime-no-Mikoto, Tagori -Hime, and Tagitsu-Hime. The entire precinct comprises an inner shrine of thirty-seven axial .....

Jahrhunderthalle

95. Breslau Germany The Jahrhunderthalle Centennial Hall of 1911 1912 in what was formerly the city of Breslau in Germany now Wroclaw, Poland was a major milestone in the development of the enclosure of large public spaces by reinforced concrete structures. It was by far the largest of several pavilions built in Scheitniger Park now Szczytnicki Park to house the 1913 centennial of Germanys liberation from Napoleonic rule. The Jahrhunderthalle was i .....

Jantar Mantar

96. Jaipur India Jantar Mantar instruments and formulae, the open-air observatory designed by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, Indias last great classical astronomer, stands at the entrance to the palace in the old city of Jaipur. Built between 1728 and 1734, the group of large, modern-looking masonry structures is in fact a collection of astronomical instruments. They measure local time to an accuracy of a few seconds the suns declination, azimuth, and .....

King s College Chapel

97. Cambridge England The architectural historian G. E. Kidder Smith correctly identifies Kings College Chapel as one of the great rooms in architecture. Initiated by King Henry VI in July 1446, it was not completed until 1537. Even then, it was acknowledged by many to be one of Europes finest late-medieval buildings. It was an architectural achievement in that it epitomized the English High Gothic, its filigreed stone frame, large windows, and exqu .....

The Krak of the Knights

98. Syria Once described as the key of Christendom, the concentric castle known as the Krak of the Knights stood on the 2,000-foot-high 611-meter southern spur of the Gebel Alawi, commanding the strategic Homs Gap in the Orontes Valley between Syrias Mediterranean coast and the hinterland. The easternmost in a chain of five castles, it was well placed to control the trade routes between Asia Minor and the Levantine Coast. The formidable fortress rep .....

Lal Quila the Red Fort

99. Delhi India Lal Quila the Red Fort was built between 1638 and 1648 at the command of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan who also built the Taj Mahal as the royal residence in his new capital, Delhi. The fort, representing the highest achievement of Mughal architecture, contained all the accoutrements befitting a center of empire: public and private audience halls, domed marble palaces, luxuriously appointed private apartments, a mosque, and exquisite .....

Lalibela rock hewn churches

100. Ethiopia Lalibela is a village in the mountainous Welo region of northern Ethiopia, about 440 miles 700 kilometers north of Addis Ababa in the Middle Ages it was known as Roha and was the capital of the Zagwe dynasty. Standing on a rock terrace at an elevation of 8,500 feet 2,600 meters, it is the site of eleven large rock-hewn monastic churches that date from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Each is architecturally distinctive a .....

Larkin Administration Building

101. Buffalo New York The Larkin Administration Building 1902 1906 by Frank Lloyd Wright 1869 1959 was his first major public work, built, as he said, to house the commercial engine of the Larkin Company in light, wholesome, well-ventilated quarters. It was a milestone in the history of commercial architecture, in terms of both its spatial organization and the exploitation of modern technology. Indeed, some historians identify it as the twentieth-cen .....

London Underground

102. England Londons underground railroad system, popularly known as the Tube, is the oldest in the world. As early as the 1830s Charles Pearson, the city of Londons solicitor, suggested that the mainline stations could be linked by an underground railroad with as many as eight tracks. Despite the potential economic and social advantages of the scheme, it could find no financial backing, and Parliament refused to approve it. The citys first above-gro .....

Madan reed houses

103. IraqThe reed houses that form part of the distinctive culture of the Madan, or Marsh Arabs, of southeastern Iraq are an architectural achievement because they result from pushing available resources to their limits. Descended partly from the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, this seminomadic people, now numbering perhaps 200,000, have for millennia inhabited Lake Hammar and the surrounding marshlands in the Tigris-Euphrates Delta, about 200 mile .....

Maiden Castle

104. Dorset England The ancient British hill fort now known as Maiden Castle (from mai-dun, Celtic for great hill), about 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) southwest of modern Dorchester, grew from a neolithic village to become the largest pre-Roman fortress among nearly 1,400 in England. Indeed, it was one of the most extensive in western Europe. Still visible 2,000 years after its massive ramparts were completed, the fort crowns a low saddleback chalk hill .....

Maillarts bridges

105. The Swiss engineer, architect, and artist Robert Maillart (1872 1940) exploited the structural strength and expressive potential of reinforced concrete to generate a modern form for his bridges. By using simple construction concepts he developed graceful structures based on flat or curved reinforced concrete slabs. Amongst his radically innovative ideas were the mushroom slab, the deck-stiffened arch, the open three-hinged arch, and the hollow-bo .....

Maria Pia Bridge

106. Oporto Portugal Located at the mouth of the Douro River, Oporto is the capital of northern Portugal and the second-largest city in the country, rising steeply from the deep river valley. In 1875 the railway between Lisbon and Oporto was almost complete, and the final problem facing its builders was crossing the Douro. An international competition attracted only four entries, three from France and one from England. Gustave Alexandre Eiffels winni .....

Marib Dam

107. Yemen The Republic of Yemen is located on the southwestern coast of the Arabian peninsula, the region once possessed by the ancient southern Arabian kingdoms that occupied the mouths of large wadis (valleys) between mountains and desert. The first-millennium-b.c. kingdom of Saba sprang up in the dry delta of the Wadi Dhana that divides the Balak Hills. In the eighth century b.c., at the height of their prosperity, the Sabaeans had established co .....

Masjed e Shah Royal Mosque

108. Isfahan Iran The Royal Mosque, or Masjed-e-Shah (now known as the Masjed-e-Imam), was the major legacy of the Safavid Shah Abbas I (1587 1628), sometimes called Abbas the Great, who established Persia as a unified state. The beautiful building, said to stagger the visitor with its opulence and inventiveness, represents the epitome of Iranian architecture. It merits a place among the worlds architectural feats because of the resplendent tile wor .....

Maunsell sea forts

109. England The coasts of Kent and Essex Counties, England, overlook the Thames Estuary, the only sea route to London. Throughout World War II it was constantly endangered by German minelayers, U-boats, and the Luftwaffe. From 1939 until 1942 the British navy patrolled the area then a series of seven sea forts was built to permanently guard the river mouth. They were an innovative architectural and engineering achievement. The reinforced concrete an .....

Mausoleum at Halicarnassos

110. Anatolia Turkey The tomb of King Mausolos, known as the Mausoleum, was a structure impressive enough to merit inclusion among the seven wonders of the ancient world, and its name has passed into many European languages to describe any imposing funereal structure. It was designed by the Greek architect Pythios (some sources credit Satyros also) and decorated with works by the sculptors Scopas, Bryaxis, Timotheus, and Leochares. Because it surviv .....

Megalithic temples

111. Malta The oldest monumental architecture in the world is found on the tiny islands of Malta and Gozo, south of Sicily in the western Mediterranean. There, for perhaps 1,500 years from 3800 b.c., communities of neolithic farmers built about thirty massive post-and-beam temples. None of these megalithic structures has survived intact, but no doubt they were architectural masterworks, the earliest of them a thousand years older than the pyramids at .....

Menai Suspension Bridge

112. Near Bangor Wales The many achievements of the Scots engineer Thomas Telford (1757 1834) include bridges over the River Severn at Montford, Buildwas, and Bewdley, all built in the 1780s. In the following decade, as engineer for the Ellesmere Canal Company, he designed and constructed aqueducts over the Ceiriog and Dee Valleys in North Wales. Temporarily returning to Scotland, with William Jessop he built the Caledonian Canal, more than 900 miles .....

Menier chocolate mill

113. Nolsiel France The Menier chocolate mill at Noisiel, Marne-la-Vallee, was at the heart of a factory complex of industrial structures associated with Meniers chocolate-manufacturing business. The multistory mill, built between 1872 and 1874, demonstrated an innovative design approach that frankly exposed its structure and materials, using the latter for decorative effect. It is widely regarded as the first building in continental Europe to have b .....

Mesa Verde Cliff Palace

114. Colorado Mesa Verde National Park is spread over more than 52,000 acres (21,000 hectares) of a well-wooded mesa between Cortez and Durango, Colorado, at a general elevation of 7,000 feet (2,100 meters). Within its boundaries are the ruins of almost 4,000 Amerindian settlements, some up to 1,300 years old. The largest and most remarkable is the so-called Cliff Palace, a multistory building like a modern apartment block built under overhanging cli .....

Meteora Greece

115. The almost flat valley of the Pineios River, north of the town of Kalambaka in Thessaly, is punctuated by spectacular formations of iron gray conglomerate rock, huge, sheer-sided columns abruptly projecting up to 2,000 feet (600 meters) above the plains. On the seemingly inaccessible pinnacles of many of these weathered outcrops there stand, as though growing out of the rock, the monasteries of Meteora. Were they architectural feats? We believe s .....

Mir space station

116. Mir (Russian for peace) was conceived in 1976 as the climax of the (then) Soviet program to achieve the long-duration presence of a man in space. Its first component was launched into orbit ten years later. The first modular station assembled in space, it is the pioneer work of extraterrestrial building constructed in a virtually gravity-free environment, it is unique among architectural and engineering works. Earlier space stations had been inte .....

Mishkan Ohel Haeduth the Tent of Witness

117. The Mishkan, or sacred tent, was a unique portable temple constructed under the direction of Moses as a place of worship for the Hebrew tribes. It was used during the forty-year period of wandering between their liberation from slavery in Egypt and their arrival in the Promised Land (ca. 1290 1250 b.c.). According to chapters 25 and 26 of Exodus, the warrant and exact specifications for its construction were given by God. The tent seems to have b .....

Moai monoliths

118. Rapa Nui (Easter Island) The small Pacific island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), 2,300 miles (3,680 kilometers) west of Chile, is the most remote inhabited island in the world, with Pitcairn, its nearest neighbor, 1,400 miles (2,240 kilometers) away. The staggering architectural achievement of the people of Rapa Nui was the creation, but especially the transportation and erection, of hundreds of monolithic moaistylized giant human heads-on-torsosc .....

Mohenjo Daro

119. Pakistan The city of Mohenjo-Daro (hill of the dead) was the largest settlement of a culture that for more than 600 years from 2500 b.c. extended over 600,000 square miles (1.5 million square kilometers) of India and Pakistanlarger than western Europe. The citys ruins, on the west bank of the Indus River about 200 miles (320 kilometers) north of Karachi, evidence careful urban design combined with a sophisticated infrastructure that was undreame .....

Mont Saint Michel

120. Normandy France Mont-Saint-Michel is a craggy, conical island, about half a mile (0.8 kilometer) across and standing half a mile from shore in the Gulf of Saint-Malo, near the border of Brittany and Normandy on Frances northern coast. The north side of the island is wooded and the west presents a barren face to the sea. A fortified village of fewer than 100 inhabitants huddles on the lower southern and eastern slopes and the great Benedictine a .....

Mount Rushmore

121. South Dakota The broad granite southeast face of 5,725-foot (1,750-meter) Mount Rushmore, neat Rapid City, South Dakota, is carved with the massive portrait heads of four U.S. presidentsGeorge Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. For its sheer engineering ingenuity and ambitiousness of scaleWashingtons head is 60 feet (18 meters) highthe ensemble may be regarded as an architectural feat. In 1923 South Dakotas s .....

Mycenae Greece

122. Imposing even as a ruin, Agamemnons city MycenaeHomer called it Mycenae, rich in goldstands on a foothill of Mount Euboea between Hagios Elias and Mount Zara near the modern village that still bears its name: Mik .....

Mystra Greece

123. The ruins of the medieval city of Mystra are 3 miles (5 kilometers) northwest of modern Sparta in the Peloponnese. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade, turned aside from its original purpose by Venetian bribes, sacked Constantinople and established Frankish dominion over Greek territories. Among the most important states they founded was the Principality of the Morea, or the Principality of Achaea, governed from 1210 by Geoffroi I de Villehardouin. In 124 .....

Nazca Lines

124. PeruThe Pampa Colorado (Red Plain) is a 37-mile-long (60-kilometer) and 15-mile-wide (24-kilometer) plateau in the coastal desert of southern Peru near the town of Nazca. Across its broad face are carved staggeringly cyclopean patterns, an agglomeration of designs on the earths surface known as geoglyphs, which portray animals, birds, and other forms, mostly made by removing the dark reddish brown surface to expose a lighter-colored substratum in .....

Nemrud Dagi

125. Turkey The hierotheseion (royal burial precinct) of King Antiochos I of Kommagene (reigned ca. 69 36 b.c.) stands on Nemrud Dagi, the highest point of his domain, near the modern village of Kahta in the southeastern Turkish province of Adiyaman. It has been characterized by UNESCO as one of the most ambitious constructions of Hellen[ist]ic times. The megalomaniac king reshaped the 7,000-foot-high (2,150-meter) mountain by leveling the rock and f .....

Newgrange

126. County Meath, Ireland Newgrange is one of the most notable archeological monuments in Europe. Named in Gaelic Uaimh na Greine (Cave of the Sun), the great passage tomb stands on a low hillock beside the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, about 9 miles (14 kilometers) from the sea. Newgrange was built around 3150 b.c., making it as old as some of the neolithic temples on Malta and much older than the pyramids of Egypt. It is a dramatic testimo .....

Offas Dike

127. English-Welsh border Built by Offa, King of Mercia (a.d. 757 796), the impressive earthwork known as Offas Dike formed a boundary, albeit discontinuous, between England and Wales. One of the most remarkable structures in Britain, it runs 177 miles (280 kilometers) 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) longer than Hadrians Wall from the Dee Estuary in the north to the River Wye in the south. It is now generally agreed that the dike was not so much a fortific .....

Orders of architecture

128. To the ancient Greeks, the word cosmos conveyed the idea of the garnished universe, the world set in order. They believed that creation was the act of a great Demiurge who brought structure and form out of preexistent chaos, an ordering that permeated the physical universe. It was therefore perceptible in nature as a ubiquitous mathematical proportional system, a harmony in everything that could be seen or heard. To be in accord with that harmony .....

Oresund Link

129. Scandinavia The ambitious project to construct a fixed rail and road link across the 65-mile (105-kilometer) Oresund Strait was agreed to by the Danish and Swedish governments in March 1991. The resulting 10-mile (16-kilometer) combination of submarine tunnel, artificial island, and bridge, carrying a double-track electrified railroad and four lanes of freeway between Kastrup, Denmark, and Lernacken, Sweden, was officially opened on 1 July 2000. .....

Paddington Station

130. London England Paddington Station, London, terminal of the Great Western Railway linking Englands capital with the Atlantic port of Bristol, was designed by engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 1859) with the assistance of architect Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820 1877). Built between 1850 and 1854, it was one of the first stations to utilize the iron-arched roof and the ridge-and-furrow roof glazing also employed in Joseph Paxtons Crystal Palace of .....

Palace of Minos

131. Knossos, Crete Probably the best known of all Cretan architecture, the ruins of the Palace of Minos at Knossos stand near the River Kairatos on the north side of Crete, about 3 miles (5 kilometers) inland, near the modern city of Ir .....

Panama Canal

132. Panama The Panama Canal, completed in 1914, is a 50.7-mile (81.6-kilometer) passageway through the Isthmus of Panama, connecting Cristobal on the Atlantic coast and Balboa on the Pacific at the narrowest point of the landmass of the Americas. By navigating its three locks, each of which raises or lowers them 85 feet (26 meters), ships can move from ocean to ocean in about twenty-four hours that saves the several days needed to sail the many thou .....

Pantheon

133. Rome Italy As its name suggests, the Pantheon in Rome was dedicated to many gods. Its seven interior niches housed statues of Apollo, Diana, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn, and the great dome also had religious significance since it symbolized the heavens. Even now, when stripped of much of its enrichment, the scale and simple geometry of the Pantheon awe the visitor. Moreover, its sophisticated engineering stirs imagination for its a .....

Parthenon

134. Athens Greece Ralph Waldo Emerson said of the Parthenon, earth wears no fairer gem upon her zone. Even if that was going a little too far, we certainly may assert that the great temple, built 447 432 b.c., is the high point of Greek Doric architecture. The Greeks quest for cosmic harmony can be traced in their sculpture and their architecture, especially temples. From archaic shrines the religious equivalent of the royal megarons the building ty .....

Pennsylvania Station

135. New York City Pennsylvania Station, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, New York City, represented the high point of railroad architecture. Built from 1904 to 1910 at a cost of $100 million (about $5.6 billion in todays terms), it was over 30 percent larger than its largest contemporary, Liverpool Street Station in London, England. In its first year of operation 112,000 trains carrying over 10 million passengers passed through Pennsylvania Stati .....

Persepolis

136. Iran The ruins of Persepolis (in Persian, Parsa) lie at the foot of Kuh-i-Rahmat (Mountain of Mercy) beside a small river on the Marv Dasht plain of southwestern Iran, about 400 miles (640 kilometers) south of Tehran. Widely held to be one of the greatest architectural complexes of the ancient world, and even claimed to be the most beautiful the world has ever seen, it was probably commissioned by Darius I between 518 and 516 b.c. as the ceremon .....

Petra

137. JordanPetra (the name means rock) in southern Jordan lies about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of the Dead Sea on the border of the mountainous Wadi Araba Desert. Although there is evidence of earlier occupation of the site, the city was founded around the sixth century b.c. as the practically inaccessible capital of the Nabataean Arabs who dominated the region and controlled international trade routes between Asia, southern Arabia, and the marke .....

Pharos of Alexandria

138. Egypt Taking the name of the long narrow island on which it stood, the Pharos of Alexandria was the most famous lighthouse of antiquity. Situated on a high mound at the end of a long peninsula, 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the city, it was a technological marvel and formed the prototype of the modern lighthouse. Since the sixth century a.d. (when it replaced the walls of Babylon) it has been listed among the seven wonders of the ancient world. I .....

Pisa CathedralThe Campanile Leaning Tower

139. Pisa Italy The city of Pisa stands on the River Arno in the Tuscan region of northern Italy. Its Piazza dei Miracoli is graced by the most beautiful group of Romanesque buildings in the country: the white marble basilican cathedral (begun 1063) the circular, domed baptistery (begun 1153) and the highly original bell tower (campanile), situated between the apse and the southeastern end of the cathedrals transept and now famous as the Leaning Towe .....

Pneumatic structures

140. The most familiar inflated membrane structures are airships, from nonrigid blimps to giant vessels such as the proposed 1,003-foot-long (307-meter) ATC SkyCat cargo lifter with a payload of 2,200 tons (2,000 tonnes). The German firm Zeppelin built several rigid-frame airships between 1900 and 1936, including the famous Graf Zeppelin. The new technology had consequences in the building industry. The English aeronautical engineer Frederick W. Lanch .....

Pompidou Center Beaubourg

141. Paris France The Centre Nationale dArt et de Culture Georges Pompidou, commonly known as the Pompidou Center, is in the Marais district of Paris. Initially given the working title Beaubourg (after its site), the center was formally named for its initiator, French president Georges Pompidou (1911 1974), following his untimely death. In December 1969 he announced an international design competition for a monumental multiuse public library, modern .....

Qosqo Peru

142. Qosqo (navel or center) in southern central Peru was once the ancient capital of the Inkan Empire. Continuously occupied for three millennia, the oldest living city in the Americas perches 11,150 feet (3,400 meters) above sea level in the Andes Mountains. Strategically located, Qosqo reached out to the entire Tahuantinsuyu (Land of the Four Quarters) by means of an extensive road network. In the days of its glory, the city boasted about 100,000 h .....

Queens House

143. Greenwich England The Queens House on the edge of the Royal Park at Greenwich near London was designed by Inigo Jones probably the greatest of all English architects early in the seventeenth century. It was a major architectural feat because it represented, all at once and in a single building, the introduction of a new kind of architecture in the face of a well-established and reactionary building industry. Before Jones (1573 1652) stepped on .....

The Red House

144. Bexley Heath England Designed for William Morris in 1859 by his friend and coworker Philip Webb, the Red House in the London suburb of Bexley Heath has been called a cornerstone in the history of English domestic architecture. Much more than that, although in one sense a piece of eclectic architecture, it was a milestone in the way that architects designed houses, making the house to fit the occupant, rather than (as had been the case) forcing t .....

Reichstag

145. Berlin Germany The restored Reichstag in Berlin, designed by the London architectural firm of Foster and Partners, epitomizes a new kind of architecture one that respects the physical and cultural environment and takes account of the past while assuming responsibility for the future. The institution known as the Reichstag was set up in 1867 by the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to allow the bourgeoisie to have a role in the politics of the .....

Reinforced concrete

146. Concrete is a combination of small aggregate (sand), large aggregate (gravel), a binding agent or matrix, and water. Historically, lime was used as a matrix, mostly for mortars that had no large aggregate. In 1774 the British engineer John Smeaton added crushed iron-slag to the usual quicklime-sand-water mix, making the first modern concrete for the foundations of the Eddystone Lighthouse off the English coast. Fifty years later, a new matrix was .....

Renault Distribution Center

147. Swindon England High-technology (usually contracted to high-tech) architecture was a movement born in the 1960s and sustained through the 1980s. It sought to express zeitgeist the spirit of the age defined by its followers as resting in the technological advances of industry, communications, and travel, including aerospace developments. These advances offered an alternative building approach. High-tech architects produced machinelike structures .....

Retractable roofs

148. The Houston Astrodome in Texas, opened in 1966, was the first stadium with a roof over the playing area. It set a trend for sports fields for the next twenty years. Its roof, designed to resist 135-mph (216-kph) winds, has a clear span of 642 feet (196 meters) it is 208 feet (64 meters) high at the apex. It was not, however, the first arena to have a roof. It was predated by almost 2,000 years by the Flavian Amphitheater in Rome, better known as .....

Roman concrete construction

149. Concrete is made by mixing broken stone or gravel and sand (aggregate), a bonding agent, and water, and allowing the mixture to harden through chemical process into a solid mass. So-called cementitious materials had been used in ancient Egypt about 3,000 years earlier and later by the Chinese, Minoans, and Mycenaeans, but this synthetic stone a new building material was developed and exploited by the Romans from about the third centuryb.c. Ambro .....

Royal Albert Bridge

150. Saltash England The Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash, completed in 1859, was Isambard Kingdom Brunels last bridge and probably his finest work. Certainly, it was one of the great engineering feats of the nineteenth century, because (it is widely agreed) of its size, its economy of design, its revolutionary superstructure, and not least because of the way in which Brunel solved difficult logistical problems. It was one of the first bridge projects .....

The Royal Pavilion

151. Brighton England The Royal Pavilion, Brighton (1817 1822), a grand oriental fantasy with Indian domes and minarets and Chinese interiors, is a fascinating example of the diverse architectural styles allowed in the Regency period, which was otherwise dominated by refined neoclassical architecture. Two elements were necessary for its realization: an esthetically adaptable architect in this case, John Nash (1752 1835) and a client powerful enough t .....

Sagrada Familia Church of the Holy Family

152. Barcelona, Spain The 328-foot-tall (100-meter) spires of the Church of the Sagrada Familia dominate the skyline of Barcelona, the chief city of Catalonia, in northeastern Spain. This unique church, which, in the tradition of the medieval cathedrals of Europe, remains unfinished more than a century after it was started, is one of the great pieces of world architecture. Its fantastic forms defy our vocabulary and confound any attempt at stylistic .....

St Chapelle

153. Paris, France St. Chapelle, at 6 boulevard du Palais, is now surrounded by the Palace of Justice on the Ile de la Cite, Paris, near Notre Dame. It was built as a palatine chapel for King Louis IX of France (known as St. Louis, reigned 1226 1270) between 1242 and 1247, and consecrated on 26 April 1248. During Louis IXs reign, Gothic architecture in France entered the rayonnant phase, its name derived from the radiating spokes of the large rose wi .....

St Denis Abbey Church

154. St. Denis, France The Abbey of St. Denis is situated in a small municipality (now a suburb) of the same name, about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) north of Paris. Its thirty-sixth abbot, Suger (1081 1151), commissioned the present church from about 1140. It is a milestone in the history of architecture because, like Durham Cathedral in England, it has in it the seeds of a new way of building for Europe: the highly inventive structural system that we k .....

St Genevieve Library

155. Paris, France The St. Genevieve Library in the place du Pantheon, Paris, was designed in 1843 by Henri Labrouste (1801 1875) and built between 1844 and 1851. It is the first public building to have a frankly exposed structural iron frame. Wrought iron and cast iron, used to great structural and esthetic effect in engineering works since the late eighteenth century, were still widely regarded as unsuitable for legitimate architecture (except for .....

St Katharine Dock

156. London, England Toward the end of the twentieth century, because of technological changes in world shipping, the St. Katharine Dock area near Londons Tower Bridge was forced to alter its function after more than a thousand years as a trade center. That adaptation of building use foreshadowed a universal trend in which former warehouses became (usually luxury) apartments. For that reason, and because of the model cargo handling and storage design .....

St Pancras Station

157. London, England Built between 1863 and 1865 for the Midland Railway, St. Pancras Station has been described as the epitome of the railroad buildings that evolved following advances in iron technology in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was one of a number of London stations, including Victoria and Charing Cross, erected during the 1860s railroad boom, when national and international travel was becoming more popular. St. Pancras esta .....

St Pauls Cathedral

158. London, England St. Pauls Cathedral in the city of London, created by the astronomer, mathematician, and designer Sir Christopher Wren (1632 1723), is the crowning work in the large oeuvre of one of the greatest English architects of his time, perhaps of all time. With it, English architecture regained the tradition of construction that it had developed for 400 years, and that had been displaced temporarily by Italian theories of proportion and .....

St Peters Basilica

159. Vatican City, Italy St. Peters Basilica is the central place of the Roman Catholic Church. From its inception, it took 225 years to complete. No fewer than sixteen architects were responsible for it, under the patronage of twenty-two popes. Nevertheless, the great building presents a degree of integrity, of harmony (perhaps helped by the mellowing passage of the centuries) that might seem improbable given its heterogeneous and sometimes philosop .....

St Pierre Cathedral

160. Beauvais, France Beauvais is capital of the French departement of Oise, north of Paris. It already was an important center in pre-Roman Gaul. The Romans called it Bellovacum, and tradition has it that Lucianus, Maxianus, and Julianus founded Christianity there at the cost of their lives in about a.d. 275. Beauvais became a countship in the ninth century. Power passed to the bishops in 1013, although the date of the foundation of the diocese is u .....

San Paolo fuori la Mura St Pauls outside the Walls

161. Rome, Italy Perhaps the most demanding question that can be asked of any architect is to invent a building to suit a new purpose, and the provision of an adequate, even seemly, answer is indeed an architectural feat. From the beginning of the fourth century a.d., congregational worship by large numbers of people needed a hall, and the Roman basilica a civil law court became one model for churches in western Europe. The early Christian architects .....

Seikan Tunnel Seikan Tonneru

162. Japan After two decades of planning and construction, the 33.5-mile-long (53.85-kilometer) Seikan submarine tunnel was opened to traffic on 13 March 1988. Part of a railroad between Aomori City and Hakodate City, it links Honshu, the main Japanese island, with Hokkaido to the north, passing under the 459-foot-deep (140-meter) Tsugaru Strait. The tunnel runs 328 feet (100 meters) beneath the ocean bed for 14.5 miles (23.35 kilometers); thus, at 7 .....

Semmering Railway

163. Austria The 26-mile-long (41.8-kilometer) Semmering Railway climbs through an altitude of 1,400 feet (439 meters) over the Semmering alpine pass, at an elevation of 2,930 feet (898 meters), between Gloggnitz and M .....

Shell concrete

164. In 1919 Dr. Walter Bauersfeld of the Carl Zeiss optical works in Jena, Germany, proposed a planetarium. Following his 1922 success with a 52-foot-diameter (16-meter) iron-rod dome built on the roof of the companys building the first lightweight steel structural framework in the world Bauersfeld consulted the structural engineers Dyckerhoff and Widmann about a larger version. Then, together with their designers Franz Dischinger and Ulrich Finsterw .....

Shibam

165. Yemen Surrounded by a 23-foot-high (7-meter) mud-brick wall, the Yemeni city of Shibam lies at the southern edge of the Rubal-Khali Desert at the junction of several wadis and the Hadramawt Valley. Popularly known as the Manhattan of the Desert, .....

Shwedagon Pagoda

166. Yangon, Myanmar The most spectacular building in Yangon (formerly known as Rangoon) is the Shwedagon Pagoda, a great bell-shaped, solid brick stupa covered with an estimated 55 tons (50 tonnes) of gold. It rises 368 feet (112 meters) on Theinguttara Hill, above the city. The sixteenth-century English adventurer Ralph Fitch wrote that it is of a wonderful bigness, and all gilded from the foot to the top .....

Sigiriya Lion Mountain

167. Sri Lanka Sigiriya (Lion Mountain), about 130 miles (210 kilometers) from Colombo in central Sri Lanka, is a ruined ancient stronghold built on a sheer-sided rock pillar. It rises 1,144 feet (349 meters) above sea level and 600 feet (180 meters) above the surrounding plain. On the summit King Kasyapa I (reigned a.d. 477 495) built a palace. Together with the surrounding gardens, it is the best-preserved first-millennium city in Asia, combining s .....

Skellig Michael

168. Ireland Skellig Michael (Sceilig Mhichil), or Great Skellig, is the larger of a pair of forbidding limestone pinnacles the other is Small Skellig jutting from the Atlantic Ocean about 7 miles (12 kilometers) off the Valentia peninsula at the southwest tip of Ireland. Skellig Michael, only 44 acres (17 hectares) in area, is dominated by two crags, one of 712 feet (218 meters) and another of 597 feet (183 meters). On top of the latter, reached via .....

Skyscrapers

169. Chicago Only seldom for ideological, political or pragmatic reasons has a society called for a new building type. Ecclesiastes asserts There is nothing new under the sun, .....

Snowy Mountains Scheme

170. Australia The Snowy Mountains Scheme, one of the largest engineering and construction projects in the world, extends over 2,700 square miles (7,000 square kilometers) in Australias Snowy Mountain Range. The Snowies, .....

Solomons Temple

171. Jerusalem, Israel No archeological remnant of Solomons Temple survives. The Bible provides descriptions, and since it is generally believed that the architectural style was constrained by regional influences, the biblical account is augmented by knowledge of contemporary buildings in the region. It is very possible that it was the most expensive structure ever built, because the gold alone, valued at 2001 prices, was worth something in the order .....

Statue of Liberty

172. New York City Originally titled Liberty Enlightening the World, the colossal statue on Liberty Island in New York Harbor stands nearly 307 feet (93.5 meters) high. It represents a woman of pre-Raphaelite appearance, draped in voluminous robes and crowned with a spiked diadem. Her right hand raises a flaming torch at arms length; her left carries a book emblazoned with, July 4, 1776 .....

Stockton and Darlington Railway

173. England The Stockton and Darlington line, the worlds first public railroad, was opened on 27 September 1825. As well as carrying coal, the train drawn by Locomotion No. 1 .....

Storm Surge Barrier

174. Rotterdam, the Netherlands More than half the Netherlands lies below sea level, and the little country is protected from flooding by about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) of dikes. The process of global warming and the consequent rise in sea levels will challenge their adequacy, and many of them will need to be raised and reinforced. The extensive Deltaworks project, completed in 1986, secured the province of Zeeland by sealing off its sea inlets. .....

Suez Canal

175. Egypt The Suez Canal, an artificial waterway across the Isthmus of Suez in northeastern Egypt, connects Port Said on the Mediterranean coast with Port Tawfiq on the Gulf of Suez, an inlet of the Red Sea. The 101-mile (163-kilometer) canal has no locks, making it the longest of its kind, sea level being the same at both ends. Because it exploits three natural bodies of water Lake Manzala in the north; Lake Timsah, almost exactly at the midpoint; .....

Sultan Ahmet Mosque

176. Istanbul, Turkey The deeply religious Ottoman sultan of Istanbul Ahmet I (reigned a.d. 1603 1617) was enthroned at the age of fourteen. Six years later he commissioned his architect Sedefkar Mehmet Agha to build a mosque that would compete for size and splendor with the sixth-century Byzantine church of Hagia Sofia. A site was chosen facing the church across what is now Sultanahmet Square, and Ayse Sultan, whose palace stood on it, was duly comp .....

Sydney Harbour Bridge

177. Australia The Sydney Harbour Bridge, irreverently known as the coat hanger .....

Sydney Opera House

178. Sydney, Australia The Opera House stands on Bennelong Point, which reaches out into Sydney Harbour, close to the famous bridge. It was designed by the Danish architect J .....

Taj Mahal

179. Agra, India The Taj Mahal, Indias most recognizable icon, was built on the banks of the River Jamuna at Agra by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (reigned a.d.1628 1666), in memory of his beloved wife Arjumand Banu Begam, known as Mumtaz Mahal (Elect of the Palace), who died in childbirth in 1631. There is a tradition that, on her deathbed, she entreated her husband to build a tomb that would preserve her name forever. The funerary mosque, faced wit .....

Temple of Amun The Hypostyle Hall

180. Thebes, Egypt On the east bank of the Nile at Thebes, 440 miles (700 kilometers) south of the site of modern Cairo, stood the most extensive temple complex in ancient Egypt. From the time of the New Kingdom (1550 1069 b.c.), the northern end of this religious compound (near the modern village of Karnak) was dominated by the great temple devoted exclusively to the worship of Amun-Ra, King of the Gods .....

Temple of the Inscriptions

181. Palenque, Mexico The modern town of Palenque is about 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of Villahermosa and 30 miles (48 kilometers) south of the Gulf of Mexico in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco. The ruins of the ancient Maya city are a little to the south, perched in dense forests on a shelf carved from the Sierra Oriental de Chiapas and overlooking the basin of the Usamacinta River. The Spanish conquistadors named it Palenque because of t .....

Tension and suspension buildings

182. Historically, post-and-beam construction and the arch (with its three-dimensional extensions) were regarded as the only ways to build. Both were constrained by a belief in the necessary permanence of architecture. Because the only available durable materials masonry of various kinds were strong in compression, structural systems exploited that property. A third way of building, the structure that used stretched filaments and membranes, was limite .....

Thames Tunnel

183. London, EnglandThe Thames Tunnel was designed by the French-born engineer Marc Isambard Brunel and supervised by his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel between 1825 and 1843. The approximately 1,200-foot-long (365-meter) structure runs under the River Thames between Wapping on the north bank and Rotherhithe on the south in east London. Originally used for foot traffic, it now forms part of the London Underground system. The first tunnel ever built throu .....

Theater of the Asklepieion

184. Epidaurus, Greece Every modem visitor to the fourth-century-b.c. Theater of the Asklepieion at Epidaurus marvels at its remarkable acoustics. The tearing of a slip of paper, a whisper, or the sound made by a struck match in the orchestra can be heard with perfect clarity everywhere in the theater, even at the very top, 250 feet (80 meters) distant. The theater epitomizes the skill of the ancient Greeks in the creation of a building type. That fa .....

Three Gorges Dam Yangtze River

185. Peoples Republic of China The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River near Chongqing in Chinas central Hubei Province is the largest hydroelectric project in history, with twenty-six generators designed to deliver over 18,000 megawatts, 11 percent of the nations needs. Started in 1994 and scheduled for completion by 2014, it will provide electricity to rural provinces and facilitate flood management and improved navigation for the upper Yangtze. T .....

Timgad Algeria

186. The Roman town now known as Timgad was founded in A.D. 100 on command of the emperor Trajan (reigned 98 117) and named Colonia Marciana Trajana Thamugas for his sister. It was built on a high plateau north of the Aures Mountains in Algeria (then Numidia), 94 miles (150 kilometers) south of the modern town of Constantine. The Third Augusta Legion, effectively the Roman police force in North Africa, was garrisoned nearby, and Timgad, designed for v .....

Tower Bridge

187. London, England Tower Bridge (1886 1894) is immediately and universally recognizable as an icon of London. Even during its construction, it was nicknamed Wonder Bridge .....

Treasury of Atreus

188. Mycenae, Greece Between 1400 and 1200 b.c. Mycenae was the most powerful ancient Greek city-state. Its ruins now stand above the Plain of Argolis in the Peloponnese, near the modern village of Mik .....

Unite dHabitation

189. Marseilles, France It has been accurately claimed that Le Corbusiers most influential late work was his Unite dHabitation in Marseilles. The eighteen-story apartment building, universally admired by architects but unloved by the people who live in it, is the first realization it was followed by three others elsewhere in France and one in Berlin, Germany of the famous Swiss architects theories of urban design formulated twenty years earlier. It a .....

U S interstate highway system

190. The Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways, inaugurated in June 1956 by the Federal-Aid Highway Act, is a 41,000-mile (66,000-kilometer) network linking 90 percent of the major cities whose population exceeds 50,000 and many other urban centers in the mainland United States. The bill earmarked $25 billion to be spent between 1957 and 1969, and the system was to be completed by 1972. Sinclair Weeks, then secretary of commer .....

Vehicle Assembly Building John F Kennedy Space Center

191. Merritt Island, Florida The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was founded in 1958 with a brief to plan and conduct nonmilitary aeronautical and space activities and to develop international space programs. The 140,000-acre (56,658-hectare) John F. Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island near Cape Canaveral, Florida, was originally established to support the Apollo lunar landing project. It is now operated by NASA as the ma .....

Venice Italy

192. Venice is one of the worlds densest urban places a compression of churches, great and small houses, and other buildings crowded around hundreds of piazzi and campi, little relieved with planting and having only two public gardens. Floating on a cluster of more than 100 low islands about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) off the Veneto region of the Italian mainland, the historical center of this remarkable city is surrounded by the shallow, crescent-shape .....

Villa Savoye

193. Poissy, France The Villa Savoye at 82 rue de Villiers, Poissy, has been described as a house so important that architects travel from all over the world to experience its presence .....

Washington Monument

194. Washington, D.C. The largest freestanding stone structure in the world is the obelisk built in honor of George Washington that stands about halfway between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. By legislation, it will remain the tallest structure in the U.S. capital The 91,000-ton (82,700-tonne) monument is 555 feet, 5 inches (166.7 meters) high and 55 feet, 5 inches (16.67 meters) square at the base. Its load-bearing granite .....

Watts Towers

195. Los Angeles, California The Watts Towers comprise a group of imaginative structures at 1765 East 107th Street in south-central Los Angeles. Once threatened with demolition, they are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and enjoy the dual status of a State of California Historic Park and Historic-Cultural Monument and a National Historic Landmark (a distinction bestowed in 1990). Someone has described them as a unique monument t .....

Weissenhofsiedlung

196. Stuttgart, Germany An acute accommodation shortage after World War I led many European cities to develop low-cost public housing programs. In Stuttgart, Germany, the W .....

World Trade Center Towers

197. New York City On the morning of 11 September 2001, terrorists targeted the World Trade Center in Manhattan, first crashing a hijacked commercial jetliner into the upper levels of One World Trade Center, one of its twin 110-story iconic skyscrapers. A few minutes later a second hijacked aircraft sliced through the middle levels of Two World Trade Center, the other tower. (A third airliner crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., while .....