Culture & History

Museums, monuments, memorials and the stories behind ordinary-looking corners.

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• Genoa's Rolli palaces — The Rolli were the Republic of Genoa's official registers of private palaces whose owners could be required to lodge visiting state guests,…
• The bridges over the Douro at Porto — Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia face each other across a deep Douro gorge, and each crossing here was built because the one before it could no…
• The bridges over the Seine inside Paris — Every crossing here is dated, and the dates are the point: a toll bridge for carrying the sick to the Hôtel-Dieu, a span built to move crow…
• Oscar Niemeyer's buildings in Brasília — Between 1956 and his death in 2012, Oscar Niemeyer drew almost every civic building that gives the Brazilian capital its silhouette, from t…
• The anchor points of the Ruhr's Route der Industriekultur — Coke, pig iron, coal, electricity and beer all stopped being made at these sites, and the Regionalverband Ruhr then designated them the loa…
• Berlin's Modernism housing estates on the World Heritage list — Six Berlin estates went onto the World Heritage list in 2008 as "Siedlungen der Berliner Moderne", and a seventh, the Waldsiedlung Zehlendo…
• The Paris locations of Amélie — Jean-Pierre Jeunet shot Amélie across a real city and then repainted it, so the addresses below are genuine while the film's version of the…
• The Los Angeles locations of La La Land — Damien Chazelle shot his 2016 musical almost entirely on public ground: a county park, a funicular the crew had to repair before it would r…
• The Vienna locations of Before Sunrise — Richard Linklater shot the whole of one night in Vienna in 1994, mostly on public ground: a footbridge, a tram ride, a lane between two hou…
• The Bruges locations of In Bruges — Martin McDonagh shot In Bruges in the historic centre between 2 February and 28 March 2007, for a story set in December, which is why the C…
• The San Francisco locations of Hitchcock's Vertigo — Hitchcock shot the exteriors of Vertigo in sixteen days in 1957, then built the interiors on soundstages, so what survives in San Francisco…
• Frank Lloyd Wright's houses in Los Angeles — Between 1919 and 1939 Wright built a handful of houses across Los Angeles, four of them tests of a patented concrete block system that his…
• Portland's bridges over the Willamette — Twelve spans cross the Willamette inside Portland, and no two of them are alike: a 1908 railway swing span rebuilt as a vertical lift, the…
• Louis Sullivan's buildings standing in Chicago — Adler and Sullivan built more than a hundred projects in fourteen years, and Chicago demolished a great many of them: the Stock Exchange, t…
• Savannah's squares, the ones the Oglethorpe plan laid out — In 1733 the new colony's ground was laid out in wards, each built around an open square with trust lots for civic buildings on two sides an…
• Presidents' homes and birthplaces the National Park Service keeps — Federal custody is what these addresses have in common: a family kept a house standing, or gave it away, and Congress or a president's proc…
• Prague's bridges over the Vltava — From the stone laid for Charles IV in 1357 to a footbridge finished in 2020 to replace one that fell into the river, the Vltava crossings r…
• Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings in Oak Park — Oak Park holds the densest concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright's early work anywhere, and most of it is still lived in. This gathering foll…
• The bridges over the Tyne between Newcastle and Gateshead — Seven crossings within about a mile of river, built across 135 years and still all in service: a Victorian double-decker carrying trains ov…
• Berlin's rubble mountains, the Truemmerberge — Berlin was flat until the bombing stopped. Between 1946 and the early 1980s the city moved something like 55 million cubic metres of broken…
• The Ivy League campuses — Each Ivy League campus keeps a founding piece: the ground the college started on, or the single building that once held all of it. The five…
• The Israeli settlements the EU counts in East Jerusalem — Footnote 2 of the European Union's six-month report on Israeli settlements, covering January to June 2018, does something most diplomatic l…
• The Smithsonian museums named in the White House review — On August 12, 2025 the White House sent Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III a letter announcing an internal review of exhibitions and…
• The American forts renamed twice — Congress set up a commission in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act to strip Confederate officers' names from Army installations; t…
• The buildings of Independence National Historical Park restored for the 250th — Between March 2025 and July 2026 the National Park Service worked through the buildings of Independence Square and the block east of it, re…
• The presidential library museums the National Archives keeps — Since the Truman library opened the model in 1957, the federal government has run its ex-presidents' papers as public buildings: research r…
• Rome's talking statues, where the pasquinades were posted — Between about 1501 and the nineteenth century, Romans who wanted to insult a pope without signing their names pasted verses onto six batter…
• The Aalto Works on the UNESCO World Heritage List — The Finnish Heritage Agency sent this nomination to UNESCO in November 2024, rebuilt from an earlier and unsuccessful submission titled "Th…
• Scottish battlefields on the national Inventory — Historic Environment Scotland keeps a statutory register of battlefields judged nationally significant, each with its own BTL reference, a…
• London homes of artists and writers kept as museums — London keeps an unusual number of writers' and painters' houses in something close to working order, and what separates them is how much of…
• Victor Horta houses standing in Brussels — Horta built roughly forty buildings in Brussels and a good part of them came down in the 1960s; these four survived intact enough to be lis…
• Atlantic Wall bunkers of the Normandy coast — Reinforced concrete poured between 1942 and 1944 for the German coastal defences, scoped to the stretch of Calvados and Cotentin where the…
• Gaudí buildings standing in Barcelona — Seven commissions that survived the century after Antoni Gaudí's death in 1926, from the tiled house he built for a tile manufacturer in 18…
• Towers Branded Trump, Some Since Renamed — Most of these are licensing arrangements rather than buildings the family designed or developed, which is why the lettering on several has…
• Commonwealth war cemeteries of the Ypres Salient — The burial grounds ringing Ypres were laid out from 1919 onward to designs by Reginald Blomfield, Herbert Baker and Charles Holden, using P…

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