Epoche
Tutto ciò che è sul sito nell’ordine in cui è stato costruito, dal più antico. I vuoti dicono quanto le voci: nota quanto tempo passa, dopo Roma, prima che si torni a tentare qualcosa di questo elenco.
Before Cities
Monumental building before agriculture, writing, metal or the wheel — the period that broke the standard story of how civilisation starts.
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Göbekli Tepe
Monumental stone architecture built by people with no pottery, no metal, no wheel, no writing — and, on the current evidence, no agriculture yet.
The Ancient Near East
Mesopotamia and Egypt: the first states, the first bureaucracies, and the first buildings designed to outlast the people who commissioned them.
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Troy
Nine cities stacked in one hill, and the layer that burned matches the poem closely enough to be uncomfortable.
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The Pyramids of Giza
The pyramid you have seen photographs of is the skeleton. The finished monument was smooth, white, and visible for kilometres.
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Babylon
The city with the blue gate and the gardens nobody can find — taken in one night, by an army that walked in through the river.
The Classical World
Persia, Greece and the empires that first had to answer the question of how you build for people who are not your subjects.
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Persepolis
An empire that paid its workers in silver, recorded it on clay, and then lost the whole ceremonial capital in a single night of fire.
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The Acropolis of Athens
The whitest building in the popular imagination was painted red, blue and gold — and it was funded with money that was not Athens’ to spend.
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Petra
A desert people got rich on incense, then spent it engineering water — and carved the receipts into a canyon wall.
Ancient Rome
Concrete, the arch and the vault — the century in which Rome worked out how to enclose space at a scale nobody matched again for 1,300 years.
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Pompeii
The only Roman city we can read street by street — because the thing that destroyed it also stopped it mid-sentence.
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Roman Arches
Rome found a way to make gravity help — then repeated the trick until it became the infrastructure of an empire.
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Jerusalem Before Rome Destroyed It
The largest building project in the Roman east was finished, and then destroyed, within a single lifetime.
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The Colosseum
Not an arena that happened to hold a crowd — a machine for sorting fifty thousand Romans into their exact place in the social order.
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Rome in AD 100
A million people, nine aqueducts running on gradient alone, and a city whose real achievement was keeping every problem from failing at once.
The Medieval World
Constantinople, the cathedrals and the great walls: engineering pushed to its limit by faith, trade and fear of the frontier.
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The Great Wall of China
It was never one wall, it was never finished, and in the end it was opened from the inside.
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Constantinople
For a thousand years the Theodosian Walls did not fall. What finally beat them was not a better army but a bigger gun.
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Venice's Sinking City
Venice is not sinking the way a stone drops. It is losing the space between itself and the sea — and it is losing it from both directions at once.
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Notre-Dame de Paris
Half-ruined, re-invented by a novelist, restored into something new, burned, rebuilt — and still called medieval.
Early Modern
Fire, plague, rebuilding and the first cities planned as instruments of policy.
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London: 500 Years of Design
Fire, bombs and its own planners each rebuilt London — and each time the medieval map underneath survived them.
The Industrial City
Iron, glass and the boulevard — the era that demolished more of the medieval city than any war had.
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Haussmann's Boulevards
The most photographed streetscape on Earth was a demolition project, and the city it replaced was mostly medieval.