Three layers of time that coexist on the same street — how to read a city built on top of, inside and alongside itself.
A structural experiment a thousand years long: how you build a city on piles, arches and Istrian stone.
Gaudí as a key to reading the city: natural forms to solve real structural problems, not visions out of time.
The city that rewrites itself: every building bears the visible scars of the twentieth century.
Where East and West are built: every great building has been a church, a mosque, a museum.
Le Corbusier and the modern city: three centuries of debate on what a city should be, in five buildings.
Álvaro Siza and Atlantic stone: an architecture that seems to have grown out of the city, not designed on top of it.
Emptiness as design: every traditional building uses it as its primary compositional element.
Where tradition and the future ignore each other: neighbourhoods like parallel universes, with no stylistic centre.
The birth of the skyscraper: in forty years, between 1880 and 1920, the city invented everything we know about skyscrapers.
Frequently asked questions
How does the interactive architecture-travel map work?
It collects every place mentioned in the site's itineraries and articles on a single map, filterable by historical period, material and geographic area, with the option to build a personalized itinerary and download it as a printable A5 travel booklet, complete with a QR code to Google Maps for every stop.
How do you plan an effective architecture trip?
By choosing a thread instead of a list of famous buildings: one architect (tracing their work across a city), one material (how it's used in different contexts), or one historical period. It's the criterion behind this site's itineraries — every city tells a specific story, not a checklist of things to photograph.
Which cities do this site's architecture itineraries currently cover?
Rome and Venice in Italy; Barcelona, Berlin, Istanbul, Paris and Porto in Europe; Kyoto and Tokyo in Asia; Chicago in the Americas — with new itineraries added regularly.
What is the printable travel booklet?
A personalized guide generated from the interactive map based on the chosen itinerary: a zone map for each city, context cards on architects and movements the first time they appear, comparisons between works, and practical information for each stop, with a QR code to Google Maps instead of a text link that's useless on printed paper.