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In 1865, as the American Civil War ended, French historian Édouard de Laboulaye, president of the French Anti-Slavery Society, proposed at a dinner near Versailles that France and the United States build a monument to American independence and democracy. Under Napoleon III, praising American liberty was a way to criticize French rule without saying so. Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi reworked a design he had pitched for the Suez Canal at Port Said, Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia, which Egypt's ruler and Ferdinand de Lesseps rejected as too costly. To avoid revolutionary imagery, Bartholdi dropped the Roman liberty cap, which Jefferson Davis had once objected to on the Capitol's Statue of Freedom, and gave her robes, a radiate crown, and a Roman legal tablet dated July 4, 1776.

A broken shackle and chain lie at her feet, hidden under her robes, after Bartholdi abandoned sketches of her holding them aloft. Gustave Eiffel designed a flexible iron skeleton for a copper skin only 3/32 of an inch thick. The French public crowdfunded the statue, but Americans were slow to fund the pedestal until Joseph Pulitzer shamed the wealthy in the New York World and printed the names of small donors. The statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886, prompting the first ticker tape parade.

• Her torch arm stood in Madison Square Park, where visitors paid to climb to the balcony to raise funds
• Emma Lazarus, who aided refugees fleeing pogroms, wrote The New Colossus, added on a plaque in 1903
• A 1916 stained glass torch leaked water into the arm and body for decades
• The 1984 to 1986 restoration found a misaligned arm, a head two feet off center, and asbestos insulation that had failed
• Workers froze paint with liquid nitrogen, blasted tar with baking soda, replaced the iron with stainless steel, and gilded a new torch in 24 karat gold

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A true gargoyle is a water spout: if water does not pour through a trough in its back and out of its mouth, it is a grotesque, a chimera, a boss, or in some regions a hunky punk. The word comes from the Old French gargouille and the root garg, meaning throat, the same root as gargle. Legend says the seventh century bishop Saint Romanus subdued a winged, fire-breathing dragon called the Gargouille near Rouen and burned it, but its fireproof head and neck would not burn, so townspeople mounted them on a church wall. Long necks were an engineering need, throwing rainwater clear of walls so it would not wash out mortar, and Gothic builders cut channels into flying buttresses to feed them. The idea is ancient: of 102 marble lion-head spouts on the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, only 39 survived.

In the 12th century the Church used gargoyles as visual warnings for illiterate congregations, though Bernard of Clairvaux attacked the monsters placed in cloisters as ridiculous distractions. Carvers turned to symbolic animals and then humans, including sinners spouting water from mouths or backsides. Underpaid stonemasons carved mocking corbel heads of clergy high on buildings like Reims Cathedral, unseen until 20th century photographers climbed the scaffolding. The London Building Act of 1724 required downpipes, ending the functional gargoyle.

• Medieval lions symbolized Christ, from myths of erasing tracks with their tails and reviving cubs after three days
• The hippopotamus and rhinoceros at Laon Cathedral are modern restoration additions with no medieval meaning
• Some gargoyles depicted moneylenders, prostitutes, and even women reading as sinners
• Gutzon Borglum carved grotesques for Princeton, and George B. Post used them in New York City
• John Taylor Arms's etchings of Notre Dame and Amiens spread their image across America

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Long before the Mughals, the ridge at Sikri held a settlement dating to the sixth century. Excavations at Bir Chhabili Tila uncovered brick walls, writing tablets, glass bangles, game pieces, a sculpture of the Jain goddess Ambika with a Brahmi inscription, and a Jain Sarasvati statue installed in 1010 that names the town Sikrikya. The Sikarwar Rajputs held the area until the Battle of Khanwa in 1527, and Babur renamed it Shukri and built a garden of victory beside its lake. In 1569 Akbar, with no surviving sons, sought the blessing of the Chishti Sufi saint Sheikh Salim. That year a son named Salim, the future Emperor Jahangir, was born at Sikri, and by 1573, after a Gujarat campaign, Akbar had named his new walled capital Fatehpur Sikri.

Built of local red sandstone on a ridge three kilometers long, the city blended Timurid planning with Hindu, Rajput, and Gujarati building traditions. In the Diwan-i-Khas, Akbar sat on a circular platform atop a single carved pillar, linked by walkways to corners where representatives of different faiths stood, and debates in the Ibadat Khana shaped his Din-i-Ilahi. English merchant Ralph Fitch found the city greater and more populous than London. Yet Akbar left in 1585 for the Punjab, returned only once in 1601, and by 1610 it was deserted.

• The 54 meter Buland Darwaza carries an inscription calling the world a bridge on which no one should build houses
• Sheikh Salim Chishti's tomb stands out in white marble with mother-of-pearl work and lacelike jali screens
• The five-story Panch Mahal rests on 176 carved columns and worked as a windcatcher
• Jahangir stayed three months in 1619 to escape a plague outbreak in Agra
• Historians debate whether water shortages or Akbar's shifting military priorities in the northwest drove the abandonment

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In the 1920s San Francisco was the largest American city still dependent on ferries, and the Southern Pacific Railroad's monopoly charged a dollar per car for a 20 minute crossing. The railroad sued to stop a bridge, and experts called the 6,700 foot, 372 foot deep strait unbridgeable. Engineer Joseph Strauss, who had proposed bridging the Bering Strait, promised to do it for 17 million dollars against a city estimate of 100 million, backed by the auto industry. His first design, a bulky double cantilever, was panned, and the Navy wanted black and yellow stripes. Strauss quietly relied on Leon Moisseiff's deflection theory for a flexible deck, architect Irving Morrow's Art Deco styling and International Orange, and principal engineer Charles Alton Ellis.

Ellis, a Greek scholar turned engineering professor, did the calculations and designed the arch that spares historic Fort Point. In November 1931 Strauss fired him, citing telegram costs. Jobless in the Depression, Ellis kept working 70 hours a week unpaid and delivered ten volumes of calculations, but was not officially recognized until 2007. Bank of America founder Amadeo Giannini bought the entire 30 million dollar bond issue in 1932, construction began in January 1933, and the bridge opened in May 1937, ahead of schedule and 1.3 million dollars under budget.

• A safety net caught 19 men, who formed the Halfway to Hell Club
• In February 1937 undersized bolts failed, a scaffold tore through the net, and ten of the 12 men who fell died
• About 300,000 people on the deck at the 1987 50th anniversary flattened the arch of the center span
• The corroded concrete deck was replaced with steel over 401 nights in the 1980s, and 38 painters and ironworkers maintain it year round
• New railing slats installed in 2020 made the bridge hum in high winds, and a 224 million dollar suicide deterrent net now runs its length

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A company town makes your employer your landlord, grocer, school board, and mayor. In the 1880s George Pullman built a planned town outside Chicago for about 6,000 employees of his railway car company, some 12,000 people with families, complete with brick houses, indoor plumbing, a library, churches, and a theater. When the Panic of 1893 hit, he cut wages and hours but kept rents and store prices the same, so some workers took home pay envelopes with two cents in them. The Pullman Strike of 1894 paralyzed the national rail network, a federal commission called his paternalism un-American, and in 1898 the Illinois Supreme Court forced the company to give up the town.

British industrialists tried gentler versions: Lever Brothers built Port Sunlight in 1888, and the Quaker Cadbury brothers built Bournville in 1895 with gardens, workers councils, and no pubs. Geography drove others, including over a hundred textile colonies on Catalonia's rivers and the Sewell copper mine in the Andes, founded in 1906, where 16,000 people lived on stairways instead of streets. At their peak the United States had more than 2,500 company towns, which faded with the New Deal, the automobile, and home ownership, until tech firms revived the idea.

• The Bolsover Colliery Company laid out Creswell in concentric circles so neighbors could watch each other's doors
• Henry Ford's Fordlandia in the Amazon imposed Midwestern food and nine to five hours, packed rubber trees into rows that blight destroyed, and was abandoned by 1934
• Under South African rule, Namibian contract miners lived in caged compounds enforced by pass laws
• In 2021 Nevada governor Steve Sisolak proposed Innovation Zones letting tech firms form their own governments
• Starbase, Texas incorporated on May 20, 2025, with SpaceX vice president Bobby Peden as its first mayor

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Westminster Abbey began on Thorny Island, a marshy gravel bank in the Thames, where a fisherman claimed a vision of St. Peter. The Fishmongers' Company still presents the Abbey with a salmon every year. St. Dunstan and King Edgar settled Benedictine monks there around 959, and in the 1040s Edward the Confessor rebuilt it as England's first cruciform church. It was consecrated in December 1065, and Edward was buried there days later in January 1066. When his tomb was opened in 1103 his body was found preserved, and he was canonized in 1161. From 1245 Henry III rebuilt the church in French Gothic style, with flying buttresses, the highest Gothic nave in England at over 100 feet, Purbeck marble, and a central open space called the theater for coronations.

Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries hit an institution earning 3,000 pounds a year in 1535. Agents melted down the gold around Edward's coffin, but monks hid his bones. When the short-lived Diocese of Westminster was dissolved, its revenue went to St. Paul's, the origin of robbing Peter to pay Paul. In 1560 Elizabeth I made the Abbey a royal peculiar, answerable only to the sovereign. More than 3,300 people are now buried or commemorated there, which William Morris called the National Valhalla.

• The Cosmati pavement of 1268, made from nearly 30,000 fragments by Roman craftsmen, lies under every coronation since
• Isaac Newton's 1727 state funeral opened burial to scientists, later including Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking
• Oliver Cromwell was dug up after the Restoration, hung at Tyburn, and beheaded
• Chaplain David Railton proposed the Grave of the Unknown Warrior, the one grave no one may walk on
• Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon left her wedding bouquet there in 1923, a custom most royal brides have followed

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Construction at Karnak, near modern Luxor, began around 1970 BC under the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Senusret I and continued until the Ptolemaic era around 30 BC, with roughly 30 pharaohs adding, altering, and erasing work. The Egyptians called it Ipet-isut, the most select of places, while the modern name comes from the nearby village of El Karnak, Arabic for fortified village. Its centerpiece, the Precinct of Amun-Re, holds the Great Hypostyle Hall: 1.2 acres, 134 columns in 16 rows, with 12 central columns 69 feet tall. Sandstone came 100 miles by barge from Gebel el-Silsila during the Nile flood, and 70 ton architraves were hauled up mud brick ramps on timber sleds over wetted sand.

The Precinct of Mut honored a mother goddess who absorbed Sekhmet, Bastet, Menhit, and Nekhbet as Thebes grew. A Johns Hopkins team found evidence of a festival of drunkenness reenacting the myth in which Ra tricked the bloodthirsty Sekhmet with red beer. After Akhenaten built a temple to the Aten beside the Amun precinct, the Amun priesthood dismantled it and used its blocks as fill inside later pylons. In 356 AD Emperor Constantius II ordered pagan temples closed, and Christians later set up a Coptic church in the festival hall of Thutmose III.

• An unfinished pillar shows carving was done after blocks were lifted into place
• The main shrine was aligned to catch the sun on the winter solstice
• Hatshepsut built a porch of drunkenness to hold festival crowds
• Medieval European maps wrongly placed Thebes near Memphis, close to modern Cairo
• A Venetian described the ruins in 1589, Capuchin monks recorded the name Karnak in 1668, and Napoleon's 1798 to 1799 expedition finally documented it

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The Transamerica Pyramid at 600 Montgomery Street in San Francisco sits on layered history: the shoreline of Yerba Buena Cove, where a Mexican pueblo was founded in 1834, the buried hull of the 1849 whaling ship Niantic, and the Montgomery Block, which survived the 1906 earthquake before being torn down for a parking lot in 1959. After 1906, A.P. Giannini ran his Bank of Italy from the site. CEO John Beckett later demanded a pyramid to let light reach the street, and architect William Pereira proposed 1,150 feet before the city capped him at 853. In December 1969 a slip-formed foundation nine feet thick was poured nonstop for three days, and onlookers tossed thousands of dollars in coins into the concrete.

Critics called it Pereira's Prick, but the crushed quartz facade and 3,678 windows won people over. Many windows pivot 360 degrees so they can be cleaned from inside, and two exterior wings hold an elevator shaft and a stairwell with a smoke tower. Only two of 18 elevators reach the 48th floor, and above it the top 212 feet is a hollow spire climbed by a 60 degree stairway. Aegon bought Transamerica in 1999, and by 2011 the company had left the building entirely while keeping its silhouette as the logo.

• The Crown Jewel beacon at the peak is lit at Christmas, on Independence Day, and on the 9/11 anniversary
• A virtual observation deck with joystick-controlled spire cameras replaced the 27th floor deck
• Redwood Park holds transplanted redwoods, a Jumping Frog fountain, and a plaque to rat-catching dogs Bummer and Lazarus
• The USGS lists it among 39 high-rises with welds of the type the 1994 Northridge quake showed to be brittle
• After Aegon sold it for 650 million dollars in 2020, Norman Foster led a renovation, and a Cyprus-based firm bought it in April 2026

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After developer Floyd Brown defaulted on plans for a 25-story office building on the old Waldorf Astoria site at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, a group including John J. Raskob, Pierre S. du Pont, and former New York governor Al Smith took over. They gave architect William F. Lamb of Shreve, Lamb and Harmon a 50 million dollar budget and 18 months from first sketch to opening. The 1916 zoning resolution forced the stepped setbacks, and a rule that no office sit more than 28 feet from a window kept the tower slender. Contractors Starrett Brothers and Eken ran the site like a vertical factory, with timed deliveries, rail carts on each floor, and prefabricated aluminum spandrels. At one point they raised 14 floors in 10 working days.

The builders ordered 18,000 psi steel when city code allowed only 16,000, and Mayor Jimmy Walker signed the new code on March 26, 1930, days before steel went up. The building opened May 1, 1931, after 13 and a half months, but the Great Depression left it the Empty State Building, with no profit until the early 1950s. In 1951 it sold to a group led by Roger L. Stevens for 51 million dollars, a record at the time, and King Kong and some 250 films made it a global icon.

• The 200 foot spire was built as a mooring mast for transatlantic zeppelins, and a blimp touched it briefly in September 1931
• Mohawk ironworkers caught hot rivets and walked beams without harnesses
• Its structural stiffness of 42 pounds per square foot exceeds the Willis Tower's 33
• In 1945 a B-25 bomber hit the 79th floor in fog, and parts reopened the next week
• It was the world's tallest building from 1931 until the World Trade Center's North Tower topped out in 1970

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On Kizhi Island in Lake Onega, in Russia's Republic of Karelia, the Church of the Transfiguration was begun in 1714 to replace a church destroyed by lightning. It rises 37 meters with 22 cascading domes, making it one of the tallest wooden buildings in northern Europe. Its main frame of Scots pine uses no nails: carpenters scribe fitted each log to the one below, packed moss between layers, and locked the corners with interlocking joints, cutting with axes that seal wood fibers against rot. The roof and domes do use about 180,000 nails holding 60,000 aspen shingles that weather to a metallic silver. Next door stands the heated Church of the Intercession, expanded to nine domes by 1764, where the congregation worshipped from October 1 until Easter.

By the late 1990s, 3D scans and fungal studies showed rotting lower logs and a dangerously leaning central octagon. From 1999 to 2014 restorers built an internal steel frame, jacked up the upper levels, and replaced or repaired the lower crowns zone by zone. Every log was numbered, photographed, and laser scanned first. About 30 percent of the wood was replaced with winter-cut Karelian pine dried on the island for years, and new pieces were left visibly distinct from the originals.

• Legend says the unnamed master builder threw his single axe into Lake Onega and declared no church would ever match it
• The belfry was rebuilt in 1862, 1874, and 1900 after repeated weather damage
• The 300 meter log fence marks holy ground and was never meant for defense
• The four-level iconostasis holds 102 icons from the 17th to 19th centuries
• Hidden steel ties, sensors, lighting, and radiant heating now let the summer church function year round