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Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto traces its founding to 711 CE and the Hata clan, immigrants from the Korean Peninsula who brought irrigation, silk farming, and sake brewing to Yamashiro province. The founding myth in the Fudoki tells of Hata no Irogu shooting an arrow at a rice cake that turned into a white bird, flew to the peak of Mount Inari, and made rice grow where it landed. The clan's private guardian deity was elevated by the imperial court into a national protector of the harvest. The shrine was relocated in 816 at the request of the monk Kukai, its main hall dates to 1499, and its two-story Romon gate was built by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Trails run about four kilometers up the 233 meter mountain.

During the Edo period, from 1603 to 1868, businesses began donating vermilion torii gates in thanks for answered prayers, with their names carved into the pillars. About 10,000 now line the mountain, including roughly 800 in the tightly packed Senbon Torii. Fox messengers called kitsune guard the paths, often holding the key to the rice granary. The shrine keeps its sacred mirror in open view, and ordinary worshippers have built tens of thousands of personal stone altars. Through ritual division of the deity, some 32,000 Inari subshrines now exist across Japan.

• Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto walked through the gates and drew on them for the Star Fox series
• In 965 CE Emperor Murakami made Fushimi Inari one of the original 16 shrines to receive written reports on state affairs
• From 1871 to 1946 it held the top rank of government-supported shrines, Kanpei Taisha
• Police counted 2.69 million visitors in the first three days of the 2006 New Year
• Tsujiura senbei, fortune crackers sold near the shrine, are traced as the origin of the American fortune cookie

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In spring 2000, developer Irvine Sellar met Italian architect Renzo Piano in Berlin to discuss replacing the 1970s Southwark Towers near London Bridge. Piano said he hated conventional skyscrapers, then sketched a tapering spire on the back of a menu, inspired by ship masts and Canaletto's church spires. English Heritage called it a shard of glass through the heart of historic London, and the developers adopted the insult as the official name. The design used 11,000 angled glass panes meant to reflect the changing sky. When the credit crunch hit in 2007 and costs rose from 350 million to nearly 435 million pounds, Qatari investors stepped in, and today the State of Qatar owns 95 percent.

The 309.6 meter tower was one of the first UK buildings redesigned after the NIST report on the World Trade Center, using post-tensioned concrete and a 400 millimeter sway tolerance. It was also the UK's first top-down build, digging basements while the core rose. Its 500 ton, 66 meter spire was test assembled on an airfield in North Yorkshire. Inside, offices, restaurants, the Shangri-La hotel, and a public observatory are stacked vertically, but the ten apartments on floors 53 to 65 have never been occupied.

• Children of Men used a CGI Shard in the London skyline before the real building existed
• A fox named Romeo lived near the 72nd floor during construction, eating builders' scraps
• Oxford researcher Bradley Garrett said over 20 urban explorers reached the top during construction
• In 2013 staff gave six Greenpeace climbers protesting Shell's Arctic drilling safety advice during their 16 hour ascent
• Free climber George King-Thompson scaled it without ropes in 2019 and received six months' detention for breaching an injunction

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For centuries Brazil's people and wealth clung to the Atlantic coast, first in Salvador and from 1763 in Rio de Janeiro. In 1827 José Bonifácio, an advisor to Emperor Pedro I, proposed moving the capital inland and suggested the name Brasília. In 1883 the Italian saint Don Bosco dreamed of a promised land between the 15th and 20th parallels beside a man-made lake. The 1891 Constitution mandated the move, and Belgian astronomer Louis Cruls surveyed the Cruls Quadrilateral in the 1890s. Nothing happened until President Juscelino Kubitschek, promising 50 years of progress in five, built the city in 41 months and inaugurated it on April 21, 1960, flying in materials before roads existed and relying on migrant workers called candangos.

Lúcio Costa won the 1957 master plan competition, which drew over 5,000 entrants, with little more than sketches and a report. His cross-shaped plan curved into the famous airplane outline, though Costa denied it was meant to be a plane. Superquadras were meant to mix classes and prevent favelas, and roads were designed with no traffic lights. Reality intervened: the core stayed near its planned 500,000 people while satellite cities pushed the metro area past 3.5 million, traffic lights arrived on the Monumental Axis, and the wealthy center earned the nickname Fantasy Island.

• Oscar Niemeyer and engineer Joaquim Cardozo designed the cathedral as a hyperboloid of 16 concrete columns weighing 90 tons each
• The Palácio da Alvorada appears to hover just above the ground on slender curved columns
• Lake Paranoá was dammed to raise humidity during a dry season when levels drop below 30 percent
• Vila Amaury, the village where the first candangos lived, now lies underwater and draws scuba divers
• Brasília became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 and the birthplace of Brazilian rock bands like Legião Urbana

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In 1631 Mumtaz Mahal, chief consort of the fifth Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, died delivering their 14th child, a daughter named Gohara Begum. The emperor shut down his court for a week, banned music for two years, and set out to build an earthly replica of Jannah, the Islamic paradise, on the Yamuna River in Agra. He traded Raja Jai Singh I a palace in the center of the city for the riverfront plot. From roughly 1632 to 1653, more than 20,000 workers raised the site 50 feet, built a brick scaffold around the tomb, and hauled Makrana marble up a 15 kilometer earthen ramp with elephants and oxen. The project cost around 32 million rupees and used 28 kinds of precious and semi-precious stones from China, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Tibet.

The builder did not get a happy ending. His son Aurangzeb won a war of succession, deposed him in 1658, and held him under house arrest in Agra Fort, where he could only look at the Taj until his death in 1666. Aurangzeb then placed his father's larger cenotaph off to the west of Mumtaz's centered one, breaking the room's perfect symmetry. Later centuries brought Jat looters from Bharatpur, Lord Curzon's British lawns in 1908, bamboo camouflage against bombers, and clay mud packs to fight yellowing from refinery pollution.

• The four minarets lean slightly outward so they would fall away from the dome in an earthquake
• Calligrapher Amanat Khan enlarged the Quranic lettering toward the top of the arches so it reads as uniform from the ground, and was allowed to sign his work
• The tomb sits at the garden's northern edge, likely so the Yamuna could serve as one of the rivers of paradise
• No evidence supports the legend that Shah Jahan maimed his builders, many of whom went on to other imperial projects
• 1990s excavations at Mehtab Bagh found no Black Taj, only discolored white stones and a pool built to reflect the monument at night

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Venice's stone palaces do not rest on bedrock. They stand on thousands of alder trunks driven through lagoon mud into hard clay, topped with Istrian limestone. In the oxygen-free mud, bacteria could not rot the wood, and mineral-rich salt water slowly petrified it. The city began in the fifth century as a refuge for people fleeing Attila the Hun and other invaders who sacked mainland cities like Padua and Aquileia, settling a malarial lagoon of 118 islands that cavalry could not cross. Drifting away from Byzantine rule, they elected their first Doge in 697. With no farmland, Venetians turned to the sea, and by the 13th century controlled trade in salt, spices, and silk, backed by the gold ducat.

The Arsenale, often called the first factory, moved hulls along canals past specialized guilds and could build and equip a galley in a day, supporting a fleet of over 3,000 ships. In 1204 Doge Enrico Dandolo steered the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople after the crusaders could not pay for their fleet. Vasco da Gama's 1497 route around Africa broke the Venetian monopoly, and after Ottoman expansion and plagues in 1348, 1575, and 1630, the Republic surrendered to Napoleon in 1797. Today the city subsides one to two millimeters a year, worsened by 20th century artesian wells banned in the 1960s. In November 2019 water peaked at 1.87 meters and flooded more than 80 percent of the city.

• The bronze horses on St. Mark's Basilica, looted from Constantinople in 1204
• Murano glassmakers isolated on their island to guard trade secrets
• Aldus Manutius and his portable octavo books, italic type, and standardized comma and semicolon
• The polychoral music of St. Mark's two facing choir lofts, a path toward Vivaldi, and the Venetian origin of the word ghetto
• The MOSE barrier's 78 air-filled steel pontoons, delayed by corruption at a cost near 7 billion euros

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Nobody knows what the builders of Teotihuacan called the Pyramid of the Sun; the Aztecs named it after arriving centuries after the city was abandoned. Standing on the Avenue of the Dead between the Pyramid of the Moon and the Ciudadela in modern Mexico, it is the third largest ancient pyramid in the Americas after La Danta in Guatemala and the Great Pyramid of Cholula. Its base measures roughly 220 by 230 meters and it holds over 1.18 million cubic meters of material, most of it raised in one phase around 200 AD by workers carrying earth and volcanic rock in tumpline baskets into a grid of internal retaining walls. Surveys list its height as either 65.5 or 71.17 meters, depending on whether the vanished summit temple is counted.

The pyramid was once coated in lime plaster, which required burning huge amounts of wood and served as waterproofing, and painted with jaguars, stars, and snake rattles. It aligns north with Cerro Gordo and with sunrises and sunsets on Mesoamerican quarter days, and the city grid copies its orientation. In 1971 archaeologist Ernesto Taboada found a seven meter pit at the foot of the stairs leading to a cave under the pyramid's center, once proposed as Chicomoztoc, the Nahua cave of origins. Doris Heyden argued the underground shrine came first. Rene Millon's 1959 tunnel study found pottery and hearths, and the craftsmanship and immigrant neighborhoods argue against the idea that slaves built it.

• The missing summit altar, which leaves the deity once worshipped at the top unknown
• Why caves were seen as wombs of the earth tied to Tlaloc and rain festivals like Etzalcualiztli
• Obsidian arrowheads and human figurines found inside, thought to represent sacrificial victims
• The stone Teotihuacan Ocelot container found near the pyramid, now in the British Museum
• Child burials at the corners as dedication offerings, and muon detectors now scanning for hidden chambers

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Kyoto's Golden Pavilion, officially Rokuon-ji or Deer Garden Temple, began when shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu bought a statesman's villa in 1397 and built the pavilion around 1399 as part of his retirement complex. His son turned it into a Zen temple after his death, as Yoshimitsu had wished. The gold leaf on the top two floors was meant to purify negative thoughts about death, catching sunlight off the Mirror Pond. The 12.5 meter building stacks three styles: the Chamber of Dharma Waters in the 11th century imperial aristocratic style, the Tower of Sound Waves in the samurai style with lattice windows and a shrine to Kannon, and the Cupola of the Ultimate in Chinese Zen style, holding Buddha relics beneath a bronze phoenix.

The pavilion was the only building in the complex to survive the Onin War of the 1460s and 1470s, and it stood for over 500 years. Then at 2:30 a.m. on July 2, 1950, 22 year old novice monk Hayashi Yoken set it on fire, destroying the original statue of Yoshimitsu. He fled to a hill and attempted suicide, was sentenced to seven years, was released in 1955 in failing health, and died of tuberculosis in 1956. The event inspired Yukio Mishima's 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. A reconstruction was completed in 1955, and in 1986 and 1987 the top floors were recoated with 20 kilograms of gold leaf five times thicker than the original.

• How lattice windows on the samurai floor cast shifting shadows as a reminder of impermanence
• Shakkei, or borrowed scenery, pruning garden trees to blend with the mountains beyond the temple walls
• Ten islands in the Mirror Pond, the largest representing Japan itself
• Four stones in a line representing sailboats bound for the Isle of Eternal Life
• Why rebuilding with thicker gold reflects a view of preservation unlike the material focus of Notre Dame's restoration

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Along State Highway 165 southwest of Pueblo, in Colorado's San Isabel National Forest, stands a 160 foot stone castle with towers, wrought iron walkways, and arched windows, built almost single handedly by Jim Bishop. Born in Honolulu in 1944, Bishop bought the land at 15 for $450 saved from mowing lawns and delivering newspapers. In 1969 he and his wife Phoebe began building a one room family cottage. When he covered a metal water tank with cemented rocks to hide it, passing neighbors said it looked like a castle turret, and the remark changed the project entirely. He began hauling stone by the truckload and building upward.

In 1988 the Bishops' four year old son Roy was killed in a logging accident on the property. Asked decades later why he kept building there, Bishop said, "What am I going to run to?" He fought officials for about 40 years over the rocks he took from the national forest, and in 1996 over his homemade highway signs, which ended with the state issuing official ones. Known for shouting blunt political opinions from the scaffolding, he drew warnings from roadside travel guides. After Jim and Phoebe were both diagnosed with cancer in 2014 and 2015, trustee David Merrill tried to take over and rename the site, and the couple spent $20,000 to win back clear title. Bishop died in Pueblo on November 21, 2024, at 80, and his son Dan now cares for the castle.

• A 40 year dispute over fees for truckloads of stone gathered in the San Isabel National Forest
• Merrill's attempt, recorded in Custer County, to rebrand the site as Castle Church for the Redemption
• A March 28, 2018 electrical fire that destroyed the gift shop and guest house while the stone castle survived
• Volunteers and donations that let the attraction reopen the same week as the 2018 fire
• The 2026 Aspen Acres Fire forcing evacuation in June, with the castle unscathed and reopened in August

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Creating New York's Central Park took more gunpowder than the Battle of Gettysburg. In the 1840s Manhattan had only about 165 acres of public squares, and figures like William Cullen Bryant and Andrew Jackson Downing pushed for a park to rival London and Paris. A plan to buy the 160 acre Jones's Wood was struck down in court, so the city turned to a 750 acre site around the Croton Aqueduct's receiving reservoir. The 1853 Central Park Act used eminent domain to clear the land, including Seneca Village, a predominantly Black community of two story homes, three churches, and a school, where property ownership gave Black men the right to vote. In 1858 Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a 33 entry contest with the Greensward Plan.

Inspired by cemeteries like Mount Auburn and Green-Wood and by England's Birkenhead Park, they hid crosstown traffic in sunken transverse roads blasted through bedrock. Over 20,000 laborers moved about five million cubic feet of soil and rock, imported more than 18,500 cubic yards of topsoil from New Jersey and Long Island, and moved mature trees by machine; five workers died. In 1870 Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall seized control and Olmsted and Vaux resigned, returning after Tweed's fall to finish the park in 1876. Robert Moses later added playgrounds and Wollman Rink, and after the decay of the 1960s and 1970s the Central Park Conservancy took over in 1980.

• Military engineer Egbert Viele's 1856 survey and his own park design, which the commission discarded
• Ignaz Anton Pilat's plantings and George E. Waring Jr.'s drainage system that kept the swamps at bay
• The 1956 Tavern on the Green parking lot fight, when Moses sent bulldozers at night and mothers stopped him in court
• Proposals during the park's decline for public housing, a private golf course, and a revolving World's Fair
• A 2009 study crediting the park with over $656 million in annual tax revenue for the city

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Beneath Cologne Cathedral lie a late antique Christian meeting house, a sixth century Merovingian church, and the Carolingian Hildebold Cathedral of 870. Everything changed in 1164, when Emperor Frederick Barbarossa took the bones of the Three Magi from Milan and gave them to Archbishop Rainald of Dassel. Housed in the golden Shrine of the Three Kings, built from 1190 to 1225, the relics drew so many pilgrims that the old church could not handle the crowds. In 1248 Master Gerhard laid out a Gothic cathedral modeled on French designs like Amiens. By around 1560 the money ran out, and for roughly 400 years a medieval wooden crane sat atop the unfinished south tower.

In the 1840s the original facade plans were rediscovered, and the Central-Dombauverein raised two thirds of the cost, with Protestant Prussia paying the rest to win over its new Catholic Rhineland subjects. Built with iron roof girders, it was finished in 1880 and was the world's tallest building at 157 meters for four years. In World War II it took 14 direct bomb hits but stood, partly because Allied pilots used its spires to navigate. Architect Willi Weyres repaired the crossing tower in 1965 in an Art Deco style critics called a wart. Today stone decays from acid rain and rusting iron dowels, and the cathedral will begin charging tourist admission in 2026 to fund upkeep.

• An American Pershing and a German Panther tank fighting at the base of the spires in March 1945
• A 2021 drone survey of over 200,000 photos producing a 25 billion polygon, 50 gigabyte 3D model
• Gerhard Richter's 2007 south transept window of 11,500 colored squares arranged by computer
• The 2024 decision to keep an antisemitic Judensau carving in the choir stalls as a teaching tool
• Andrea Buettner's winning 2025 mural of the Torah ark base from a destroyed Cologne synagogue, reused under an altarpiece