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Hoover Dam was born from fear of the Colorado River, which flooded in spring and dried to a trickle by late summer. After a canal to California's newly branded Imperial Valley was breached, the river poured into a desert basin for two years and created the Salton Sea, and the Southern Pacific Railroad spent $3 million forcing it back. When the St. Francis Dam collapsed in March 1928 and killed up to 600 people, Congress demanded an arch gravity design on ultra conservative lines and passed the Boulder Canyon Project Act that December. By 1931, Depression-era workers and their families were crowding into a squatter camp called Ragtown, where temperatures reached 120 degrees. High scalers dangled from ropes with jackhammers and dynamite, and dipping cloth hats in tar led Six Companies Inc. to order hard hats for the site.

Superintendent Frank Crowe faced $3,000 a day in penalties, and when tunnel workers struck in August 1931 over a wage cut, he fired them all. Officially 112 people died, but 42 deaths in 140 degree diversion tunnels were labeled pneumonia, which workers said hid carbon monoxide poisoning. To stop the concrete from taking 125 years to cool, crews poured it in blocks chilled by 582 miles of pipe. Gordon Kaufmann gave the dam its Art Deco look, and Allen Tupper True drew on Navajo and Pueblo designs for the interiors. The dam starved the Colorado River Delta and now faces a megadrought that has pushed Lake Mead toward dead pool.

• Oscar J.W. Hansen's terrazzo star map fixing the sky of September 30, 1935, for future astronomers
• Surveyor J.G. Tierney drowning in 1922, and his son Patrick Tierney dying on the project 13 years later to the day
• How Harold Ickes renamed it Boulder Dam in 1933 until Congress restored Hoover's name in 1947
• Cavitation during the 1983 floods that blasted chunks of concrete from the spillway tunnels
• Cold water released from the bottom of Lake Mead pushing the humpback chub and other native fish toward extinction

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Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, holds the Guinness World Record for the highest density of white marble buildings, with a dental hospital shaped like a tooth, an airport terminal shaped like a falcon, and a development bank topped with a giant coin. It sits in a narrow oasis between the Karakum desert and the Kopetdag mountains, about 30 miles from Iran, on a fault line. Its roots go back to Konjikala, a Silk Road wine village leveled by an earthquake in the first century BC and later wiped out by the Mongols. The name likely comes from Ashk, the Persian name of Parthian founder Arsaces I, with abad meaning city, not the popular reading of city of love. In 1881 the Russian Empire built a garrison with a European street grid and brought in the Trans-Caspian Railway.

In October 1948 a magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck at night and shattered the city's adobe buildings, killing an estimated 110,000 to 176,000 people, about two thirds of the population, while Soviet reports claimed 40,000. The drained postwar Soviet Union rebuilt on the same 1880s grid with drab concrete blocks. After independence in 1991, President Saparmurat Niyazov launched the White City project with French and Turkish firms, cladding towers in marble imported from Italy and Vietnam. Human rights reports describe forced, uncompensated evictions as new development lines spread, often of homes survivors built after 1948 and never registered.

• Why adobe, strong under vertical weight, disintegrated under the side-to-side shaking of 1948
• The brief 1920s renaming of the city as Poltoratsk
• The Arch of Neutrality's golden Niyazov statue that rotated to follow the sun until it was moved in 2010
• Monuments to the bicycle and a gilded Alabai sheepdog in a traffic circle
• The Altyn Asyr bazaar, known as Tolkuchka, where carpets, livestock, and used cars keep the Silk Road trading spirit alive

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The Flatiron Building sits on a scalene right triangle created where Broadway, an old Native American trail, cuts diagonally across Manhattan's 1811 grid at Fifth Avenue and 22nd and 23rd Streets. In 1857 Amos Eno bought the block for $32,000, built the seven-story Cumberland apartments, and rented its exposed north wall to advertisers, including the New York Times with the city's first electric sign and a magic lantern that projected election news to huge crowds. By the 1890s the wall earned his family $42,000 a year. After his death, his son William bought the lot for $690,000 in 1899 and flipped it three weeks later, and in 1901 Harry S. Black of the Fuller Company paid about $2 million to build a headquarters there.

Daniel Burnham and Frederick P. Dinkelberg designed a 22-story tower shaped like a classical column, with limestone at the base and terracotta above, while engineer Corydon Purdy built a pre-cut steel frame braced for four times the expected wind. Crowds bet on when it would blow over and called it Burnham's Folly. It survived, but its downdrafts smashed windows, killed a 13-year-old bicycle messenger in 1903, and lifted women's skirts. The building went into foreclosure in 1933 and sold for $100,000, then decayed under a deadlocked ownership group until a 2023 court-ordered auction and a plan to convert it to luxury condos by 2026.

• Why the Flatiron was not New York's first steel-framed skyscraper, and how the 1892 building code made it possible
• Red-hot rivets tossed through the air and a frame that fit together without a single re-drilled hole
• The cowcatcher retail space that developers forced on Burnham against his objections
• Police telling loiterers to skidoo, the local legend behind 23 skidoo
• Jacob Garlick winning the 2023 auction, then failing to pay the deposit and vanishing

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Boston's Central Artery/Tunnel Project, the Big Dig, replaced an elevated six-lane highway built through downtown in the 1950s, a green steel structure that displaced 20 percent of North End businesses and was mocked as Boston's other Green Monster. Designed for 75,000 vehicles a day, it carried 190,000 by the 1990s, and planners predicted 16-hour jams by 2010. After protests in the 1970s killed the Inner Belt bypass, the only option left was to go underground. Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan's veto to fund it, work began in 1991, and the main phases were finished around 2007. Crews dug slurry walls 120 feet deep through landfill, shipwrecks, and old foundations while keeping the old highway open above them, and froze the ground with chilled brine to tunnel beneath South Station's 400 daily trains.

Management by the Bechtel and Parsons Brinckerhoff consortium merged with the state turnpike authority, and the estimate of $2.8 billion grew to $14.6 billion, over $21 billion with interest. Leaks hidden since 2001 were exposed by MIT researchers, and in 2004 harbor water burst into a tunnel. In 2005 state police raided Aggregate Industries for mixing rejected concrete into fresh loads and forging delivery times. In July 2006 concrete ceiling panels held up with a short-term epoxy fell on a car and killed Milena Del Valle. The project cut vehicle hours of travel by 62 percent and created the Rose Kennedy Greenway, but induced demand pushed congestion to the suburbs.

• The rat mitigation program needed before crews could disturb the city's underground
• How bentonite clay held slurry trenches open until concrete pumped from below pushed it out
• The Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge by Christian Menn, born from a lawsuit by Cambridge over ugly designs
• Square-edged Ginsu guardrails and a $54 million fix for 25,000 light fixtures corroded by galvanic reaction
• Abandoned transit promises including the North-South Rail Link, the Red-Blue connector, and the Arborway streetcar

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In June 1926 an elderly man in threadbare clothes was struck by a tram in Barcelona, and because he looked like a vagrant with empty pockets he was taken to a hospital for the poor. Days later a chaplain recognized him as Antoni Gaudí, the architect behind the city's skyline. Born in 1852 in Reus or Riudoms (he later claimed Riudoms, likely out of spite after Reus rejected one of his proposals), Gaudí came from generations of coppersmiths who hammered flat sheets into boilers and stills, which he credited for his three-dimensional thinking. Rheumatism kept him from playing as a child, so he studied how leaves, trees, and bones carry weight. He earned average grades at the Barcelona Higher School of Architecture, and director Elies Rogent said at his 1878 graduation that the school had given the title either to a fool or a genius.

A glove display cabinet at the 1878 Paris World's Fair caught the eye of industrialist Eusebi Güell, who became his lifelong patron. Gaudí rejected Gothic flying buttresses as crutches and built with hyperboloids and catenary arches found through hanging string models. Once a dandy with a carriage, he became an ascetic Catholic, nearly died from fasting in 1894, and was beaten and arrested in 1924 for refusing to speak Spanish to the Civil Guard. After losing his niece Rosa, collaborator Francesc Berenguer, and Güell by 1918, he moved into the Sagrada Família workshop and begged for money to keep building it.

• How a hyperboloid can be built from perfectly straight bricks or rods, like a twisted bundle of spaghetti
• The Colonia Güell model of strings and bags of birdshot, photographed and flipped upside down to reveal the structure
• His insistence on speaking only Catalan to King Alfonso XIII, and his theory of Mediterranean light at 45 degrees
• Anarchists smashing and burning his models in 1936, and Dalí and Le Corbusier reviving his reputation in the 1950s
• Seven UNESCO World Heritage works and Pope Francis declaring him venerable in April 2025

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The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur rose on the former Selangor Turf Club racetrack and were the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004, and they remain the tallest twin towers. The Malaysian government asked architect Cesar Pelli for an icon that reflected Malaysia's Muslim culture, and he based the 88-story floor plan on the Rub el Hizb, an eight-pointed star of two overlapping squares, adding rounded scallops to make usable office space. Planning began on January 1, 1992, but test boreholes revealed that half the site sat on decayed limestone that dropped off like an underground cliff. The builders shifted both towers 61 meters onto the soft rock side and drove 104 concrete piles per tower, 60 to 114 meters deep, beneath a raft foundation poured continuously for 54 hours.

With a six-year deadline, Tower 1 went to a Japanese consortium led by Hazama and Tower 2 to a South Korean consortium led by Samsung C&T, which reached the top first despite a one-month handicap. Steel was too expensive, so the towers use Fazlur Rahman Khan's tube-in-tube system in high-strength concrete. When one batch failed a strength test, work stopped at a cost of $700,000 a day and a finished floor was demolished. On September 12, 2001, a bomb threat forced both towers to evacuate at once, exposing the limits of the stairwells. Later the towers drew Felix Baumgartner's 1999 BASE jump and Alain Robert's climbs.

• Why a 54-hour pour could not pause without creating a fatal cold joint in the foundation
• Three on-site concrete plants set up so a bad batch could never stop construction again
• The 750-ton double-decker skybridge at levels 41 and 42, lifted over three days in July 1995 and built to slide as the towers sway
• Double-decker elevators serving odd and even floors, and the post-2001 plan to use elevators in evacuations
• Alain Robert arrested on the 60th floor in 1997 and 2007 before reaching the top of Tower 2 in 2009

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The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum began with a conversion. Solomon R. Guggenheim, a Gilded Age mining magnate who collected old masters, met the artist Hilla von Rebay in 1926, and she turned him toward non-objective art, which she believed carried spiritual and utopian power. He bought works by Wassily Kandinsky in bulk and showed them in his apartment at the Plaza Hotel, then in 1939 opened the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in a Midtown townhouse. In 1943 Rebay asked for a temple of spirit and chose Frank Lloyd Wright, whom she thought was dead until Irene Guggenheim pointed out he was 76 and still working. Wright, who had never designed a museum, proposed an inverted ziggurat with a continuous spiral ramp under a glass skylight on Fifth Avenue facing Central Park.

The project took 15 years and six sets of working drawings. World War II caused material shortages, postwar inflation pushed the budget from about $1 million to $2 million, and Guggenheim died in 1949. In 1952 the trustees forced Rebay to resign and renamed the institution the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Construction began in 1956, the same year 21 artists published a letter protesting that the slanted, curved walls were unfit for paintings. It opened in October 1959 to crowds of 600 people an hour. Director Thomas Messer, who feared his first show there would be his last, invented angled mounts to hang flat canvases on walls that lean back.

• Rebay's belief that art without recognizable subjects could speak to the soul after the devastation of World War I
• Giuseppe Momo's 1932 double-helix staircase at the Vatican Museums as a likely inspiration for the ramp
• Wright's goal of letting a wheelchair user travel from top to bottom without a single stair
• An Alexander Calder mobile hanging perfectly plumb and exposing how steeply the walls tilt
• The 1963 Thannhauser Impressionist collection, Rebay's own bequest in 1971, and Thomas Krens's $24 million restoration with a 10-story annex

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In the late 1930s, archaeologists digging under a toppled stone at Avebury in Wiltshire found a crushed skeleton with a leather pouch holding three silver coins from the 1320s, iron scissors, and a lancet: a medieval traveling barber surgeon killed while helping bury one of the stones. Avebury is the largest megalithic stone circle in the world, so large that a village with a pub, thatched cottages, and a post office sits inside it. In the third millennium BC, early farmers dug a ditch 11 meters into chalk bedrock with red deer antlers and cattle shoulder blades, raised a bank over 340 meters across, and set up an outer circle of 98 unworked sarsen stones, some over 40 tons, with two inner circles and stone-lined avenues leading in.

By the late Middle Ages the Christian villagers saw the stones as the devil's work, naming them the Devil's Chair, the Devil's Coits, and the Devil's Brand Irons. After the surgeon's death, the Black Death hit in 1349 and the burying stopped for three centuries. Puritan-era villagers later smashed stones with fire and cold water for building material. John Aubrey came upon the site while hunting in 1649 and brought Charles II, and William Stukeley documented it in the 1720s while bending his measurements to fit a Druid and Trinity theory. By the 1930s only nine outer stones still stood, until marmalade heir Alexander Keiller bought the site and re-erected the buried stones.

• How antlers were used as picks along fault lines in the chalk, with cattle shoulder blades as shovels
• The unusually clean interior that suggests the henge was kept off limits for special ceremonies
• The thermal shock method of heating toppled stones with bonfires and drenching them with cold water
• Keiller's concrete markers for stones that had been destroyed, and the 50 local men he hired
• Modern Druid rites at the Devil's Chair and the weekend rota pagan groups use to share the stones

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In 356 BCE, on the same night ancient historians claim Alexander the Great was born, a man named Herostratus set fire to the wooden roof of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, near modern Selçuk in Turkey. The temple was said to be twice the size of the Parthenon and took 120 years to build, and the heat of the collapsing roof turned its marble to chalky powder through calcination. Almost nothing is known about Herostratus himself, but the fact that he was tortured on the rack suggests he was of low social standing, since full citizens were often protected from such treatment. Under torture he confessed that his only motive was everlasting fame.

Ephesus executed him and passed a decree forbidding anyone to speak or write his name on pain of death. It failed almost immediately. The historian Theopompus of Chios, outside Ephesian jurisdiction, recorded the name, and later writers from Valerius Maximus and Lucian to Chaucer kept it alive. Jefferson was once accused of a herostratic dream of glory, and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a short story inspired by him. The episode also questions whether a confession extracted on the rack can be trusted, and whether Herostratus was a scapegoat for a larger plot.

• How the ban on his name became one of the earliest examples of what is now called the Streisand effect
• Why heat from a burning wooden roof could destroy a marble temple
• Luigi Lucheni, who assassinated Empress Elisabeth of Austria for newspaper fame and blew kisses during his trial
• Arthur Bremer, who shot George Wallace in 1972 and picked his target by expected media coverage
• Philosopher Jeffrey Scarre's argument that Herostratus is remembered only for pointless, pathetic stupidity

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The Temple of Heaven in Beijing was built in 1420 by the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty, the same ruler who built the Forbidden City, and renamed in 1534 by the Jiajing Emperor. It was the stage for a terrifying ritual: at the winter solstice the emperor, as the Son of Heaven, prayed for a good harvest, and a single stumble or dropped jade tablet was believed to doom the nation to famine. Before the ceremony he fasted and gave up meat, alcohol, and music, and commoners had to lock themselves indoors so their gaze would not pollute the procession. The 2.73 square kilometer complex, larger than the Forbidden City, maps Chinese cosmology with a circular north wall for heaven and a square south wall for earth.

Its centerpiece, the 38 meter Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, is built entirely of wood with no nails, held together by interlocking dougong brackets and mortise and tenon joints that let it flex in storms and earthquakes. It burned after a lightning strike in 1889 and was rebuilt. Later the site was occupied by the Anglo-French alliance during the Second Opium War, used as a military command post by the Eight Nation Alliance in 1900, and left to rot after the Qing fell in 1912. In 1914 Yuan Shikai performed the old Ming prayer to bolster his bid to become emperor, and rioters damaged the central altar during the Cultural Revolution. It opened as a public park in 1918 and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998.

• Pillars that work as a calendar: 4 for the seasons, 12 for the months, 12 for the two-hour periods of the day, and 24 for the solar terms
• The Circular Mound Altar, built in 1530 and enlarged in 1740, with the Heart of Heaven stone where the emperor's voice resonated off the marble
• The mortarless Echo Wall around the Imperial Vault of Heaven that carries a whisper across the courtyard
• An obsession with the number nine, from nine plates around the center stone out to 81 in the ninth ring
• Today's 267 hectares of parkland filled with tai chi, chess, choirs, and dancing, reached from the Temple of Heaven East Gate station on Line 5