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A 2021 study of old maps and documents suggests the site was originally called Huayna Picchu or just Picchu. Hiram Bingham III, leading the Yale Peruvian Expedition in search of Vilcabamba or Vitcos, reached it on July 24, 1911, guided by farmer and innkeeper Melchor Arteaga. At the top he found two Quechua families farming the terraces, and an 11-year-old boy named Pablito showed him around. On the Temple of the Three Windows was a charcoal signature, A. Lizarraga 1902, left by Agustín Lizárraga, which Bingham recorded privately. In a 1922 letter he compared himself to Columbus, and in 1952 he published Lost City of the Incas. The emperor Pachacuti ordered the citadel built around 1420 as a royal retreat served by about 750 residents.

Isotope and genome studies of skeletons show those residents came from across the empire, from the coast, the Ecuadorian highlands, and the Amazon, with less wear than typical laborers. Builders placed the site on fault lines that supplied pre-fractured granite for mortarless ashlar walls, and about 12 acres of terraces handled 1,800 millimeters of yearly rain with layered stone, gravel, sand, and topsoil. The site was occupied from about 1420 to 1530, likely emptied by smallpox. Bingham's team removed thousands of artifacts in 1912, 1914, and 1915 on an 18-month loan that became a century-long dispute with Yale, pressed by figures such as Eliane Karp, until the last pieces returned to Cusco's Casa Concha Museum in 2012. It now draws over 1.5 million visitors a year.

• Teeth that record childhood water and food, and bones that record where a person lived later
• Llamas and alpacas brought down from 4,000 meters for meat and pelts, with dogs buried beside people
• The Intihuatana stone aligned with sacred peaks rather than serving as a simple sundial
• Sunlight entering the Intimachay cave near the December solstice for Capac Raymi initiations
• Bismuth bronze knives that show advanced Inca metallurgy, among the artifacts taken to Yale

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20 Fenchurch Street replaced a 1968 tower that had to be dismantled from the top down in the dense City of London. Developers Land Securities and Canary Wharf Group hired architect Rafael Viñoly, whose design widened toward the top, maximizing the high-rent upper floors on a small footprint and earning the nickname the Walkie Talkie. Heritage groups feared for protected views of St Paul's and the Tower of London, forcing the height down from 200 meters to 160 meters, and a 2007 public inquiry still approved it. In summer 2013 the concave, glass-clad south face focused sunlight onto Eastcheap, hitting 117 degrees Celsius at street level. A parked Jaguar XJ's mirrors and badge melted, the developers paid its owner 946 pounds, and a City AM reporter fried an egg on the pavement.

Viñoly had done it before with the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas, whose facade singed guests' hair by the pool. He said sunshade louvers had been removed during planning and suggested London had simply become sunnier. Temporary screens and then a permanent sunshade went up, but by 2015 downdrafts off the broad upper facade were knocking pedestrians over. The promised Sky Garden, the planning gain for approval, opened in January 2015 with ferns and succulents instead of full-height trees, and Guardian critic Oliver Wainwright likened it to an airport departure lounge. The building won the 2015 Carbuncle Cup for the UK's worst new building, yet was fully leased by 2017 and sold that July to the Hong Kong oyster sauce maker Lee Kum Kee Group for a record 1.3 billion pounds.

• The concave south facade acting as a parabolic reflector for about two hours a day
• Media nicknames the Walkie Scorchie and the Fry Scraper
• Sky Garden visits booked online, screened by security, and capped at 60-minute slots
• Insurers including Markel, Kiln, RSA, and Tokio Marine signing on for the huge floor plates
• The highest price ever paid for a single UK office building at the time of the 2017 sale

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In 1072 the Norman bishop Remigius de Fécamp moved his seat to Lincoln and raised a massive church to project Norman power over a diocese stretching from the Thames to the Humber. He finished it in 1092 but died on May 7, two days before its consecration. Fire destroyed the timber roof in 1124, and in 1185 an earthquake estimated at magnitude 5 or more split the building from top to bottom. Bishop Hugh of Burgundy, later Saint Hugh of Lincoln, began rebuilding in 1192 in the new Gothic style with pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses. Bishop Hugh of Wells signed Magna Carta in 1215, and in 1941 Britain's Foreign Office drafted a plan to give the cathedral's copy to the United States to help secure Lend-Lease.

The central tower collapsed in 1237, the chapter won permission from Henry III in 1255 to tear down part of the town wall, and between 1307 and 1311 a lead-covered timber spire rose to 525 feet, making the cathedral the tallest structure on Earth until a storm toppled it in 1548. In 1255 a boy's death became the Little Saint Hugh blood libel, leading to the hanging of 18 Jewish people, a lie the cathedral denounced on a plaque in 1955. In World War II, RAF pilot Billy Strachan nearly flew into the towers in fog, and treasures were hidden 60 feet underground. Today the cathedral uses more than 100 tons of limestone a year from its own quarry, and in 2022 scaffolding came off the West Front after 36 years.

• Why rigid Norman walls failed under the lateral shaking of the 1185 earthquake
• Geoffrey de Noiers' asymmetrical crazy vaults in Saint Hugh's Choir
• The Dean's Eye facing north against evil and the Bishop's Eye facing south toward the Holy Spirit
• The grinning Lincoln Imp in the Angel Choir, now the mascot of the whole city
• Soldiers of the Lincolnshire Regiment pumping the new Willis organ by hand in 1898 because the power station was not ready

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In central Scotland the Forth and Clyde Canal and the Union Canal sit 35 meters apart in height. Boats once crossed through an 11-lock flight that used about 3,500 tons of water per trip and took most of a day. Road and rail made it obsolete, the locks were dismantled in 1933, and parts of the Union Canal were filled in and piped under housing. The 78 million pound Millennium Link set out to reconnect Glasgow and Edinburgh by water, but its 1999 boat Ferris wheel design was rejected as boring. Architect Tony Kettle of RMJM got three weeks to redesign it, built gear concepts from his eight-year-old daughter's Lego, and drew on a double-headed Celtic axe, a ship's propeller, and a whale's ribcage.

The site was an old fireclay mine, coal mine, and tar works laced with tar and mercury, so 30 piles 22 meters long were driven to bedrock, and an aqueduct once called unbuildable was reinforced with 40 millimeter rebar. The wheel was made in Derbyshire, trucked north on 35 lorries, and joined with more than 14,000 bolts instead of welds to absorb stress reversals. Each caisson holds 250,000 liters and always weighs 500 tons, because a boat pushes out its own weight in water, so ten hydraulic motors turn it on about 1.5 kilowatt hours. Just before a May 2002 opening by Queen Elizabeth II, vandals flooded the dry pit and caused 350,000 pounds in damage, delaying it a month. It has since drawn 5.5 million visitors.

• Why bolted joints let the structure flex safely and give it a design life of at least 120 years
• Archimedes' principle keeping both caissons balanced whether or not boats are aboard
• An eight meter fixed central gear and idler gears that keep the caissons level through the whole turn
• A pumped-dry pit under the lower caisson so the arm never fights canal water buoyancy
• The wheel lifts boats 24 meters, so two old-fashioned locks still finish the climb to the Union Canal

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In the winter of 1850 a storm stripped the grass from a hillside above the Bay of Skaill in Scotland and exposed stone houses with beds, shelves, and hearths. Skara Brae, occupied from about 3180 to 2500 BC, predates the Egyptian pyramids and is considered Europe's most complete Neolithic village. The laird William Graham Watt dug out four houses before giving up in 1868, looters struck over a weekend in 1913, and after a 1924 storm washed part of a house into the sea, V. Gordon Childe led a professional excavation in 1927. In 2019 a note on the back of a photo revealed that four women long taken for tourists, Margaret Simpson, Margaret Mitchell, Mary Kennedy, and Margaret Cole, were Childe's students working the dig.

Seven nearly identical houses sat packed in midden, compacted household waste that blocked Orkney's wind and gave off slight heat. Storage boxes always sat left of the door, forcing visitors to turn right, and the right-hand bed was always larger, while beads and paint pots turned up in the smaller left beds. The Grooved Ware people kept cattle, sheep, and pigs, grew barley, sealed limpet tanks with clay, and burned dried seaweed for fuel. House 8, with no beds and two meter walls, served as a workshop. Evan Hadingham called the site the Pompeii of the North, pointing to a broken necklace in a passage, while Anna Ritchie argues for slow abandonment as the climate turned colder and wetter. Today rising seas and storms threaten the site itself.

• The glassy, slag-like residue called cramp left behind by burning seaweed at high temperature
• Thirty liter jars holding traces of oat and barley ale laced with deadly nightshade, hemlock, and henbane
• The Skara Brae Buddo, a 5,000 year old whalebone figure with eyes, a mouth, and a belly button
• The first recorded evidence of the human flea in Europe
• Carved stone balls and long ivory pins linking the village to the Boyne Valley in Ireland

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Before it was suburbia, this stretch of Long Island was called Jerusalem in the 1600s and later Island Trees, farmed for potatoes and onions after the railroad arrived in 1837. Levitt & Sons, founded in 1929 by Abraham Levitt, built slow custom homes until William Levitt, born in 1907, returned from the Navy Seabees with a method for mass-producing buildings from uniform parts. With his architect brother Alfred, he broke each house into 26 steps handled by specialized crews moving plot to plot. The company bought timberland and a lumber mill in Blue Lake, California, and a nail factory in Pennsylvania, pushed local officials to drop the basement rule in favor of concrete slabs, and paid non-union crews piece rates. By July 1948 they finished 30 houses a day, and by 1951 there were more than 17,400.

A house cost about $8,000, and with GI Bill and FHA backing a veteran could buy in for $400 down, with 1949 ranch models offering radiant floor heating, a Bendix washer, and a built-in Admiral television. Clause 25 of the lease and purchase agreement barred anyone but members of the Caucasian race, and FHA redlining refused to insure mixed neighborhoods. William Levitt, himself Jewish, claimed he could not solve a housing crisis and a social crisis at once. Activists formed the Committee to End Discrimination in Levittown, and the Supreme Court's 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer ruling made such covenants unenforceable, yet the 1990 census still showed a tiny non-white population. By 2020, Hispanic residents were over 16 percent and Asian residents over 11 percent. Levitt & Sons, by then in Florida, went bankrupt in 2007.

• How the Seabees' wartime airstrips and barracks inspired a stationary assembly line on potato fields
• Half of the first 2,000 rentals claimed within two days of the 1947 announcement
• Why home equity denied in the 1940s meant generations of lost family wealth
• The Levitts building pools and community centers while leaving schools and sewers to local towns
• Billy Joel's childhood home and Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands neighborhood drawn from Levittown

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Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was born in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in the region known as Watch Valley, to a piano teacher mother and a father who enameled watch dials. With no formal architectural training and an early horror of the profession, he was pushed toward building by his art teacher Charles L'Eplattenier, who took him hiking in the Jura Mountains. His first house, built at 18, was a decorated alpine chalet. He then sketched the Parthenon for weeks, worked with reinforced concrete under Auguste Perret and Peter Behrens, and in 1914 and 1915 devised the Dom-ino system of slabs on thin columns. In Paris he co-founded Purism with Amédée Ozenfant, took the name Le Corbusier in 1920, called the house a machine for living in, and set out five points realized in the Villa Savoye of 1928 to 1931.

His 1925 Plan Voisin proposed flattening central Paris for 60-story cross-shaped towers, and his Ville Contemporaine imagined three million people in zoned high-rises among highways. The sources document that he wrote for fascist-leaning syndicalist journals, sought commissions from the Vichy regime, expressed anti-Semitic views in private letters, advised a eugenics foundation, and drew Algiers plans that marginalized the local population. After a decade without major work, he built the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille from 1947 to 1952, raw concrete housing for 1,600 with an internal shopping street and a rooftop school. He planned Chandigarh for Nehru, surprised critics with the curving chapel at Ronchamp, and died in 1965 at 77 while swimming in the Mediterranean.

• The Dom-ino frame that freed outside walls from carrying weight, opening the way to ribbon windows
• The five points: pilotis, free facade, open plan, ribbon windows, and a roof garden
• Interlocking L-shaped duplexes in Marseille giving most units both east and west balconies
• Jane Jacobs' argument that towers in empty parks kill the street life that keeps cities safe
• The Open Hand monument at Chandigarh and a legacy of 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites

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Chand Baori sits in the village of Abhaneri in Rajasthan, India, and dates to the 8th and 9th centuries under Raja Chanda of the local Nikumbha dynasty. It drops 30 meters, about 100 feet or 13 stories, into the ground as an inverted pyramid of some 3,500 narrow steps in symmetrical double flights on three sides. The terraces act as retaining walls against the surrounding earth and let hundreds of people reach the water at any level through the dry season and the monsoon. The wide mouth catches scarce rain while the narrow bottom limits the surface exposed to the sun. Hot air rises out and cool air settles, so the bottom stays five to six degrees Celsius cooler than the surface, which explains the royal pavilion and resting room built on one side.

The well formed a spiritual complex with the adjoining Harshat Mata temple, dedicated to the goddess of joy, where pilgrims drank, washed, and rested. Mahmud of Ghazni's forces damaged the temple in the 11th century and the Mughals later smashed the well's sculptures, but the stairs survived because every army needed the water. Scholar Morna Livingston notes two building periods fused together: the plain 8th century base and ornate upper palace additions by later Chauhan rulers, built with arches of stacked, overlapping flat stones. The pillared northern side still holds shrines to Ganesha and Mahishasura Mardini, plus a reclining Vishnu on the cosmic ocean. Filmmakers came for Bhool Bhulaiyaa, Paheli, Bhoomi, and Tarsem Singh's The Fall.

• A separate room, the Andheri Ujala, set aside for the heavy work of drawing water with pulleys
• Scattered pillars and carved fragments now gathered in the arcades by the Archaeological Survey of India
• A local legend of a secret tunnel running from Abhaneri all the way to the city of Dausa
• Why The Dark Knight Rises prison pit was inspired by Chand Baori but filmed on a built set
• How the stepped design turned a water source into a cooled town square and pilgrim refuge

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In April 1819 a British cavalry officer named John Smith, out hunting tigers in Maharashtra, followed a local shepherd boy into a remote U-shaped gorge and found painted faces staring down from a vaulted ceiling. The local Bhil people already knew the site. Smith climbed a five foot mound of debris and scratched his name across a painted Buddhist figure, so after later excavation his graffiti now sits oddly high on the wall. The Ajanta Caves are 30 rock-cut Buddhist monasteries and worship halls cut into a 75 meter cliff of flood basalt. There is no masonry: viharas with monks' cells and cathedral-like chaitya halls with ribbed ceilings and stupas were carved as single pieces of the mountain, starting at the roofline and working downward so no scaffolding was needed.

An austere first phase dates to roughly 100 BCE to 100 CE. Art historian Walter Spink argued that nearly all of the second, lavish phase was cut in about 20 years, from 460 to around 480 CE, under Emperor Harishena of the Vakataka dynasty, judging by chisel marks, pillar designs, and unfinished caves. Harishena and his prime minister Varahadeva, both Hindu, funded these Buddhist masterpieces, and a Durga plaque found in a nearby brick monastery hints the workers were Hindu too. Work paused around 472 under threat from the Asmaka kings, and when Harishena died the royal money stopped. Poorer donors rushed in with small intrusive Buddha carvings before the artists and monks left and the jungle closed over the gorge for more than a thousand years.

• The top-down method: laborers lowering the floor while sculptors shaped pillars and painters worked above
• A dry fresco of mud, cow dung, and rice husks under lime plaster that kept colors alive in the damp
• The serene Padmapani bodhisattva with a blue lotus in Cave 1, commissioned by Harishena
• Why monastery walls show pearls, wine, dancers, and Prince Mahajanaka's wealth: to show what was renounced
• Conservators now protecting John Smith's 1819 vandalism as a marker of the site's rediscovery

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I. M. Pei was born in China in 1917 and grew up among his family's classical gardens in Suzhou, spaces built to steer how people move and feel. His mother died of cancer when he was 13, after he had prepared the opium pipes prescribed for her pain, and his banker father withdrew into work. In 1935 he left for America, drawn partly by Bing Crosby films about carefree college life, and clashed with Beaux-Arts teaching at Penn and MIT while falling for the international style. During World War II the National Defense Research Committee used his knowledge of construction to help design incendiary bombs. He then worked for New York developer William Zeckendorf on housing in Denver, Washington, and Kips Bay before designing the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado from bush-hammered concrete mixed with pink sandstone.

Jacqueline Kennedy chose Pei for the JFK Library partly because he was born the same year as her husband, starting a 15 year fight over sites and community opposition. At the same time, Boston's Hancock Tower was dropping glass onto sidewalks, forcing the replacement of over 10,000 windows and a tuned mass damper on the 58th floor. He answered with Dallas City Hall's 34 degree lean, a triangle-based East Building for the National Gallery using marble from a reopened Tennessee quarry, and the Louvre pyramid, opposed by a reported 90 percent of Parisians until a full-size cable mock-up changed minds. Later came the Fragrant Hill Hotel, Hong Kong's bamboo-inspired Bank of China Tower, Japan's mostly buried Miho Museum, and Doha's Museum of Islamic Art on its own island.

• How the Suzhou gardens shaped his idea that a building is a psychological experience, not just shelter
• Why the Hancock Tower's double-paned glass failed under sway, heat stress, and negative wind pressure
• The Louvre pyramid as an entrance hub for a sprawling underground network of galleries and tunnels
• The Bank of China Tower's exterior triangles carrying typhoon wind loads down to four corner columns
• His public anguish over Tiananmen Square in 1989 and a working life that ended at age 102