A bedded sandstone ridge that rises some 500 meters above the parched sands of Western Sahara, the Bandiagara Escarpment has served as a cultural crossroads for more than 2,000 years. The eroded remnants of a Precambrian massif, the 200-kilometer-long formation snakes its way across the landscape...Read more
The future of Strawberry Hill, the “little Gothic castle” created by Horace Walpole in the eighteenth century, is looking decidedly brighter thanks to a £4.6 million grant which has been earmarked by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). The award to the Strawberry Hill Trust along with £370,000...Read more
Ruins form every time technologies requiring vast architecture go obsolete, or civilizations abandon remotest edges of settlements or deplete land beyond habitability or give up on streets devastated by war or natural disaster. The sheared and eroding walls used to be considered stockpiles of...Read more
The breathless headline of the January 9, 1901 London Times heralded the discovery of the “Sistine Chapel of the Eighth Century.” The article was written by Gordon Rushfort, the first Director of the British School in Rome, who had been an eye-witness to a sensational event, the re-discovery of...Read more
Emulating Rome’s Pantheon, the Marble Hall at Stowe is one of the great interiors of northern Europe. It is at the heart of the great Stowe House, which itself is at the center of one of the greatest manmade landscapes in England. Almost all the great English architects of the eighteenth century...Read more
For centuries if not millennia, peoples around the globe have developed and maintained cultural traditions that have not only sustained their practitioners but in more recent years have garnered the admiration of those visiting from the outside. According to the World Tourism Organization, an...Read more
Embraced by the dense Argentine rainforest near the Paraguay border, the remains of the seventeenth-century Misión San Ignacio Miní bear silent witness to Jesuit efforts to indoctrinate the region’s indigenous Guaraní, as well as manage Spanish economic interests in South America. Abandoned in the...Read more
To that list of must-see Maya ruins in Mexico and Central America, add the Ennis House in Los Angeles. The temple-like romanza of pyramiding volumes and battered walls designed by Frank Lloyd Wright grows up from a plateau the architect built in the Los Feliz hills overlooking the city.Read more
With each new list of 100 Most Endangered, the World Monuments Fund is presented with, and in turn presents to the world, a unique snapshot of the history of humanity as it is manifest in the architectural legacy that has come down to us. At first glance, this picture may appear to be a random...Read more
The cause of preserving the world’s great monuments has several components, all of which the World Monuments Fund addresses. Primary energy must be given to actual physical preservation of edifices that are becoming decrepit. They must be made structurally strong; and they must be made legible. But...Read more