# A history of cities in 50 buildings [series from The Guardian]



## Suburbanist (Dec 25, 2009)

Manchester (UK) newspaper The Guardian has an excellent ongoing series on 50 buildings that are somehow relevant in the history of their role in cities and time. It is not a "the best" list of architectural merits, it is more about an intersection of architecture, urban features and the built-up environment in history.

I highly recommend people to check it out (it is still day 27 and they publish a new building's article every day). I'll post just a couple bits of some of the articles on specific buildings (hope this is okay).


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## Suburbanist (Dec 25, 2009)

*Berlin's flat-roofed Hufeisensiedlung *


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> When you walk along the long red block to that horseshoe, however, you can see opposite some rather different housing – this time with much more muted colours, white with a little sky-blue to the doorways, Biedemeier-style details, dormer windows, shutters and big, deep pitched roofs. This is because Berlin-Britz is one of those few places where a political and architectural dispute were played out in a very direct way – with modernism and traditionalism literally pitted against each other. This was already controversial, though, as the largest scale modernist housing project that had happened anywhere at that date – housing not the rarefied clientele of Le Corbusier’s then-celebrated modernist villas, but a population of working class Berliners.
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## Suburbanist (Dec 25, 2009)

*Coricancha, the Incas' temple of the sun*



> Believed to have been built around 1200 AD, the temple was constructed using the distinctive and intricate masonry style of the Incas. Early Spanish historian Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa praised this style in his 1572 book History of the Incas: “Those of us who have seen it … are awed upon seeing the evenness and beauty of it.”
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> The location of Coricancha within the city was very important. Placed at the convergence of the four main highways and connected to the four districts of the empire, the temple cemented the symbolic importance of religion, uniting the divergent cultural practices that were observed in the vast territory controlled by the Incas.
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> As well as housing more than 4,000 priests, the positioning of the temple in relation to the nearby Andes mountains meant that Coricancha functioned as an enormous calendar. Shadows cast by stones placed on the foothills could be seen from the temple, marking out the solstice and equinoxes observed by the Incan empire.


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## Suburbanist (Dec 25, 2009)

*Pruitt-Igoe: the troubled high-rise that came to define urban America*



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> If you propose a high-rise public housing project in America, your opponents will almost certainly use Pruitt-Igoe as a rhetorical weapon against you – and defeat you with it.
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## karibeaulieu (Mar 9, 2017)

Awesome! Thank you for sharing!


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