The Guardian currently has an extensive online series on architecture. The collection of articles, entitled “A History of Cities in 50 Buildings”, presents the stories of fifty buildings throughout all ages and highlights their influence on architecture. It starts with the Pyradmid of Zoser in Egypt, built around 2600 BC, and ends with a building not yet finished – the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Inbetween, you will find many famous buildings and some curious ones as well, as well as some that are not buildings at all, like the Four Level Freeway Interchange in Los Angeles or the Bus Rapid Transit system in Curitiba, Brazil.
The overview page lists all buildings along with a short introduction and a link to the full article. I would especially like to point out the article about the “Hufeisensiedlung” in Berlin. This so called “Horseshoe estate” was built in the inter-war years and is one of six large scale housing projects of the time that were enlisted on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2008. Here on “on architecture”, we already covered another one of those estates, the “White City”.