Architecture as a reason to travel: planned cities, sacred buildings and famous architects

The same building can be a church, a mosque and a museum. Hagia Sophia was built as an Eastern Orthodox cathedral in Constantinople in 537 CE, was a Roman Catholic church only from 1204 to 1261, became a mosque after the Ottomans took over in the 1450s, was a museum for nearly a century, and was made a mosque again by a 2020 decision. Wikivoyage's travel guide to architecture treats stories like this as part of the sight: the architecture of a place is often an attraction in its own right.

Hagia Sophia. Photo: Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Look at it from every distance

The guide says the finest architecture is almost fractally interesting. From a meter away, the Taj Mahal's appeal is the fine stone inlay; a few meters back, the elegant shapes; further back, the whole building and its gardens. Understanding it fully needs the history of the Mughal Empire and the traditions of Islamic art. Architecture overlaps with urban planning, civil engineering, decorative arts, interior design and landscape design, and many fine examples are on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The Taj Mahal. Photo: Yann, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The guide adds that local styles and materials once limited what was built. Concrete, glass and steel and the international exchange of ideas have produced a new "global" style that is loved and hated in almost equal measure.

Planned cities

Large-scale planning is ancient: the Roman Empire and Imperial China practiced it, and Ancient Egypt had pre-planned settlements. Priene in Ancient Greece has been called the first orthogonal-grid planned city, about 350 BCE, though Mohenjo-daro in what is now Pakistan had a grid, and the world's first municipal sewer system, about 2600 BCE. Most settlements, though, grew organically. Many medieval European cities formed around a harbor, a river's head of navigation or a mountain pass, with a castle and a church. Even then there was a kind of zoning: tanners and metal smelters had to stay outside the walls and downwind.

Capitals built to be capitals include:

Some change is faster than any plan. Pudong in Shanghai was undeveloped, mostly residential and industrial and partly agricultural in 1990; within a decade it was a major business and finance hub. The guide says it now has more skyscrapers than New York City, including four over 400 m. In 1978 Shenzhen and Zhuhai were groups of market towns and fishing villages; in the 2020 census Shenzhen had about 17.5 million people and Zhuhai 2.4 million.

The guide's caution: virtually every city laid out by a master plan eventually departs from it, whether it outgrows the plan's edge or the plan clashes with residents' needs.

Buildings that changed faith

The guide lists places where one building has served several religions:

• Great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus: began as a local deity's shrine, was rebuilt as a Roman temple of Jupiter, then became a church for St. John the Baptist, and was overhauled into the first monumental mosque in history between 706 and 715.
• Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba: built as a mosque in 786; converted to a Catholic cathedral in 1236, after the Reconquista. The former mihrab survives.
• Seville Cathedral: stands on the site of a 12th-century mosque. The mosque's minaret survives as La Giralda, the bell tower.

Roman engineering

The guide says the Romans used concrete and built bridges and dug tunnels that stood the test of time, and many of their feats of civil engineering were not matched until the industrial revolution or later. Its examples: the Pantheon in Rome, the best preserved Roman temple, with a dome that remains the biggest unreinforced concrete dome in the world; the Pont du Gard aqueduct near Nîmes; theaters at Orange and Taormina; amphitheaters at Verona, Pula and El Jem.

Pont du Gard, France. Photo: Patrick Clenet, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Styles in a sentence

Architects

Saint Paul's. Photo: Mark Fosh, CC BY 2.0.

• Christopher Wren (1632–1723): after the 1666 fire he and his office were the main architects for rebuilding London, designing 52 churches in the City alone; Saint Paul's is his best known, and his grave is in its crypt.
• Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926): seven of his Barcelona works are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, among them Casa Milà and Park Güell. La Sagrada Família, which holds his tomb in its crypt, is expected to be completed by the centenary of his death in 2026.
• Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959): over a career of more than 70 years he designed more than 1,000 buildings, about half built; eight were listed by UNESCO in 2019.
• Alfred Waterhouse (1830–1905): in London's Natural History Museum, the towers' octagonal top storey holds the water tanks, and the pinnacles around them are air intakes and vents for ventilation and heating.

Casa Milà, "La Pedrera," Barcelona. Photo: Thomas Ledl, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Sources

• Wikivoyage, "Architecture," https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Architecture, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Photographs credited to their photographers under their licences (CC BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY 2.0). Changed here: condensed, reorganised and rewritten in hubnx's own words; some images and sections left out.