The jury's votes are in — Architizer is proud to present the winners of the 2025 Vision Awards! Join the program mailing list and continue celebrating the world's best architectural representations by clicking here.
Occasionally, we stumble across a singular drawing that is worth an article all on its own. The gargantuan, mind-boggling cross section through Kowloon’s infamous Walled City, drawn by Japanese surveyors before its demolition in 1994, is one such example — check it out here — but for sheer beauty and extraordinary detail, this illustrated chart from over a century before is more than a match for it.
Image via Wikipedia
The drawing, created by George F. Cram in the 1880s, highlights the 78 tallest buildings of significance around the world at that time (see a high-resolution version here). We are used to seeing tall-building charts with silhouettes lined up from left to right in order of height, but Cram’s 132-year-old edition eschewed that conventional format. Instead, he grouped the buildings together in a single, imaginary metropolis of columns, domes, crowns and spires.
On first viewing, this ornate diagram appears chaotic, but on closer examination can be read reasonably easily — the buildings are arranged one in front of the other in a carefully considered composition that sees the shortest buildings at the front and the tallest at the back.
Detail; image via Wikipedia
The colors of the buildings are also informative, with the various tones signifying the primary construction materials of each structure — a reddish tint indicates brick, the pink represents granite, the purple stands for bronze, copper or lead, and so on. What about the bright yellow color that can be seen atop a number of spires and domes?
Yep — that’s gold.
The jury's votes are in — Architizer is proud to present the winners of the 2025 Vision Awards! Join the program mailing list and continue celebrating the world's best architectural representations by clicking here.
