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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.
Feast your eyes on the world's most outstanding architectural photographs, videos, visualizations, drawing and models: Introducing the winners of Architizer's inaugural Vision Awards. Sign up to receive future program updates >
