The Textbook of Architecture

Il giro d’Italia · and beyond

The Grand Tour

For two centuries young architects and gentlemen crossed the Alps to measure the ruins of Rome with their own hands. This tour goes further. It rebuilds famous cities of the past in 3D for you to fly over and walk through, with notes on the buildings and the rules they follow.

Five cities in full

Whole cities, with their monuments placed from the archaeology and their houses filled in around them. Fly over them, take the narrated tour or walk the streets. Each opens full screen and builds the city as it loads. A computer with a good graphics card works best; phones get a lighter version.

400 BC

Athens · 400 BC

The Athens of Pericles

The city in 400 BC, four years after its defeat by Sparta and a year before the trial of Socrates. The marble buildings of the Acropolis stand complete above some 7,000 courtyard houses of mud brick; the Agora bustles below, the Theatre of Dionysus still has wooden benches, and the Long Walls, breached by the Spartans, run six kilometres to the war harbours of the Piraeus. More than seventy monuments stand at their researched positions and sizes; fly over the city, take the narrated tour, or walk its lanes.

What you will find
  • The Parthenon in full (peristyle, metopes, frieze, pediments and the gold-and-ivory Athena within), with the Erechtheion and its Caryatids, the Propylaia and the Nike temple
  • The Agora of the democracy: the Painted Stoa, the Stoa of Zeus, the Royal Stoa, the Tholos, the Bouleuterion, market booths and plane trees
  • The landscape of Attica: the sheer Acropolis rock, Hymettos and Salamis, the Ilissos, and the Piraeus with its ship-sheds
  • Every card rates its own certainty and links to the book’s Doric order, the Parthenon’s 4 : 9 rule and the Greek theatre

Enter Athens

AD 320

Rome · AD 320

Roma Aeterna

The whole city as it stood in the reign of Constantine: the seven hills, the Tiber and its bridges, the Aurelian Walls and the aqueducts, 190 monuments at their researched positions and sizes, and tens of thousands of houses at the density the fourth-century Regionaries record. Fly over it, take the narrated tour, or walk the streets between the Colosseum, the Forum and the Circus Maximus.

What you will find
  • The Colosseum, the Pantheon, the imperial fora, the baths of Caracalla and Diocletian, the Circus Maximus and the Palatine palaces
  • Surveyed street lines and monument plans from OpenStreetMap; vanished buildings reconstructed from scholarly plans
  • Time of day from dawn to a starry night, following the sun over Rome on 21 April
  • Every monument’s card links to the chapters and rules of this book that explain how it was built

Enter Rome

c. 1150

Constantinople · c. 1150

The Queen of Cities

Constantinople around 1150, in the reign of Manuel I Komnenos: the Queen of Cities at its height, half a century before the crusaders sacked it. Fly over the seven hills between the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus and the Golden Horn, where Hagia Sophia’s dome floats on its ring of forty windows; follow the Hippodrome, the terraced Great Palace and the marble porticoes of the Mese west past the fora to the Theodosian land walls, through some 36,000 houses of banded brick and timber, monasteries, open cisterns and orchards, down to harbours full of dromons and merchant ships.

What you will find
  • Hagia Sophia in full (dome, pendentives, semidomes, buttresses, atrium), with Hagia Eirene, Sts Sergius and Bacchus, the Holy Apostles and the Pantokrator
  • The Theodosian walls: a triple line with moat and 96 towers, the Golden Gate, and sea walls round three seas
  • The Mese with its porticoes and fora, the Hippodrome’s obelisks and Serpent Column, the Aqueduct of Valens and the sunken open cisterns
  • Harbours with dromons, lateen merchant ships and caiques; the Venetian and Pisan quarters; Galata and the Asian shore across the water

Enter Constantinople

1500

Venice · 1500

Venetie MD

Venice in 1500, as Jacopo de’ Barbari drew it in his great bird’s-eye view: the richest city in Europe, built on a hundred islands in a shallow lagoon. Fly over it or walk it, from the Byzantine domes of San Marco and the Gothic Doge’s Palace to the wooden Rialto bridge and the Arsenale where the Republic built its galleys, with early-Renaissance newcomers like the Miracoli and the Clock Tower among twenty thousand plastered houses, canals full of boats and campi with their well-heads.

What you will find
  • 169 researched places: San Marco, the Doge’s Palace, the Campanile, the Clock Tower, the Rialto, the Ca’ d’Oro, the Arsenale and 107 churches with their campanili
  • A living lagoon city: the Grand Canal and 165 rii, some 330 bridges, gondolas, burchi, round ships and galleys, crowds in the dress of 1500
  • The sun of Ascension Day 1500, when the Doge wed the sea from the Bucintoro, with the clock in Italian hours
  • A narrated tour of fifteen stops, and cards linking to the book’s Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance chapters and rules

Enter Venice

1500

Florence · 1500

Firenze, A.D. MD

Florence in 1500, the republic of Savonarola’s last years and Michelangelo’s youth. Brunelleschi’s dome rises over a valley ringed by the hills of Fiesole, San Miniato and Bellosguardo, inside the last walls with their towers still whole. More than a hundred researched monuments (the cathedral and campanile, the Palazzo della Signoria and its Loggia, Orsanmichele, the churches of Brunelleschi and Alberti, the palaces of the Medici, the Rucellai and Luca Pitti, the Strozzi palace still under scaffolding) and the Arno under its four medieval bridges, among some thirteen thousand houses with arched shops, jutting upper storeys and roof loggias.

What you will find
  • Brunelleschi’s double-shell dome on the quinto acuto, Alberti’s façade of Santa Maria Novella and the Innocenti loggia, each linked to the book’s rules
  • The Ponte Vecchio with its shops, the Grazie with its hermits’ chapels, the weirs and mills, and the walls of 1333 with their ten gates
  • Positions researched for every monument, each with its confidence; the ordinary houses generated in the Florentine types
  • The sun over Florence on the feast of St John, 24 June, with the clock in Italian hours

Enter Florence

What the Grand Tour was

The phrase is Richard Lassels’s, in his Voyage of Italy of 1670, and the custom it named lasted until the railways: a year or two abroad, Paris to Rome and back by Venice, with a tutor, a sketchbook and letters of introduction. Architects went to draw. Inigo Jones came home with his Palladio annotated in the margins; Robert Adam measured Diocletian’s palace at Split; Chambers, Soane and many others spent months or years among the ruins with a tape and a rod. What they brought back (the orders, the dome, the portico, the planned square) is much of what this book is about.

The tour below keeps their habit of looking and measuring but not their map. It begins with the first cities, passes through Rome, and goes on to Baghdad and Isfahan, Angkor and Kyoto, Tikal and Cuzco, before returning to the villas and piazzas the travellers actually saw and the metropolises that followed them.

The first cities

Before the classical world: a ceremonial landscape, a planned workmen’s town, the greatest city of Mesopotamia, a Bronze Age citadel and a Persian palace terrace.

  1. 1

    c. 2500 BC · Wiltshire, England

    Stonehenge and Durrington Walls

    Look for the avenue from the river to the stones, and the timber circles for the living beside the stone circle for the dead.

    Explore in 3D Prehistoric and Megalithic · The Stonehenge landscape, c. 2500 BC, with distances shortened

  2. 2

    c. 1890 BC · El-Lahun, Egypt

    Kahun

    Look for a whole town laid out at once on a grid for the pyramid builders, with its mansions and rows of standard houses.

    Explore in 3D Ancient Egyptian · The town of Senusret II at Illahun, c. 1890 BC

  3. 3

    c. 1250 BC · Argolid, Greece

    Mycenae

    Look for Cyclopean walls, the Lion Gate and the megaron on the summit.

    Explore in 3D Aegean Bronze Age · The citadel and lower town, c. 1250 BC

  4. 4

    c. 575 BC · Hillah, Iraq

    Babylon

    Look for the Ishtar Gate, the Processional Way and the ziggurat Etemenanki.

    Explore in 3D Mesopotamian · The inner city of Nebuchadnezzar II, c. 575 BC

  5. 5

    c. 480 BC · Fars, Iran

    Persepolis

    Look for the Great Stairway, the Apadana and the Hundred-Column Hall on their terrace.

    Explore in 3D Achaemenid Persian · The terrace of Darius and Xerxes, c. 480 BC

Greece and Rome

The cities of the treatises: the Athens of Pericles, a Greek grid laid out as Hippodamus taught, Rome itself at the height of its building, and the new Rome on the Bosporus.

  1. 6

    400 BC · Greece

    Athens

    Look for the Acropolis of Pericles, the Agora of the democracy and the Long Walls to the Piraeus, in a whole city modelled in full detail.

    Enter the city

  2. 7

    c. 300 BC · Güllübahçe, Turkey

    Priene

    Look for a Hippodamian grid stepped up a mountainside, with agora, theatre and temple each on its terrace.

    Explore in 3D Ancient Greek · After Aristotle, Politics II.8 and VII.11–12, and Vitruvius, Book V

  3. 8

    AD 320 · Italy

    Rome

    Look for the capital of the empire at the height of its building, in full detail.

    Enter the city

  4. 9

    c. 1150 · Istanbul, Turkey

    Constantinople

    Look for Hagia Sophia, the Hippodrome, the Mese and its fora, and the land walls, in a whole city modelled in full detail.

    Enter the city

The Islamic world

Five capitals from the Tigris to the Yamuna and the Alhambra: a round city, a medina, a royal square, a mosque complex by Sinan and a Mughal walled city.

  1. 10

    AD 766 · Iraq

    Baghdad

    Look for al-Mansur’s Round City, its four gates and the palace and mosque at the centre.

    Explore in 3D Early Islamic (Umayyad and Abbasid) · Madinat al-Salam of al-Mansur, 762–766, after al-Ya‘qubi and al-Khatib al-Baghdadi

  2. 11

    c. 1450 · Andalusia, Spain

    Granada

    Look for the courts of the Alhambra above a city of patio houses on dead-end lanes.

    Explore in 3D Moorish (Western Islamic) · The last Muslim capital of al-Andalus, c. 1450, by the law of the neighbours and the rules of the market

  3. 12

    c. 1580 · Turkey

    Istanbul (the Süleymaniye)

    Look for Sinan’s mosque with its madrasas, kitchen, baths and tombs, and the timber houses round it.

    Explore in 3D Ottoman · Sinan’s külliye for Süleyman the Magnificent, 1550–57, and the timber quarters round it, c. 1580

  4. 13

    c. 1670 · Iran

    Isfahan

    Look for the Maidan with its mosques, palace and bazaar gate, and the Chahar Bagh avenue.

    Explore in 3D Persian Islamic (Seljuk, Timurid and Safavid) · The capital of Shah Abbas I and his successors, c. 1670, as Chardin saw it

  5. 14

    c. 1660 · India

    Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi)

    Look for the Red Fort, Chandni Chowk with its canal, and the Jama Masjid on its plinth.

    Explore in 3D Mughal · Shah Jahan’s capital, founded 1639, as François Bernier described it c. 1660

South and East Asia

A monastic hill, a temple city, a temple-mountain capital and three capitals built on the Chinese pattern.

  1. 15

    c. AD 600 · Madhya Pradesh, India

    Sanchi

    Look for the Great Stupa and its gateways among monasteries on the hill.

    Explore in 3D Buddhist India · The monastic hill about AD 600, after the Vinaya and the Great Passing

  2. 16

    1296 · Siem Reap, Cambodia

    Angkor Thom

    Look for the face towers of the Bayon at the centre of a moated square city.

    Explore in 3D Khmer · The walled city as Zhou Daguan saw it in 1296

  3. 17

    c. 1000 · Japan

    Heian-kyō (Kyoto)

    Look for the grid of the capital, the palace at its head and the estates of the nobility.

    Explore in 3D Japanese · After the Engishiki, the Sakuteiki and the Shōmei

  4. 18

    c. 1450 · Korea

    Hanyang (Seoul)

    Look for palace, shrine and altars placed by the rules of the Kaogong ji among the guardian mountains.

    Explore in 3D Korean · After the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty and the Kaogong ji

  5. 19

    c. 1650 · Tamil Nadu, India

    Madurai

    Look for the temple’s towering gopurams at the centre of concentric processional streets.

    Explore in 3D Hindu Temple: Dravida (South Indian) · The Nayaka city about 1650, after the Mayamata

The Americas

Two capitals built without the wheel or the arch.

  1. 20

    c. AD 750 · Petén, Guatemala

    Tikal

    Look for Temples I and II facing each other across the Great Plaza, and the causeways through the forest.

    Explore in 3D Mesoamerican · The ceremonial centre about AD 750, after the buildings and Landa

  2. 21

    c. 1530 · Peru

    Cuzco

    Look for kancha compounds of fitted stone, the great square and the fortress of Sacsayhuamán above.

    Explore in 3D Andean · The city about 1530, after Garcilaso de la Vega

The Grand Tour itself

Where the young travellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries actually went: Florence and Venice, a fortress town, the villas of the Veneto, papal Rome, and the new planned towns of the north.

  1. 22

    1500 · Tuscany, Italy

    Florence

    Look for Brunelleschi’s dome, the Signoria, the Ponte Vecchio and the palaces of the Medici and the Rucellai, in a whole city modelled in full detail.

    Enter the city

  2. 23

    1500 · Veneto, Italy

    Venice

    Look for San Marco, the Doge’s Palace, the Rialto and the Arsenale in the lagoon, as de’ Barbari drew them, in a whole city modelled in full detail.

    Enter the city

  3. 24

    1620 · Friuli, Italy

    Palmanova

    Look for a nine-pointed star fortress with streets radiating from a hexagonal square.

    Explore in 3D Mannerism · On the plan of Palmanova (1593), after Scamozzi and Serlio

  4. 25

    1580 · Veneto, Italy

    The Brenta and the villas of Palladio

    Look for the Rotonda on its hill and the villas along the river, each built to the Four Books.

    Explore in 3D Palladian · After Palladio’s Quattro libri (1570), Books II and III

  5. 26

    1730 · Italy

    Rome of the popes

    Look for the trident of streets from the Piazza del Popolo, Navona, the Pantheon and St Peter’s colonnade.

    Explore in 3D Baroque · Sixtus V’s streets and obelisks (Fontana, 1590) and Bernini’s piazza

  6. 27

    1780 · Baden, Germany

    Karlsruhe

    Look for thirty-two streets fanning from the palace tower.

    Explore in 3D Rococo · After Karlsruhe (1715), with the gardens of Dezallier and Blondel

  7. 28

    c. 1830 · Scotland

    Edinburgh New Town

    Look for Craig’s grid of Georgian terraces between two squares and two gardens.

    Explore in 3D Neoclassical · After James Craig’s plan of 1767 and Laugier’s Essai, c. 1830

The modern metropolis

The cities that rebuilt themselves for the railway, the elevator and the motor car.

  1. 29

    c. 1875 · France

    Paris

    Look for Haussmann’s boulevards, the Étoile and the Opéra, and the regulated façades.

    Explore in 3D Beaux-Arts · After the decrees of 1852 and 1859 and Haussmann’s Mémoires, c. 1875

  2. 30

    c. 1905 · Austria

    Vienna

    Look for Otto Wagner’s houses on the Wienzeile, the Secession and the Stadtbahn.

    Explore in 3D Art Nouveau · After Otto Wagner’s Moderne Architektur (1896) and his plans for the Wien valley, c. 1905

  3. 31

    c. 1905 · Illinois, USA

    Chicago

    Look for the first skyscrapers of the Loop inside the elevated railway.

    Explore in 3D Chicago School · After Sullivan’s Tall Office Building (1896), the height ordinances and Burnham’s Plan of Chicago (1909)

  4. 32

    1931 · New York, USA

    Manhattan

    Look for setback towers shaped by the 1916 zoning law.

    Explore in 3D Art Deco · After the 1811 grid and the 1916 Zoning Resolution, c. 1931

Five cities, Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Florence and Venice, are whole-city explorers of their own; every other stop opens a town of this book laid out by its own tradition’s rules. In each, the Walk button takes you down into the streets.