Aerial view of University Square (Piata Universitatii), Bucharest, Romania

The Three Cs of Bucharest

Three big Cs dominate the history of Romania and its capital city, Bucharest. You may know communism and Ceaușescu, but what about Cuza?
Cape Town, South Africa

Cape Town, South Africa

Although the apartheid era continues to cast its shadow on Cape Town, many of its neighborhoods have been enjoying a renaissance as tourist destinations.
Gourna Mosque

Hassan Fathy and New Gourna

Fathy rejected European ideas of modernism, arguing that Egypt could draw on its own regional histories to develop a national aesthetic.
Hutong in Beijing, China

China’s Historic Preservation Challenges

Beijing’s hutongs are disappearing quickly. Is there a way create safe housing, preserve historic buildings, and meet the city's financial needs?
Mark Zuckerberg

Who Wants the Metaverse?

What exactly is the “metaverse,” and what could it be, beyond an overused, hyper-trendy prompt in marketing copy?
Construction of the Pedregulho Residential Complex

Latin America Revisits Its Modern Architecture

As preservationists grapple with crumbling monuments in Brazil and Peru, they’re also confronting the progressive agendas that originally shaped the buildings.
An Ayahuasca visual

The Colonization of the Ayahuasca Experience

“If someone is from the Amazon,” says Evgenia Fotiou, an anthropologist who studies Western ayahuasca usage, “they bring some legitimacy” to an ayahuasca ritual.
Girls' Beating the Bounds' at a fence near St Albans in Hertfordshire, 1913

“Beating the Bounds”

How did people find out where their local boundaries were before there were reliable maps?
Windowsill

When Americans Became Obsessed with Fresh Air

Once it became clear that mosquitoes, not the air itself, carried malaria, early 20th-century Americans went to extreme lengths to enjoy fresh air at night.