Explore the Ruins of Timgad, the “African Pompeii” Excavated from the Sands of Algeria

in Architecture, History | August 4th, 2020

Fifteen centuries after its fall, the Roman Empire lives on in unexpected places. Take, for instance, the former colonial city of Timgad, located in Algeria 300 miles from the capital. Founded by the Emperor Trajan around 100 AD as Colonia Marciana Ulpia Traiana Thamugadi, it thrived as a piece of Rome in north Africa before turning Christian in the third century and into a center of the Donatist sect in the fourth. The three centuries after that saw a sacking by Vandals, a reoccupation by Christians, and another sacking by Berbers. Abandoned and covered by sand from the Sahara from the seventh century on, Timgad was rediscovered by Scottish explorer James Bruce in 1765. But not until the 1880s, under French rule, did a proper excavation begin.

Today a visitor to the ruins of Timgad can see the outlines of exactly where each of its buildings once stood (especially if they have the aerial view of the photo above, recently tweeted out by Architecture Hub). This, in part, is what qualified the place for inscription on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

“With its square enclosure and orthogonal design based on the cardo and decumanus, the two perpendicular routes running through the city, it is an excellent example of Roman town planning,” says UNESCO’s web site. Its “remarkable grid system” — quite normal to 21st-century city-dwellers, much less so in second-century Africa — makes it “a typical example of an urban model” that “continues to bear witness to the building inventiveness of the military engineers of the Roman civilization, today disappeared.”

“Within a few generations of its birth,” writes Messy Nessy,” the outpost had expanded to over 10,000 residents of both Roman, African, as well as Berber descent. “The extension of Roman citizenship to non-Romans was a carefully planned strategy of the Empire,” she adds. “In return for their loyalty, local elites were given a stake in the great and powerful Empire, benefitted from its protection and legal system, not to mention, its modern urban amenities such as Roman bath houses, theatres, and a fancy public library.”

Timgad’s library, which “would have housed manuscripts relating to religion, military history and good governance,” seems to have been fancy indeed, and its ruins indicate the purchase Roman culture managed to attain in this far-flung settlement.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Timgad’s library is just one element of what UNESCO calls its “rich architectural inventory comprising numerous and diversified typologies, relating to the different historical stages of its construction: the defensive system, buildings for the public conveniences and spectacles, and a religious complex.” Having outgrown its original street grid, Timgad “spread beyond the perimeters of its ramparts and several major public buildings are built in the new quarters: Capitolium, temples, markets and baths,” most of which date from the city’s “Golden Age” in the Severan period between 193 and 235.

Image Alan and Flora Botting via Flickr Commons

This makes for an African equivalent of Pompeii, the Roman city famously buried and thus preserved in the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79. But it is lesser-known Timgad, with its still clearly laid-out blocks, its recognizable public facilities, and its demarcated “downtown” and “suburbs,” that will feel more familiar to us today, whichever city in the world we come from.

via Architecture Hub/MessyNessy

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Take an 360° Interactive Tour Inside the Great Pyramid of Giza

in Architecture, History | July 31st, 2020

You can’t take it with you if you’ve got nothing to take with you.

Once upon a time, the now-empty Great Pyramid of Giza was sumptuously appointed inside and out, to ensure that Pharaoh Khufu, or Cheops as he was known to the Ancient Greeks, would be well received in the afterlife.

Bling was a serious thing.

Thousand of years further on, cinematic portrayals have us convinced that tomb raiders were greedy 19th- and 20th-century curators, eagerly filling their vitrines with stolen artifacts.

There’s some truth to that, but modern Egyptologists are fairly convinced that Khufu’s pyramid was looted shortly after his reign, by opportunists looking to grab some goodies for their journey to the afterlife.

At any rate, it’s been picked clean.

Perhaps one day, we 21st-century citizens can opt in to a pyramid experience akin to Rome Reborn, a digital crutch for our feeble imagination to help us past the empty sarcophagus and bare walls that have defined the world’s oldest tourist attraction’s interiors for … well, not quite ever, but certainly for Flaubert, Mark Twain, and 12th-century scholar Abd al-Latif.

Fast forwarding to 2017, the BBC’s Rajan Datar hosted “Secrets of the Great Pyramid,” a podcast episode featuring Egyptologist Salima Ikram, space archaeologist Dr Sarah Parcak, and archaeologist, Dr Joyce Tyldesley.

The experts were keen to clear up a major misconception that the 4600-year-old pyramid was built by aliens or enslaved laborers, rather than a permanent staff of architects and engineers, aided by Egyptian civilians eager to barter their labor for meat, fish, beer, and tax abatement.

Datar’s question about a scanning project that would bring further insight into the Pyramid of Giza’s construction and layout was met with excitement.

This attraction, old as it is, has plenty of new secrets to be discovered.

We’re happy to share with you, readers, that 3 years after that episode was taped, the future is here.

The scanning is complete.

Witness the BBC’s 360° tour inside the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Use your mouse to crane your neck, if you like.

As of this writing, you could tour the pyramid in person, should you wish—the usual touristic hoards are definitely dialed down.

But, given the contagion, perhaps better to tour the King’s Chamber, the Queen’s Chamber, and the Grand Gallery virtually, above.

(An interesting tidbit: the pyramid was more distant to the ancient Romans than the Colosseum is to us.)

Listen to the BBC’s “Secrets of the Great Pyramid” episode here.

Tour the Great Pyramid of Giza here.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Tony Hawk & Architectural Historian Iain Borden Tell the Story of How Skateboarding Found a New Use for Cities & Architecture

in Architecture, Sports | July 29th, 2020

Wouldn’t we enjoy seeing our cities like an architectural historian, in command of deep knowledge about the technology, ideology, and aesthetics of the buildings we pass by every day? For most of us, this would hugely enrich our experience of the urban environment. But then so, less obviously, would seeing our cities like a skateboarder, in command of deep knowledge about how to glide, jump, and bounce along the streets, the buildings, and all the myriad pieces of infrastructure as a surfer rides the waves. The architectural historian learns the city with his mind; the skater learns the city, no less painstakingly, with his body.

The Vox video above brings mind and body come together in the persons of Iain Borden, author of Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History, and Tony Hawk, to whom even those wholly ignorant of skateboarding need no introduction. Their complementary interviews reveal the history of modern skateboarding through the sport’s “legendary spots”: public-school campuses, abandoned swimming pools, dry drainage ditches, forgotten sections of concrete pipe. In the main this selection reflects the highly suburbanized 1970s in which skateboards first came to popularity in the United States. But at its outer limits, such as the Mt. Baldy pipeline in northern California, it also shows how far skaters will go in search of the ideal place to ride.

Though purpose-build skate parks do exist (their numbers kept low by formidable insurance challenges), serious skaters prefer spaces not expressly designed for skating. This is thanks in large part to the innovations of a skater with less wider-world name recognition than Hawk, but no less influence within the sport: Natas Kaupas. Hawk remembers the thoughts triggered by footage of the young Kaupas skating masterfully through his neighborhood in the 1987 film Wheels of Fire: “Wow, you can skate curbs like that? You can skate benches? You can skate fire hydrants? The whole world is a skate park now.” Suddenly, Borden adds, “you didn’t need to be in California, or in the Arizona desert, or in Florida anymore. You could be anywhere.”

Reviewing Borden’s Skateboarding and the City, Jack Layton in Urban Studies highlights its history of “how the assemblage of materials that makes up cities has been – in countless ways – re-imagined by the skateboarder to create acceleration, rotation, friction and flow.” It’s easy to forget, Layton writes, that “along with facilitating commerce, transport and habitation, cities can be spaces that facilitate play, exhilaration and pleasure.” Despite often having been regarded as public nuisances, skateboarders are “a constant reminder that our cities are creative and rich places,” says Borden. With the exception of the skate parks secretly constructed in hidden urban spaces across the world, skaters, of course, don’t build the city — but they do show us some of its untapped potential.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Introduction to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Museum, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again

in Architecture, History, Travel | July 13th, 2020

No tour of Istanbul can fail to include Hagia Sophia. The same is true enough of the British Museum in London or the Louvre in Paris, but Hagia Sophia is more than a museum: it’s also spent different stretches of its near-millennium-and-a-half of existence as an Eastern Orthodox cathedral, a Roman Catholic cathedral, and a mosque. Stripped of its religious function in the mid-1930s by the administration of President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, remembered for his creation of a secular Turkish republic, the majestic building has spent the past 85 years as not just a museum but the country’s top tourist attraction. Now, according to a decree issued last week by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hagia Sophia will become a mosque again.

“Erdogan, like his predecessor Ataturk, appears to be using the fate of the Hagia Sophia to make a political statement and score some points with his supporters,” writes Ars Technica’s Kiona N. Smith. But so did Emperor Justinian I of the Eastern Roman Empire, who “ordered the cathedral’s construction in the first place for similar reasons.”

Built on the site where two cathedrals had previously stood, both burned down in different revolts, “the Hagia Sophia has always been as much a political landmark as a religious or cultural one — so it’s not surprising that it has also changed hands, and functions, at least four times in its history.” Ataturk’s secularization of Hagia Sophia entailed a restoration of its historic features: “Christian mosaics that had been plastered over in the late 1400s were carefully uncovered, and they shared the domed space with Muslim prayer niches and pulpits.”

You can get a clearer sense of what the building’s architecture and decoration reveal in the animated TED-Ed lesson at the top of the post. Educator Kelly Wall points to, among other features, the ancient fortifications that “hint at the strategic importance of the surrounding city, founded as Byzantium by Greek colonists in 657 BCE.”; the foundation stones that “murmur tales from their homelands of Egypt and Syria, while columns taken from the Temple of Artemis recall a more ancient past”; and, beneath the golden dome that “appears suspended from heaven,” reinforcing Corinthian columns, “brought from Lebanon after the original dome was partially destroyed by an earthquake in 558 CE,” that offer a reminder of “fragility and the engineering skills such a marvel requires.” The BBC 360-degree virtual tour just above goes into greater detail on these elements and others.

According to reports cited by Hyperallergic’s Hakim Bishara, “tourists will still have access to the site, although it might be closed to visitors during prayer time.” Still, “art historians and conservationists worry that the Turkish authorities might decide to cover up or remove the centuries-old Byzantine mosaics and Christian iconography that adorn the celebrated structure, as was done in other converted churches in Turkey in the past.” Good job, then, that irrepressible television traveler Rick Steves has already shot his episode on Istanbul, which (from 9:34) naturally features a visit to Hagia Sophia. But whether as a museum, cathedral, a mosque, or whatever it becomes next, the building will surely remain what Steves called “the high point of Byzantine architecture” and “the pinnacle of that society’s sixth-century glory days.” And no leader of Turkey, no matter what their beliefs about church and state, will want the tourists to stop coming.

via Hyperallergic

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The World According to Le Corbusier: An Animated Introduction to the Most Modern of All Architects

in Animation, Architecture, History | June 23rd, 2020

Among modern architects, was any architect ever so modernity-minded as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known a Le Corbusier? Like many cultural figures well-known outside their field — Franz Kafka, George Orwell, David Lynch — his name has long since been adjectivized, though nowadays the term “Corbusian” is seldom used as a compliment. Many a self-described opponent of modern architecture, whatever they consider modern architecture to be, points to Le Corbusier as the originator of all the inhumanity of buildings designed over the past 90 years, and especially the second half of the 20th century: their drab colors (or lack thereof), their depressing austerity, their forbidding scale, their dark corridors, their leaky roofs. But how much, really, is he to blame?

“Le Corbusier recommended that the houses of the future be ascetic and clean, disciplined and frugal,” says The Book of Life, the companion site to Alain de Botton’s School of Life. Remembered as an architect but both an artist and engineer at heart, he thought that “true, great architecture – meaning, architecture motivated by the quest for efficiency – was more likely to be found in a 40,000-kilowatt electricity turbine or a low-pressure ventilating fan” than in the capitals of old Europe. For inspiration he looked to modern machines, especially those that had begun appearing in the sky in his youth: “he observed that the requirements of flight of necessity rid airplanes of all superfluous decoration,” says de Botton in the animated School of Life primer above, “and so unwittingly transformed them into successful pieces of architecture.”

Hence Le Corbusier’s infamous pronouncement that “a house is a machine for living in,” which first appeared in his 1923 manifesto Vers une architecture (Towards an Architecture). Le Corbusier was a writer — and a painter, and a furniture designer, and an urban planner — as much as he was an architect. “The problem is that both his detractors and his acolytes want to believe that his written manifestos, urbanistic visions, utopian ideologies and theories are compatible with his buildings,” writes Jonathan Meades, sometime architectural critic and full-time resident of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation apartment block in Marseilles. But “Le Corbusier, writer, has little in common with Le Corbusier, maker of the century’s most profoundly sensuous, most moving architecture”: one was a “self-advertising propagandist,” the other “an artist-craftsman of peerless originality.”

Le Corbusier’s headline-making urban-renewal proposals included, Meades writes, “the destruction of the Right Bank in Paris and its replacement with ranks of cruciform skyscrapers”; he also proposed demolishing Manhattan, as de Botton says, “to make way for a fresh and more ‘Cartesian’ attempt at urban design.” Le Corbusier’s utopian dreams of colossal skyscrapers placed in the middle of vast green parkland and surrounded by elevated freeways led, in this telling, to “the dystopian housing estates that now ring historic Paris, the wastelands from which tourists avert their eyes in confused horror and disbelief on their way into the city.” But if cities can still use Le Corbusier’s planning ideas as a negative example, they have more to learn from the positive example of his aesthetic sensibility, which remains exhilarating today, even amid a kind of modernity the man himself could never have imagined.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Magnificent Ancient Roman Mosaic Floor Unearthed in Verona, Italy

in Architecture, History | June 1st, 2020

One often hears about renovation projects that tear up linoleum, shag carpet, or some equally unappealing flooring to discover a pristine (and now much more attractive) layer of hardwood or tile beneath. Any building of sufficient age becomes a palimpsest, a collection of era upon era of trends in architecture and design: a look under a floor or behind a wall can potentially become a trip back in time. The same holds for the land itself, at least in the parts of the world where civilization arrived first. “In former Mesopotamia there are hills in areas that should be entirely flat,” writes Myko Clelland, better known as the Dapper Historian, on Twitter. “They’re actually remains of entire towns, where residents built layer after layer until the whole thing became metres tall.”

Or take Negrar di Valpolicella, home of the eponymous wine varietal, one of whose vineyards has turned out to conceal an ancient Roman villa. The discovery at hand is an elaborate mosaic floor which The History Blog reports as “dating to around the 3rd century A.D.” So far, the dig under the Benedetti La Villa has revealed “long uninterrupted stretches of mosaic pavements with polychrome patterns of geometric shapes, guilloche, wave bands, floral vaults and the semi-circular pelta.”

Though the floor’s brilliance may have been unexpected, its presence wasn’t: that a Roman villa had once stood on the grounds “was known since the 19th century. Indeed, the name of the winery is taken from the name of the contrada (meaning neighborhood or district), evidence of culturally transmitted knowledge of a grand villa there.”

Announced just last week by Negrar di Valipocella, the discovery of this mosaic floor comes a result of the most recent of a series of archaeological digs that began in 1922. “Numerous attempts were made in subsequent decades to find the villa,” says The History Blog, “and another smaller mosaic was discovered in 1975 and covered back up with soil for its preservation.” Though interrupted by budgetary limitations, the work cycle of the still-operational vineyard, and this year’s coronavirus pandemic, the project has nevertheless managed to turn up a strong contender for the archaeological find of the year. With luck it will turn up much more of this 1,800-year-old domus, giving us all a chance to see what other unexpectedly tasteful design choices the ancient Romans made. The images in this post come via Myko Clelland, Dapper Historian on Twitter.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Houses Offer Virtual Tours: Hollyhock House, Taliesin West, Fallingwater & More

in Architecture | April 13th, 2020

One might, it seems, be almost anywhere in the U.S. and only a few hours drive from a Frank Lloyd Wright house. The “Wisconsin-born Wright’s portfolio,” writes Jess Hoffert at Midwest Living, consists “of about 500 structures, a good portion of which still stand in the Midwest.” Wright houses span the West Coast and nestle in the suburbs of Washington, DC. As millions of visitors see up close every year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Frank Lloyd Wright Room, Wright’s style permeated every part of his designs, inside and out.

But there’s no talk of travel these days. The Wright-designed homes and museum exhibitions that were open to the public have closed their doors to visitors “just when they were gearing up for the spring touring season to begin,” announced the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. To make sure the public still has access to twelve of those famous works, the Conservancy—along with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation—have launched #WrightVirtualVisits, which offers virtual tours of 12 iconic houses.

The delivery method is “a touch confusing,” Matt Hickman comments at The Architect’s Newspaper. Tours kick off at 12:00 Central every Thursday “for six weeks (and maybe more). Each week, the conservators of a specific Wright site will share a short yet intimate video tour on its website and associated media pages of another Wright site…. Each week, two fresh Wright properties will partake in this virtual tour swap.” This does require a close reading of the instructions, and requires one to keep a date, as it were, for a Wright tour.

Given the houses on display, you might not find this too troublesome.

Buildings that have been featured already or are up to bat in the coming weeks include the Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois; the Hollyhock House, recently named as the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in Los Angeles; Chicago’s Prairie School stunner, the Emil Bach House; Taliesin West, home of the (possibly) defunct School of Architecture at Taliesin, in Scottsdale, Arizona; the stunning yet often-overlooked Graycliff estate outside of Buffalo, New York; Samara, a pristine Usonian design in West Lafayette, Indiana; the Gordon House, the only Wright building in Oregon, and, of course, Fallingwater.

That last house must surely be Wright’s most famous, an exemplar of his “Usonian” style. But no matter what particular idiom he chose, the Midwestern aesthetic values that shaped his early Prairie Style carried through into all of his later work. In her short guide to ten of the most well-known Prairie Houses, Wright expert Carla Lind describes his visual philosophy as representative of “ideals in which midwesterners believed.”

The seeds of the Prairie Style were rooted in an appreciation for nature and a dedication to the freedom and individuality inherent in democracy. To that Wright added his own experiences and influences: his mother’s teaching via the Froebel gifts, that natural law could be understood through geometric abstractions; his father’s passion for music, which introduced him to composition and harmony; the literature of the day that informed him about the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements and transcendental writers such as Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau… the Japanese art and architecture at the World’s Columbian Exposition….

The price of admission—free for as long as it lasts—makes this opportunity to see, from a safe social distance, how Wright balanced these influences well worth the virtual trip.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Take a 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Including the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx & More

in Architecture, History, Technology | March 31st, 2020

Imagine the pyramids of ancient Egypt, and a vivid image comes right to mind. But unless you happen to be an Egyptologist, that image may possess a great deal more vividness than it does detail. We all have a rough sense of the pyramids’ size (impressively large), shape (pyramidical), texture (crumbly), and setting (sand), almost wholly derived from images captured over the past century. But what about the pyramids in their heyday, more than 4,500 years ago? Do we know enough even to begin imagining how they looked, let alone how people made use of them? Harvard Egyptologist Peter Der Manuelian does, and in the video above he gives us a tour through 3D models that reconstruct the Giza pyramid complex (also known as the Giza necropolis) using both the best technology and the fullest knowledge available today.

“You’ll see we’ve had to remove modern structures and excavators, debris dumps,” says Der Manuelian as the camera flies, dronelike, in the direction of the Great Sphinx. “We studied the Nile, and we had to move it much closer to the Giza pyramids, because in antiquity, the Nile did flow closer. And we’ve tried to rebuild each and every structure.”

Of the Sphinx, this model boasts “the most accurate reconstruction that has ever been attempted so far,” and Der Manuelian shows it in two possible colors schemes, one with only the head painted, one with the entire body painted in “the reddish brown reserved for male figures.” He also shows the pyramid temple of Khafre, both in the near-completely ruined state in which it exists today, and in full digital reconstruction, complete with seated statues the Fourth-Dynasty pharaoh Khafre himself.

The model accommodates more than just the built environment. Der Manuelian shows a model bark with another statue being carried into one of the chambers, explaining that it allows researchers to determine “whether or not it’s big enough or small enough to actually fit between the doors of the temple.” Elsewhere in the model we see a re-enactment of the “Opening of the Mouth ceremony,” the “reanimation ceremony for the deceased king, meant to magically and ritually bring him back to life for the netherworld.” The rendering takes place inside the temple of the Pyramid of Khufu, peopled with human characters. But “how many should there be? What should they be wearing? Where are the regular Egyptians? Are they allowed anywhere near this ceremony, or indeed are they allowed anywhere near Giza at all?” The greater the detail in which researchers reconstruct the ancient world, the more such questions come to the surface.

In the video just above, Der Manuelian explains more about the importance of 3D modeling to Egyptology: how it uses the existing research, what it has helped modern researchers understand, and the promise it holds for the future. The latter includes much of interest even to non-Egyptologists, such as tourists who might like to familiarize themselves with Giza necropolis in the days when the Opening of the Mouth ceremonies still took place — or any era of their choice — before setting foot there themselves. These videos come from “Pyramids of Giza: Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology,” Der Manuelian’s online course at edX, a worthwhile learning experience if you’ve got your own such trip planned — or just the kind of fascination that has gripped people around the world since the Egyptomania of the nineteenth century. The technology with which we study Egypt has advanced greatly since then, but for many, the mysteries of ancient Egypt itself have only become more compelling.

via The Kid Should See This

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Explore the Ruins of Timgad, the “African Pompeii” Excavated from the Sands of Algeria

Take an 360° Interactive Tour Inside the Great Pyramid of Giza

Tony Hawk & Architectural Historian Iain Borden Tell the Story of How Skateboarding Found a New Use for Cities & Architecture

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The World According to Le Corbusier: An Animated Introduction to the Most Modern of All Architects

Magnificent Ancient Roman Mosaic Floor Unearthed in Verona, Italy

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Houses Offer Virtual Tours: Hollyhock House, Taliesin West, Fallingwater & More

Take a 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Including the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx & More

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