23 essays tagged “architecture”.
Singapore, Singapore
Singapore has, for two generations, been written off by travel writers as too clean, too efficient, too engineered. They were almost always passing through. Stay a week and you discover a small, dense, multi-ethnic city of profound urban design intelligence and one of the best hawker-food cultures on earth.
April 29, 2024
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona is a city that has been loved nearly to death and is, slowly, recovering. You can still have a beautiful week here. You just need to skip half of what the guidebooks insist on, and learn the names of three or four streets that aren't on the tourist map.
April 8, 2024
Hallstatt, Austria
Hallstatt has 700 residents and, last I checked, 11,000 visitors a day in high season. The math doesn't work. The two windows that do work — first light, and after 6 p.m. — give you the alpine village that made it famous in the first place.
February 22, 2024
Hoi An, Vietnam
Hoi An's central trading town, the old port on the Thu Bon river, is one of the most architecturally preserved towns in Southeast Asia. It is also, on lantern-festival nights, a crowded selfie corridor. The trick is the early morning, the rainy afternoons, and the bicycle to the beach.
October 22, 2023
Antigua, Guatemala
Antigua Guatemala was the colonial capital of Central America from 1543 until earthquakes destroyed much of it in 1773. The surviving stone façades, the ruined convents, and the cobblestone streets are some of the most architecturally complete colonial set pieces in the Americas.
August 25, 2023
Beijing, China
Beijing is a city of axes — the great north-south central axis from the Bell Tower through the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven — and of pockets. The pockets are the hutongs, the grey-brick alley neighbourhoods, and they remain, in the surviving sections, one of the most distinctive urban textures on earth.
July 7, 2023
Shanghai, China
The Shanghai of the headlines — Pudong, the LED-skinned skyline, the supertall towers — is real and worth seeing once. The Shanghai of the *longtang* lane houses, the morning markets, and the plane-tree-lined French Concession streets is where the city actually lives.
June 30, 2023
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Hong Kong's verticality is famous. What's less famous is how walkable it remains. The Mid-Levels escalator alone covers 800 metres of climb. The city is layered — street level, podium level, rooftop level — and the trick is to keep moving between them.
April 4, 2023
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Dubai is the most engineered city of the modern era — built almost entirely since the 1990s, from a small Trucial Coast pearl-trading port into a 3-million-person globally connected emirate. The city is best read as the architectural laboratory it is.
March 24, 2023
Budapest, Hungary
Budapest's two best institutions are its thermal baths and its ruin pubs — both unique to this city, both essential, both best understood by trying them yourself. The river is the city's spine and the baths are its lungs.
March 19, 2023
Jaipur, India
Jaipur is the rare planned 18th-century Indian city — Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II laid it out in 1727 on the Hindu Shilpa Shastra principles, with the famously rose-pink colour washed onto every building inside the old walls for an imperial visit in 1876 and never washed off.
November 25, 2022
Prague, Czechia
I first saw Prague in 2003, when the post-communist hangover was real and the beer cost almost nothing. The city has changed more than any European capital I know. The trick now is to find the version of it that survived.
October 30, 2022
Florence, Italy
Florence is the Renaissance city: small enough to walk across in twenty minutes, dense with paintings and buildings that changed Western art forever, and now reliably packed by mid-morning. The trick is to be up earlier than anyone else.
August 22, 2022
Samarkand, Uzbekistan
Samarkand is the great Timurid capital, with the most extraordinary 14th- and 15th-century Islamic architecture in Central Asia. Uzbekistan has, since 2018, dramatically liberalised tourist access; the country is now one of the most rewarding regions in the world to visit.
May 15, 2022
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Dubrovnik is the most besieged old town in the Mediterranean — first by armies for a thousand years, now by cruise ships for ten. The trick is timing. Off-season Dubrovnik is one of the most beautiful weeks in Europe.
April 11, 2022
Vienna, Austria
Vienna is a city that doesn't want to be done quickly, and it's surprisingly good at outlasting visitors who try. The Viennese take their afternoons in coffee houses for a reason. Sit down. Order. Stay.
January 15, 2022
Marrakech, Morocco
Marrakech is a city built for confusion. The medina was designed in the 11th century as a fortified labyrinth, and the design has held. The riad — the inward-facing courtyard house — is built around a small fountain and a fragment of sky. The streets are narrow on purpose. Surrender to it.
November 30, 2021
Bruges, Belgium
Bruges has, for fifteen years, been a kind of cautionary tale about overtourism — a town of 20,000 in the old centre that absorbs 8 million visitors a year. In November, all but a few thousand of those visitors are elsewhere. Bruges in November is one of the most beautiful walking weeks in Europe.
November 8, 2021
Havana, Cuba
Havana is a city of crumbling baroque facades, 1950s American cars, the most particular post-Soviet political economy in the world, and a daily life that does not, despite the photo-tourism economy, perform for the camera. A short guide to the city's depths.
October 19, 2021
Luang Prabang, Laos
Luang Prabang is small. The entire peninsula between the Mekong and the Nam Khan rivers can be walked in 20 minutes. It is also one of the most preserved colonial-and-monastic towns in Southeast Asia, and the dawn alms procession remains, for now, an unforced daily ritual.
August 14, 2021
Oia, Greece
Santorini between 6 p.m. and 9 a.m. is a different island. The cruise ships are at sea. The day-trippers are on the ferry. The whitewashed villages, which spend the daylight hours being photographed, finally exhale. This is the island worth flying to.
June 4, 2021
Seville, Spain
Seville is a city where the afternoon doesn't really happen — it's too hot — and the evening doesn't really begin until 9. Plan accordingly. The four hours between then and midnight are when everything that matters in this city actually happens.
April 22, 2021
Quebec City, Canada
Quebec City is the only walled city north of Mexico, the oldest continuous French settlement in North America (founded 1608), and one of the rare places where you can spend a week speaking French without anyone switching to English on you. The deep winter is the right time.
January 25, 2021