The paintings depict two of just a handful of local festivities held specifically at night.
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If you look at a map of Cairo from the second half of the 19th century you'll easily recognized the Ezbekiya Gardens, a large rectangle with chamfered corners to the northwest.
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I'm not sure if Place des Vosges inaugurated the practice of carving urban space out of existing urban fabric, but the experience of Paris had certainly an enormous impact throughout the world.
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Before the triumph of Castro's revolution in 1958, the night of Havana was the stuff of legend and fantasy.
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Midway through "Night in Bombay"--the wonderful and quaintly risqué 1940 novel by Louis Bromfield--the story takes a brief rest, just enough to let the three main characters have a quiet dinner together.
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It should not be difficult to imagine the sound of the night along the narrow streets climbing up the hills from the downtown Baixa.
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West Lake is Hangzhou's defining urban element, both physically and culturally.
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During the more than four centuries of Moorish domination (AD 714 to 1147,) Lisbon was variously known as Luxbona, Lixbuna, Ulixbone and Olissibona, names that eventually morphed into the Portuguese Lisboa.
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For the 1925 Exposition International des Arts Décoratives he set out to build, literally, a house for his vision of the city.
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His eccentric character not only has to complete an elaborate cafe circuit in about six hours, but also go back home after each stop and change clothes.
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If you look carefully behind the front of the buildings along the street, you will notice that they are part of a single circular wall, the remnants of the central drum of Rome’s first Thermae, the Baths of Agrippa.
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More than fifteen centuries earlier, the “Forma Urbis Romae” made one of the first attempts, if not the first, to map the imperial city.
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The urban structure of settlements on mountains and hills typically follow the “lay of the land”. Take for example the towns in the Baronia de Carapelle on the Abruzzo region of Italy.
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Walking the narrow streets of Castelvecchio Calvisio--the small town on the Apennine Mountains of Abruzzo--one is immediately struck by the proliferation of stone stairs rhythmically projecting out from the façade of the buildings.
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Giambattista Nolli oriented his celebrated 1748 map of Rome with north up, a modern, carefully chosen cartographic convention, one that we still use today.
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In the Middle Ages, European world maps were drawn orienting east up. Actually, that's where the word orientation comes from, oriens, Latin for east.
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Some open spaces in the city are voids left by the structures around them. Others are figural spaces defined by the surrounding buildings.
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Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat in Brno is undoubtedly one of the canonical masterpieces of Modern Architecture.
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Walking through Rome you continuously encounter antiquities amidst the contemporary fabric of the city.
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In order to remember the names of Rome’s seven hills, Victorian school children used to memorize a rather silly phrase--Can Queen Victoria eat cold apple pie?--where the first letter of each word stood for the name of each of the hills.
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