Highlights

Located on a hillside overlooking Lake Hollingsworth, Florida Southern College contains the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in the world. The master plan for the institution, described by Wright as "the first uniquely American campus," was created in 1938.

The first and most significant of the buildings, the Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel, was constructed between 1939 and 1941. Over the next two decades, nine more buildings, a “water dome” fountain, and nearly 1.25 miles (2 kilometers) of esplanades were constructed.

The textile blocks that make up the buildings of Florida Southern’s campus are failing, due in part to water infiltration, which has corroded the iron bars that hold them together. The deterioration has been exacerbated by deferred maintenance and inappropriate repairs. In addition to the technical challenges of conserving the textile blocks, the difficulty in sympathetically adapting the Wright-designed buildings for modern use presents an obstacle to the conservation program.
 

Route 66 roadbed near Miami, Oklahoma, 2001

Route 66, once the primary highway from America’s interior to the West Coast, has played a now-legendary role in U.S. history since its designation in 1926. During the 1930s, it carried Dust Bowl farmers west to California. Throughout World War II, it was a lifeline conveying troops and supplies across eight states. By the 1950s, when the car became king and millions discovered the road trip, America’s “Mother Road” had come to symbolize the freedom of the open highway. Lined with eclectic curiosities—diners, motels, gas stations, and fanciful “attractions”—Route 66 delighted travelers and supported the economies of hundreds of small towns along its length.

Over the centuries, the rural countryside between the southern Moravian towns of Lednice and Valtice had been a landscape divided by shifting national borders, scarred by conflicts like the Thirty Years War. Howeverit was also slowly unified by the continued building campaigns commissioned by the Liechtenstein family. Beginning in 1249, the Liechtensteins acquired the Lednice zamek, or manor house, and they soon purchased the Valtice zamek to the north.

Over the next 500 years, the Liechtensteins developed the two chateaus and surrounding park with a series of additions and reconstructions. Under the direction of Duke Jan Josef I (1760–1836), the vast property became an architectural landscape. From the late 18th century into the first half of the 19th, a series of subsidiary summer houses, chapels, monuments, and other structures were built and linked by landscaped sightlines throughout the property.

Phnom Bakheng is one of Angkor’s oldest temples. It was built as a state temple between the late 9th and early 10th centuries, when King Yasovarman constructed it as the centerpiece of his new capital, Yasodharapura, later absorbed into Angkor. The first mountain-style temple built there, Phnom Bakheng represents Mount Meru, home of the Hindu gods. Despite its architectural and historical significance, the temple is popular today mainly for its panoramic view of Angkor Wat, particularly at sunset.

At the turn of the 20th century, Antarctica remained the only continent untouched by humans. In 1895, the 6th International Geographical Congress declared that Antarctica’s ice-choked seas and frozen peaks were the next frontier for scientific discovery, ushering in what has come to be known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Dozens of men, including famed expedition leaders Sir Ernest Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott, and Carsten Borchgrevnik, answered the call and trekked to the bottom of the planet. They erected prefabricated wooden cabins that served both as homes during the coldest months and laboratories for research into the local climate and ecosystem. Using these cabins as bases, the explorers traversed glaciers and scaled Mt. Erebus, the southernmost volcano on Earth. When WWII diverted the world’s attention, Antarctic investigation was abandoned, leaving behind several expedition huts on the continent. The small wooden buildings were built to withstand the drastic weather conditions only for the few short years that the explorers inhabited them, but, remarkably, after more than a century, the structures are still intact.