The New Age of Building Age Maps Has Begun

The new era of building age maps has begun. Block and Paper have been busy recently creating animated building-age maps of cities around the world, showing urban development unfold over time. The style has since been emulated by others, including Parcelscope's Every Building in Los Angeles County.

Now Alexander Bogachev has imported the idea to France, creating an animated building-age map of Paris that shows when each of the French capital's 122,435 buildings was constructed.

Paris, Building by Building provides an animated timeline of the construction of Paris since the year 900. One of the most surprising findings of this chronology is how much of Paris was built after the famous Haussmann period. According to the map, only one building in fifteen dates from 1851 to 1870, the era associated with Baron Haussmann's transformation of the city. Six times as many buildings were actually constructed during the Belle Époque, between 1871 and 1914.

Paris, Building by Building, offers more than an animated journey through the architectural history of Paris. Bogachev has introduced two features that make this building age map particularly interesting to explore.

The first allows you to isolate any street in Paris and view its buildings side by side. Selecting a street removes all the other buildings from the map, making it much easier to focus on the ages of the buildings along that particular stretch of road. It's a simple but effective way to compare the architectural history of individual streets without the distraction of the surrounding city.

The second feature lets you step down to street level and explore Paris in 3D. Switch to the street-level panorama to see the city from a first-person perspective, then walk around and explore. The buildings remain coloured according to their construction dates, so you can investigate Paris's architectural history from the ground as well as from above.

Together, these features turn the map into more than a chronological visualization. You can watch Paris grow through the decades, compare the buildings along a single street, and then wander through a 3D version of the city to see its architectural history up close.

Via: Datawrapper's Data Vis Dispatch