The Age of the World's Buildings Mapped

Russia's Mercator has joined in this year's trend to map the ages of all the world's buildings. Mercator's Houses of Moscow maps the ages of all Moscow's buildings.

The map shows a distinct pattern in Moscow's development. The center of the city retains many of its pre-revolution historical buildings and remains mainly largely untouched by later developments. Modern developments from the 20th and 21st centuries seem to be fairly evenly distributed across the rest of the city.

The Age of Greater Reykjavík is a map that shows the age of the Icelandic capital's buildings. The darker the color of the building on the map the older it is.

You can mouse-over any of the buildings on the map to view its age of construction and address.


The Five Boroughs: Building Age NYC uses NYC's Pluto data to map the age of all buildings in the five boroughs of New York City. That is an incredible 1,053,713 buildings in total. The map is a great resource to help you find New York's hidden historical buildings.

Block by Block, Brooklyn’s Past and Present uses the same data to show the age of Booklyn's buildings.

CitySDK's map shows the age of nearly 10 million buildings in the Netherlands. It is a great mapped visualization of a very large data set, which provides a great tool for exploring different patterns of urban development in Dutch towns.

The iBag Viewer is an interactive map of the same Dutch building age data set. In my opinion the choice of colors in the CitySDK map make it a much nicer map to look at, however the iBag Viewer includes two really handy controls; a date slide control and a map opacity control.

The date slider allows you to filter the results shown on the map by building age. You can therefore use the control to find out where all the oldest buildings are in any Dutch town. The map opacity control also allows you to adjust the opacity of the OpenStreetMap map tiles.


Ljubljana Building Ages is a map of building ages in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Buildings on the map are colored by age and a line graph provides a quick visual overview of the ages of the city's buildings.

The Ljubljana map was inspired by the Portland, Oregon: The Age of a City. This MapBox map colors 544,033 buildings in Portland by age.

If you live in Chicago then you can check out Wired's MapLab map of Chicago's Building Ages.