Mapping the Age of Chicago's Buildings

Back in July Wired published a nice tutorial on how to create a building age map. In Adventures in Mapmaking Wired's MapLab not only provided a great tutorial on how to map the ages of a city's buildings but also created an example map visualizing the ages of Chicago's buildings.

The Wired Chicago map is OK but it is missing a legend (so it is difficult to determine a building's age from its color) and it is also missing any filtering options. Both these problems have been addressed in Shaun Jacobsen's Chicago Building Age Map.

This map not only includes a nice legend (so you can tell what the building colors represent) it also includes the option to filter the buildings shown on the map by their year of construction. This filtering option means that you can choose to visualize only the city's oldest buildings on the map. Alternatively, if you want to view the city's newest buildings, you can visualize only those buildings constructed this century.

The map also allows you to mouse-over any of the individual buildings on the map to view its year of construction.