The Marvelous Maps of the Week

There has been a huge surge over the last few years of maps which show the age of buildings using colored building footprints. This Los Angeles building age map has the added bonus of including an animation option which allows you to watch the city growing over time.

The LA Building Age map visualizes the age of nearly 3 million buildings in Los Angeles. The colors of the building footprints on the map show the decade of when the buildings were originally built (you can also click on individual building footprints on the map to view the exact year that it was built).

The animation option provides a great sense of how and where Los Angeles developed during the 20th Century.


In 1963 Jerry Gretzinger began drawing a map of an imaginary city. Now, 52 years later, you can explore Jerry's city on an interactive Leaflet powered map.

Using Jerry's Map you can zoom in on any of the over 3,200 eight by ten inch panels of the original paper map. Jerry estimates that he has averaged about 20 minutes a day over 30 years working on the map. He says,

"That would come to 456.25 days or 1 year and 3 months. To have 'wasted' 15 months of my 70 years and nine months doesn’t seem too bad."

How long will you spend in examining this new interactive version of Jerry's Map?


The 2015 European Games is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, from 12 to 28 June 2015. This will be the inaugural event of the new European Games, an international mini-Olympics type event for athletes representing the National Olympic Committees of Europe.

The Journey of the Flame is a very interesting map which shows the route of the Baku 2015 torch relay. This futuristic 3d map was built using WebGL and three.js. When zoomed out the map presents a traditional top down map view. As you zoom in the map actually transitions to present an oblique view of Azerbaijan and the route of the torch relay.

If you select a town on the map you can view social messages posted by map users at that location. To view a message just select one of the individual flames shooting out of the torch that appears over the town.