Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, the great revivals, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and concrete: the world's architectural styles on one map, century by century. Built from the styles that Wikidata records for 180,451 buildings, with honest gaps where the record is thin.
Walk through almost any old town in Europe and you can read its history in its buildings: a Romanesque church with round arches, a Gothic cathedral reaching up, a Baroque palace, a Neoclassical bank with columns, a row of Victorian shops, a concrete car park. Each style belonged to a time and a place, and then travelled: Gothic came back as Gothic Revival in Toronto and Melbourne, Greek temples turned into American courthouses, and the International Style went everywhere.
Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, records the architectural style of 180,451 buildings and structures that also have coordinates, using 1,314 different style labels, from 'Romanesque architecture' to 'zenpō-kōen-fun' (a keyhole-shaped Japanese burial mound). I grouped them into 25 families with a mapping table that I checked by hand, and mapped them. Slide through the centuries to see which styles were being built where, switch to the dominant style in each patch of the map, or search for a place or a building and click any dot.
Each dot is a building or structure whose Wikidata item has an architectural style (P149) and coordinates, coloured by the family of its style. Dates are Wikidata's inception (P571); round-century dates are read as the middle of that century. Click a family above to hide or show it. Source: Wikidata (CC0) via QLever, retrieved in 2026. Outlines: Natural Earth. Base map tiles © Esri.
86,148 buildings (48%) have a date of construction or foundation. Put them in centuries and the sequence every architecture student learns falls out of the data on its own. Romanesque makes up 63% of dated buildings from the 1100s; Gothic 72% of those from the 1300s; Renaissance 43% of the 1500s; Baroque and Rococo 51% of the 1700s. The 1800s belong to Neoclassical (27%) and to the revivals, which make up 42% of everything dated to that century. Modernism leads the 1900s, but only just (17%), in a crowded century of historicism, Art Deco (12%) and Art Nouveau (11%). Since 2000, postmodern and contemporary work leads (31%).
What was built, century by century
Share of dated buildings in each century by style family, from the 800s on. Columns before the 1100s rest on fewer than 1,000 buildings each. Hover for numbers; click a column to show that century on the map.
A warning about dates. 2,374 buildings are dated exactly 2000, against 51 for 1999 and 56 for 2001: most of these are Wikidata's way of storing '20th century', which it keeps as the last year of the century. About a fifth of all dates (21%) fall on a round century like this, so I read them as the middle of the century they end. Read them as written instead and the share of a family in a century moves by up to 20.2 points, and the leading family changes in 3 centuries; the broad sequence holds. Another 3,166 buildings have a date earlier than their style existed (a Gothic Revival church 'founded' in 1200 is usually a medieval parish rebuilt in the 1800s), and I leave them out of the time views.
36,445 buildings (20%) are in a revival style, where architects of a later age borrowed the forms of an earlier one. The biggest by far is Gothic Revival, with 10,776 buildings in 97 countries, 40% of them outside Europe. There are more Gothic Revival buildings in the United States (3,426) than in Germany (1,384), Poland (1,219) or Britain (1,175), and Canada (522) has more than France (381).
When Gothic Revival arrived
Gothic Revival buildings dated to a year (not just a century) from 1740 on, by country (at least 15). The hollow dot marks the year by which the first tenth were begun, the solid dot the median year.
The dates trace the revival's journey. In Britain, where it began, the first tenth of dated Gothic Revival buildings were begun by 1832 and half by 1870. The style reached Canada (1848) and Australia (1849) within a generation, the United States by 1854 and New Zealand by 1864, and it kept going in the United States long after Britain had moved on (median 1896). Russia's early date is real: Catherine the Great's 'pseudo-Gothic' palaces of the 1770s and 1780s.
Other revivals stayed closer to home. Greek Revival is overwhelmingly American: 96% of its 5,518 buildings are in the United States, the courthouses, banks and plantation houses of a young republic that saw itself in Athens. Colonial, Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival (5,196 buildings) are 81% American too, with Brazil's neocolonial style a distant second. Moorish Revival is the most scattered: 407 buildings in 46 countries, from Spain to the United States.
Neoclassical is the largest family of all (26,140 buildings), and capitals wear it more than most places. Of the 53 national capitals with at least 40 styled buildings within 15 km, Neoclassical is the most common family in 6: Helsinki, Washington, Tbilisi, Paris, London and Havana. Helsinki has the highest share (33%), the legacy of Carl Ludvig Engel's Empire-style centre built for a new Russian grand duchy, with Washington (28%) close behind.
Neoclassical share of styled buildings in capitals
Buildings within 15 km of each national capital (capitals with at least 40). Bars show the Neoclassical share; the label gives the count.
Wikidata counts how many Wikipedias and other wikis have a page about each item, a rough measure of fame. The best documented building in the whole set is the Taj Mahal (185 pages), then the Statue of Liberty, which Wikidata files as Neoclassical, and Hagia Sophia. Half of all the buildings here have 2 pages or fewer: this is a map of the ordinary as well as the famous. Click a card to find the building on the map.
This is not a map of the world's buildings. It is a map of the buildings someone has given a style in Wikidata, and that depends largely on which heritage lists have been loaded into it. The United States (22.3%) and Spain (20.7%) hold 43% between them. Spain's total includes 5,782 Catalan farmhouses (masies) and 675 grain silos; Slovakia, with 10,486 buildings, has more per head than any other country of over two million people, and only 11% of its entries have an English name. Germany, France and the United Kingdom together hold just 12%.
Where the styled buildings are
Share of all 180,451 buildings, by country (top 15) and continent.
The rest of the world is thinly drawn. China has 381 styled buildings and India 1,116; Africa has 679 (0.4%). The families from outside the European tradition (Islamic, Persian, Ottoman, Mughal, Hindu, Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asian and Pre-Columbian) hold 5% of the buildings between them. Wikidata's style labels are themselves European in outlook: Iran's buildings are labelled by dynasty, Japan's by shrine type, and few Maya or Inca sites carry a style at all.
Wikidata gives a style to 37,369 buildings in Spain and 381 in China.
Buildings. Every Wikidata item with an architectural style (P149) and coordinates (P625), retrieved through QLever in 2026: 180,451 items carrying 196,135 style statements. Most are buildings; some are monuments, bridges, gardens, districts and a few whole towns. For each I kept the English label (85% have one), the number of wiki pages about it, its country (Wikidata's country, else the Natural Earth country under its point) and its earliest inception date.
Families. Every style used by 20 or more buildings got a family and, where it re-uses an older style, a revival flag, decided by hand (478 styles, covering 99% of style statements). The long tail was sorted by words in the label (417 styles) or by the nearest classified parent in Wikidata's style hierarchy (61); the remaining 358 rare styles, and general labels such as 'medieval architecture' or 'gable roof', are 'Other or general'. A building with several styles is coloured by its most specific one (the style used by the fewest buildings); 9,731 buildings have styles in more than one family. Revivals keep the family of the style they revive: Gothic Revival is Gothic, with the revival flag. The whole mapping is published as style_families.csv.
Dates. Wikidata's inception is the date a building was begun or founded, which for a rebuilt church may be centuries before its present fabric. Precision is not in the extract, so round-century years are read as the middle of that century, and buildings dated more than 25 years before their style began are left out of the time views. 'Dominant style' on the map is the family with the most buildings in each square of the screen, ignoring 'Other or general'.
What this is not. It is not a census of buildings, nor of styles. Coverage reflects which heritage registers have been loaded into Wikidata and how keen editors are to add a style, and labels can be loose: 'Classicism' and 'Neoclassical' are used for overlapping things, and some items carry the style of a later rebuild. Counts compare records, not architecture.