Block and PaperMake a map
New Mexico, United States

Every building in Albuquerqueby the year it was built

The map opens on today’s skyline. Play or scrub to explore recorded dates; undated buildings stay visible as optional present-day context. Documented former buildings appear in rust and disappear in their demolition year. Historical coverage is partial; missing buildings and dates remain unknown.

2026

132,793dated surviving buildings built by this year

Decade built
←1910
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
2010
2020
no year
132,793 of 141,116 footprints dated

8,323 undated footprints are context only, not evidence they existed in the selected year.

Rust: 2 former buildings · partial history. Dots show locations only.

drag to pan · ⌘ or Ctrl and scroll to zoom · hold ⌃ and drag to tilt
heights ×7 at this zoom

Overture Maps buildings outlines · Bernalillo County Assessor public parcels — dwelling and commercial year built years
heights exaggerated when zoomed out

WHAT THE MAP HOLDS

Albuquerque in 141,116 buildings.

141,116Buildings standing today

Every structure in the Overture footprint data inside the mapped area of Albuquerque, garages and sheds included.

132,793Carry a year built (94%)

Dates come from building inventories, assessor parcels or explicit mapped construction dates. Parcel dates can describe the main building rather than every outbuilding. 8,323 buildings have no year at all and remain grey as optional present-day context.

73 mTallest structure

ATLAS-I Wedge. Heights come from lidar or the source data where we have it. Otherwise we estimate from floor counts.

1706Oldest dated building

We take this only from buildings with their own record, never from an area estimate.

Recorded construction yearsHow the years were sourced

Dates come from building inventories, assessor parcels and explicit mapped construction dates. A parcel date can describe the main building rather than every outbuilding.

THE SHAPE OF THE STOCK

Which decades are left.

Each bar counts surviving buildings with a recorded date in that decade. A short bar can reflect fewer surviving buildings or missing construction dates. It does not measure everything built or demolished during that decade.

Albuquerque buildings standing today, by the decade they were builtThe tallest bar is 1950s with 28,068 buildings. 1800s 10, 1840s 1, 1850s 3, 1860s 5, 1870s 6, 1880s 32, 1890s 13, 1900s 955, 1910s 1,103, 1920s 2,729, 1930s 5,313, 1940s 16,213, 1950s 28,068, 1960s 12,572, 1970s 16,995, 1980s 12,282, 1990s 12,620, 2000s 18,225, 2010s 4,527, 2020s 1,121, no year 8,323.05.0k10k15k20k25k30k18001840186018801900192019401960198020002020no yearDecade the building went up
Buildings standing today. Albuquerque, 141,116 mapped buildings, 132,793 with recorded construction years.
HOW TO READ THIS MAP

Colour, height, and what to trust.

Drag to pan. Hold ⌃ or use the right mouse button to tilt. Scrub the timeline to stop on any year. Everything you change goes into the address bar, so copy the URL or press Share and the other person sees exactly what you see.

  • Decade built. Warm colours mark the oldest buildings left and cool colours the newest, one step per decade from 1910 on.
  • Grey. No construction year on record. Undated buildings stay visible as present-day context throughout the timeline. Hide them with “Show undated present-day buildings” to view dated records alone.
  • Height mode. Switch the colour from age to height and the same boxes become a relief map of where Albuquerque is tall.
  • Heights are exaggerated when you zoom out. At the widest view they stand up to forty times taller, so a whole city still reads as a skyline. From zoom 15 in, the boxes are at true scale.
DATA AND METHOD

Where these buildings come from.

  • Coverage target: 1800–2026. 132,793 of 141,116 current footprints have a recorded construction year (94%). 8,323 remain undated. These counts cover the map’s extraction area, which can extend beyond city boundaries.
  • Bernalillo County Assessor parcels date most current buildings, but a parcel with two different building years is left undated. The historical layer contains a few individually documented buildings; most demolitions and replacements remain unmapped.
  • 2 documented former buildings with usable lifetimes in this dataset. Scrub back in time to see them appear and disappear. Standing-building counts and charts exclude these historical records.
  • Repeated census-tract median dates, including 1938, are no longer assigned as construction years. Undated buildings remain unknown; recorded 1938 dates are retained.
  • The main footprints describe surviving buildings. The rust historical layer adds documented former buildings only between their construction and demolition years. Dots mark locations where a historical outline is unavailable. This is a partial reconstruction, not a complete inventory of past buildings.
  • Heights are measured where the source has them and estimated from floor counts otherwise. 98,640 of 141,116 are measured.
  • Below zoom 12.5 the map draws 100 m cells instead of individual footprints, so you can see a whole city at once. Cells use the median recorded year of their current buildings; zoom in for individual outlines and construction years.
  • Built 2026-09-09. This is a snapshot, not a live feed.
  • history

    Albuquerque Museum / Library of Congress HABS verified lifetime + OpenStreetMap + Wikidata lifetimes

    Partial coverage · retrieved 2026-09-09
    Historical source ↗

    Wikidata locations are CC0; OpenStreetMap records are ODbL. Local historical outlines retain their source attribution in each building’s details.

    Wikidata building lifetimes ↗
  • footprints

    Overture Maps buildings

    ODbL-1.0 / CDLA-Permissive-2.0
    View the source ↗
  • footprints

    OpenStreetMap contributors

    ODbL-1.0
    View the source ↗
  • heights

    Microsoft ML Buildings

    ODbL-1.0
    View the source ↗
  • years

    Bernalillo County Assessor public parcels — dwelling and commercial year built

    Bernalillo County Assessor public GIS data
    View the source ↗
  • years

    OpenStreetMap building construction dates

    ODbL-1.0 · OpenStreetMap contributors
    View the source ↗
  • heights

    USACE National Structure Inventory

    Public domain (US Army Corps of Engineers)
    View the source ↗
TAKE IT OFF THE SCREEN

Put Albuquerque on paper.

A browser tab is a fine place to lose an hour, but it is not a wall. The studio prints a street map of the same place in colours you pick, with your own words underneath.

KEEP LOOKING

Nearby skylines.

All 100 skyline maps ↗