Every building in Ann Arborby 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.
31,498dated surviving buildings built by this year
1,562 undated footprints are context only, not evidence they existed in the selected year.
Rust: 402 former buildings · partial history. Dots show locations only.
drag to pan · ⌘ or Ctrl and scroll to zoom · hold ⌃ and drag to tilt
heights ×3 at this zoom
Overture Maps buildings outlines · SEMCOG 2024 building inventory years
heights exaggerated when zoomed out
Ann Arbor in 33,060 buildings.
Every structure in the Overture footprint data inside the mapped area of Ann Arbor, garages and sheds included.
Dates come from building inventories, assessor parcels or explicit mapped construction dates. Parcel dates can describe the main building rather than every outbuilding. 1,562 buildings have no year at all and remain grey as optional present-day context.
Tower Plaza. Built 1969. Heights come from lidar or the source data where we have it. Otherwise we estimate from floor counts.
We take this only from buildings with their own record, never from an area estimate.
Dates come from building inventories, assessor parcels and explicit mapped construction dates. A parcel date can describe the main building rather than every outbuilding.
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.
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 Ann Arbor 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.
Where these buildings come from.
- Coverage target: 1800–2026. 31,498 of 33,060 current footprints have a recorded construction year (95%). 1,562 remain undated. These counts cover the map’s extraction area, which can extend beyond city boundaries.
- SEMCOG’s regional inventory primarily covers buildings existing from 2010 onward. Earlier demolitions and recent changes missing from that inventory are represented only where individual historical records are available.
- 402 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. 29,651 of 33,060 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
SEMCOG regional inventory (primarily since 2010) + 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
SEMCOG 2024 building inventory
Southeast Michigan Council of Governments public GIS data
View the source ↗ - years
City of Ann Arbor assessor parcels
City of Ann Arbor public GIS data
View the source ↗ - years
OpenStreetMap building construction dates
ODbL-1.0 · OpenStreetMap contributors
View the source ↗
Put Ann Arbor 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.
Nearby skylines.
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