Block and PaperMake a map
North Carolina, United States

Every building in Durhamby 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

10dated surviving buildings built by this year

Decade built
←1910
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
2010
2020
no year
10 of 41,556 footprints dated

41,546 undated footprints are context only, not evidence they existed in the selected year.

No dated former buildings found in this import. Historical coverage is incomplete.

drag to pan · ⌘ or Ctrl and scroll to zoom · hold ⌃ and drag to tilt
heights ×4 at this zoom

Overture Maps buildings outlines · OpenStreetMap building construction dates years
heights exaggerated when zoomed out

WHAT THE MAP HOLDS

Durham in 41,556 buildings.

41,556Buildings standing today

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

10Carry a year built (<1%)

Dates come from building inventories, assessor parcels or explicit mapped construction dates. Parcel dates can describe the main building rather than every outbuilding. 41,546 buildings have no year at all and remain grey as optional present-day context.

29 mTallest structure

One City Center. Heights come from lidar or the source data where we have it. Otherwise we estimate from floor counts.

1900Oldest dated building

Hicks Warehouse. 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.

Durham buildings standing today, by the decade they were builtThe tallest bar is no year with 41,546 buildings. 1900s 2, 1910s 1, 1920s 1, 1950s 1, 2010s 3, 2020s 2, no year 41,546.05.0k10k15k20k25k30k35k40k190019202020no yearDecade the building went up
Buildings standing today. Durham, 41,556 mapped buildings, 10 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 Durham 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. 10 of 41,556 current footprints have a recorded construction year (<1%). 41,546 remain undated. These counts cover the map’s extraction area, which can extend beyond city boundaries.
  • Historical records are incomplete across 1800–present. Missing buildings, unknown demolition dates and undocumented replacements remain gaps; an empty location in an earlier year does not establish that the site was vacant.
  • 0 documented former buildings with usable lifetimes in this dataset. No usable historical lifetimes were found in this import. 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. 30,564 of 41,556 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.
TAKE IT OFF THE SCREEN

Put Durham 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.

Make a Durham print See the Durham print page ↗
KEEP LOOKING

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All 100 skyline maps ↗

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