This is Toledo, Spain. A comment reads “Clearly not enough parking!” (Arch/Eyes)

Even before I started writing weekly about architecture in the Providence Journal (every Thursday), I had a collection of big, coffee-table books of various cities photographed from the sky. I would leaf through them by the hour. The books are long gone, some vanished over the years and others, I suppose, succumbing to a minor flood the other week which destroyed boxes of books kindly rescued from my office shelves by the Jounal after they showed me the gate in 2014. They deposited these books on the floor of my basement. Maybe half of them were inundated by the flood, which was not natural but the result of backup caused by a tree root invading a sewage pipe. But some of the boxes emerged unscathed. Maybe some of my “From Above” books are still in there.

The other day I received several emails with a link to a set of photographs of cities taken from above. I immediately decided to show them to readers  but forgot about that intention for several days. Now I cannot find any email links in my inbox that offer more than one photograph each, rather than the 20 or so that came in the original missive. Yet I found them online on a blog called ArchEyes | Timeless Architecture, and here they are (down below. Click on “continue reading,” I think):

The text seems to suggest that the photos, or at least some of them, were taken before the current era of pilotless (but not cameraless) drones. I could write a blog 20 times this long on the differences in the layout of each city, but I will spare you. But I should probably note something that most of you will note on your own, which is that some of the cities captured from above or shot from an angle are not exactly planned according to how a traditionalist would plan them. As usual, the modernists have to horn in on a good show.

(WordPress has made “improvements” recently that change how I can put links into my posts. Whether the new link format works, I have no idea. So if you don’t get the 20 cities from above, please go to the “ArchEyes” blog on the internet. I found it and so can you!)

20 Stunning Aerial Views of Cities Around the World: Captivating Urban Landscapes