London

I love London. All of London. Every bit of London.

The Centraal Station in Antwerp.
The Angel of the North in Gateshead.
Liverpool (Liver Building, Cunard Building, Exchange)
And bridges, big bridges.

The Natural History Museum in London - a better building than the V&A, although the contents are less interesting.

Kinkaku-ji (Link)

Chicago in general - a great architectural city.

Oh, and the Millau viaduct, which is I think the first modern bridge to meet (and in my opinion exceed) the beauty of the great steel bridges of the past (such as Golden Gate).

There's a style of architecture that I love in Budapest in the older, more traditional neighborhoods.

I also like the much maligned Palace of Culture in Warsaw.

I liked the blue-tiled domes of Valencia (if they're still around).

- Akashi Kaikyo bridge, Kobe, Japan
- Brunel's Clifton suspension bridge across the Avon near Bristol
- The Millau Viaduct (indeed, J)
- The complex of flood barriers and dams on the Schelde in Zeeland, the Netherlands
- The Flatiron building
- The Duomo in Milan, Italy and the Galleria across the square
- The Cologne Cathedral, Germany
- Burj al-Arab, Dubai

St. Petersburg, Jerusalem, Thebes, Pompeii, Haifa, San-Diego.

I love some cities because of the atmosphere/the people/the things one can do there, not necessarily for the way they look (NYC, Chicago, London, Miami, Tel Aviv, Cairo), although some have a bit of everything. I also love bridges (dying to see the Millau). In St. Petersburg they open them at night - I found it awesome as a kid and still do. Oh, and sailing through the Corinth was amazing, as were the rest of the Greek islands.

You can tell I've spent this summer at home - cabin fever is showing...

The Royal Crescent, Bath.
The Theatre Royal, Bath.
The terrace of the White Lion/ Avon Gorge Hotel
(the best view of Brunel's Suspension Bridge with a pint to hand)
The Piazza del Campo Siena.
San Gimignano (All of it)
The Temples at Luxor.
The doors of the Baptisty in Florence
and of course Manhatten.

- Versailles
- St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice
- The Alhambra, Granada
- The Taj Mahal, especially at dawn.
- The Winter Palace in St Petersburg

St Sophia
The Pantheon
The Eiffel Tower
The Pitt Rivers museum, Oxford
The Todaiji Temple, Nara
too many churches and cathedrals to mention.

Valletta (all of it)

St. Conan's Kirk, by Loch Awe.

Agia Sofiya in Istanbul is my favourite. Absolutely awesome!

RAB: I meant the temples at Luxor, and while looking them up, discovered that the actual name is Thebes - I had no idea.

BTW, has anyone been as disappointed by Vancouver as I have?

- Padua, my home town: the "piazze" bursting with stalls selling fruits and vegetables and the "Sotto Salon" (underneath the "Palazzo della Ragione"). The "portici" in the Ghetto at dawn. "La cappella degli Scrovegni", the "Palazzo del Bo" (University).
- The Euganean Hills in autumn.
- Venice, anywhere, in october/november. Few tourists, well, less than during summer, and the magical mist giving the city a mystical aura, especially in the evening.
- Varanasi, the Ganga ghats. The full circle of Life... so different compared to the sanitized life we live in the West.
- The Moors in Devon.
- The Sierra in California.

All of Dubrovnik within-the-walls. Magnificent.

I'm trying to remember is the 'maison carre' in Montpellier? A fascinating building and you have to give the French vredit they've done an excellent job preserving it.

The Crysler building is nice but I prefer Rockefeller Center, for a bit of midtown it has a nice human scale to it. I also love the New York Public Library.

Jerusalem and Haifa are both lovely in their own ways.

The Temple of Heaven in Peking is great as is I M Pei's Bank of China building in Hong Kong

Washington DC, in the right season, is a beautiful city. The height limit on buildings gives it a nice horizontal look. Now if we could only get them to move the government out to some place like Little Rock ...

The interior of the Bradbury building in L.A.

Alisa, one of the ancient Egyptian capitals, yes.
I forgot Pompeii.
I might as well bung in Caerphilly Castle, the largest and most intact Norman castle in Europe
And Three Cliffs Bay, the Gower.

And before Nick M gets in first-
How about the worst places you've ever seen?
I'll start with
The view of the Transporter bridge down Commercial Street in Newport Gwent on a wet sunday in march.
Port Talbot steelworks from Margam Abbey (not the other way round).
The Aswan Dam

I like the bits of really large buildings most people never see, like crawlways and underground walkways, or catwalks in the ceiling. That's where the real architecture happens.

Is this man-made structures, or just an beauty spots on Earth? And must I restrict myself to structures I have seen with my own eyes?

Let's think.

Great bridges. The Millau viaduct and the George Washington Bridge, I think. (I haven't seen the Akashi Kaikyo except in pictures). The Forth Bridge in Scotland, too.

Other transport infrastructure: Hong Kong Chek Lap Kok international airport.

If Jonathan is allowed the centre of Montpellier, I will go for all of Avignon.

If I am allowed something new, I will say that the combination of the buildings and the setting of the Getty Center in Los Angeles is pretty impressive, although they probably need another fifty years before the art collection will match it.

I agree with Julian that the Alhambra in Granada is something very special.

The underground churches and other first century relics at Cappadocia' in Turkey.

The 1920s and 1930s art deco architecture of Shanghai is extraordinary. (I like the more playful commercial stuff on Nanjing road to the overly pompous stuff on the Bund, but Shanghai had the most over the top colonial architecture in Asia in the first place, and then history meant much of it has survived).

And I will finish with one that not everyone will agree with: the Pompidou Centre at Beaubourg in Paris. (Renzo Piano as an angry young man, except that he comes across as far too civilized to have ever been that).

More would no doubt come to mind if I thought about it longer.

Acropolis (Greece)
Alhambra (Spain)
Argonath (Gondor)
Forbidden City (China)
Grand Canal, Venice (Italia)
Hagia Sophia (Byzantium)
Neuschwanstein Castle (Germany)
Notre Dame Cathedral (France)
Pyramids and Sphinx (Egypt)
St. Basil's Cathedral (Russia)
St. Peter's Basilica (Vatican City)
Statue of Liberty (US)
Sydney Opera House (Oz)
Taj Mahal (India)
Vehicle Assembly Building, interior (US)
Versailles (France)
Westminster Abbey (UK)
World Trade Center (US)

RAB,

My route to work used to take my past the Newport transporter bridge daily - let me assure you that it looks pretty rubbish no matter what time of year. I'm not sure if you've visited recently but Newport is managing to forge ahead with its powerful architectural synthesis of the worst of the old combined with the very worst of the new.

As for Port Talbot steel works - I've taken friends from elsewhere in the U.K/world down the M4 (towards the Gower) on day trips. Not a single one of them has failed to be shocked by this sight. The impact is even greater by night when it looks like a sort of low-budget Gotham City.

As for the great - well for me it's bridges, in particular the the Clifton and the Humber (both of which draw you towards them regardless of whether your journey takes you over, or under, them).

Ah you live in or near the Armpit of Wales then Dan?
So did my aunt Marie Rose and my cousins. In Commercial street, hence the reference.
It was always sunday when we visited and had to plough through 8 courses of barely recognisable food.
My aunt is French, but that is no guarantee that you know how to cook! She certainly didn't.
Two Welshmen on SD then! According to an old joke that is all that's needed to hold the Pass!

I also forgot on the plus side

Anuradhapura, the Sacred city, 5 bc
And The rock fortress of Sigiriya, 5 ad, both in Sri Lanka.
I have never seen the like of either of those.
Michael Woods has a 6 parter on the history of "India" starting tonight. Certainly worth a look, for where to go next.

St. Gallen, Switzerland -- the quintessential postcard town of central Europe

Queen of all Saints Basilica, Chicago

Hmmm. Of course this list is by definition limited to what I have seen in person.

Architectural structures? My favorites are:

Edinburgh Castle, Stirling Castle, Schloss Hohenzollern (the valley view is spectacular!), Schloss Neuschwanstein (how could you NOT love the setting!), the John Hancock tower in Chicago. I would like to see the Great Wall, any of the great temples in Thailand or Japan, or the Taj Mahal.

General City Centers?

Edinburgh, Munich, Venice (Piazza San Marco!), Chicago, Paris

Honorable mention: London, Seoul

I'd have to say Sizewell B nuclear power station.

Architecture-without-compromise, dedicated to an engineering purpose.

Well, I've found the Northrup Mall at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis is quite attractive. Red brick solidness, and the neo-Classical pillars on the front. Some how, I find the Neoclassical style very, authoritative and comforting. The Lincoln Memorial is one of the most impressive in that style.

Glad to see, reading through the comments, someone finally bringing up the Forth Bridge. Although the road bridge is nothing like the spectacular, almost unique, engineering achievement the rail bridge is, it does add something. The best view is from South Queensferry, between the two.

Perry, I was taken to Dubrovnik by my parents at the age of three. I don't remember much about the holiday, I don't remember anything about what we did, but I certainly remember the place.

As for my own choice, anything by Alexander Thomson, the "other" Glasgow architect (some would say "the": he had a far greater influence on the city itself than his famous art nouveau successor, Mackintosh). Sadly, the building of his I would most like to have seen, Queen's Park UP Church (pictured here; scroll down), was destroyed by a German bomb during WWII. Looking at photographs of the interior, it's almost unbelievable that this was a presbyterian church in Scotland. Thomson was a fascinating man: a visionary always ready to apply - or invent - the latest techniques, despite his style harking back to Egyptian and Greek architecture (and scorning the arch). I'm convinced, by the way, that had his design for the London Science Museum been accepted, it would be recognised today as one of the great landmarks of Europe. It would have been an exraordinarily, almost comically, monumental edifice.

Pink Art Deco Villa in the Parque de Serralves in Oporto.

The Hoover Dam personally, I can appreciate Tanuki's sentiment, its good to see engineering structures that don't try to hide their purpose (well as far as one could with a giant wall of concrete in the middle of a desert.) The visitor sections of the Hoover Dam are like an art-deco cathedral worshipping power...its all very Randian IMO despite being a government project. I'd love to see the Three-Gorges Dam in China now that most of it is online, it may be controversial but God, what a sight it must be.

I have a soft spot for the 1930s suburban stations on the London Underground, particularly those designed by Charles Holden for the Piccadilly Line. (Two exceptions are Uxbridge and it's twin at the other end of the line, Cockfosters, where the reinforced concrete architecture bears a nasty resemblance to a Third Reich armaments factory). Admirers of Frank Lloyd Wright's American domestic architecture should make an effort to see Harrow-on-the-Hill on the Metropolitan Line which seems to echo the Shangri-La set for the film, Lost Horizon.

Man-made: I'll second the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and mention the Back Bay of Boston.

Natural: Big Sur

Has anyone been here?

As to natural, the list is very long, and Big Sur is certainly high on it.

Man-made:
Sydney Harbor Bridge, Sydnew, NSW Australia
US Capitol, Washington DC

Natural:
Shi-Shi Beach, coastal Washington
St. Mary's Glacier, Montana
Uncompahgre, Colorado (maybe not objectively a wonder of the natural world, but it's the first fourteener I've ever climbed)
Big Two-Hearted River, Michigan (again, not objectively a wonder but the first place I've ever seen the Northern Lights and heard a real wolf howling.)
The Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia

India seems to be criminally neglected on this thread! A couple of my favourites:

Fatehpur Sikri, half an hour's drive from Agra. Built by the only decent Mughal emperor, Akbar, and largely abandoned shortly after his death due to water shortages. It's unfairly ignored due to the nearby (much less interesting, and IMHO over-rated) Taj Mahal.

The mighty Merangharh fort in Jodhpur, Rajasthan is also amazing. The view over Jodhpur, the blue city, from the top its ramparts is unforgettable (the photo provided doesn't really do it justice).

Regarding China, I'm going to be controversial and say the Temple of Heaven is better than the Forbidden City. Okay, they're not really comparable as the Forbidden City is a large compound and the Temple of Heaven is just one building.

I'm not that impressed by the Forbidden City, to be honest - it's notable only due to its sheer size. It's a huge 500ish year old concrete jungle. The Vietnamese "Forbidden City" in Hue looks (if the existing models are to be believed) like it was much more pleasant - less pompous and grandiose, more romantic - but the French all but destroyed it in the 1950s and the Americans finished off the remainder in the 60s (bar a couple of buildings which still stand today).

Oh, and the Great Wall is mind-bogglingly vast and straddles the most improbable terrain (like over the peaks of mountains). If anyone's heading to Beijing, don't see the Wall from Badaling - whilst conveniently close to the city, it's where most tourists go. It's ridiculously crowded in peak season and the Wall has been reconstructed in an almost Disneyfied fashion. For a much more authentic Wall experience, take a 4 hour trip out of Beijing to Simatai and walk 10 kms along the wall to Jinshaling (or vice versa). Simply astonishing. The Wall is quite degraded in places, so bring some strong, grippy shoes - and don't even think about it if it's a wet or icy day!

Ok....bridges I've been on....Natchez Trace overpass @hiway 96 in Franklin TN, pure 100%pork, but wonderful in desigin anyway, (by the same guy that did) the SKYLINER in Tampa/ST.Pete...(now if we could just keep all those pesky 'free markerters" from running into it!)
ALL of the old steel bridges around where I live in middle TN, USA. dangeras(too drunk to spell)as they were.

There is a c.1800's(not sure on exact date) Episcipalian chaple-of limestone in gothic style in Nashville. Got to take pictures before it's trashed to "make way". (N'ville tends to "eat" it's history, even of the "rich white folk")

The airport in Singapore, Good gosh,you could plunk down 3 BNA's in that terminal and STILL have room for the 3 MB showrooms...and the odd Porsche onna' pedestal.

The old Spanish fort in San Juan, PR.

*Church, Posche, Singapore; don't get me started on "dangeras"

Hmmm.... Well, for buildings my two favorites are the Salt Lake City Temple, and the old Rath Packing Company office building here in Waterloo.

As for natural, I have two as well: The Grand Tetons in Idaho, and Iowa cornfields at sunset with thunderheads rolling in.

Sizewell B doesn't do anything for me personally, but Drax is cool.

Alisa: Yes. I wrote about the Bilbao Guggenheim at length after I went to see it, actually.

Basic thought: I like it a lot, although it wouldn't quite make a top ten list.

The Forth Rail Bridge, end of discussion :P

Michael: thank you. I opened the link in a separate tab to read later.

Natural: the White Nights in St. Petersburg (and the same in Alaska 30 years later). Oh, and Alaska, of course, especially the glaciers.

The orcas seen from an inflatable boat somewhere between Victoria Island and Seattle, the seals all along the West Coast.

The view at down from the top of Santa Catarina in Sinai. The entire Sinai desert.

The Red Sea underwater, the Dead Sea before it was all dried out.

The Giant Sequoia in California. What impressed me most about these amazing trees is not just their enormous size, but also their age: thousands of years.

The black sand beaches in Oregon, the Big Sur. The Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

Florida Everglades. The alligator that used to live in the pond behind our backyard.

I-10 in Louisiana.

The Greek Islands (again), and the pack of dolphins that accompanied our boat for a good part of an hour.

Wow, life has not been all that bad so far, after all.

I am seriously shocked nobody has mentioned this.

OK, it isn't finished yet but then this thread jumped the shark when somebody mentioned The Argonath.

I'm also mildly surprised that nobody mentioned Grey Street, Newcastle.

I dislike the Forth Bridge because it's absurdly over-engineered. Now this is a cool bridge.

Dawn, not down, dammit.

Chrysler Building, New York
Grand Place, Brussels
Viktuellenmarkt, Munich
Altstadt, Salzburg
Royal Crescent, Bath
Luxembourg Gardens, Paris
Edinburgh Castle
Storms River Bridge, South Africa
John Hancock Building, Chicago
Ulm Cathedral

More, as I visit them.

The CN Tower is the quietest middle finger to be raised by any big city.
Seen from a distance the entire skyline of Toronto means home to people I know but don't pretend to understand.
It stands out over prairie and lake, a beacon to people looking for an easy-going relaxation to take them out of themselves.
Therapy on a stick.