The Iconic Home Designs That Define Our Global Cities

What You Need To Know

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To understand a city, start with the foundation. Floor plans from homes around the world explain how the way we live has shaped the design and architecture of urban neighborhoods — and vice versa.

In Amsterdam, for example, a continuing quirk of local housing — its extremely steep staircases — reflects the city’s long history as a merchant port, in which its older canal houses needed to maximize floor space not just to live in, but also to store goods. In Singapore, the clearest monuments to the government’s paternalistic ethos are the homes people live in — spacious units in publicly built housing projects that are inhabited by all but the very wealthiest Singaporeans. The example of London, meanwhile, shows that local expectations of how a home should be organized can be so ingrained that they survive dramatic changes in architectural style — you’ll find “two-up-two-down” duplexes both in low-rise Victorian terraced housing and in state-built modernist tower blocks.