Roadmap

What we are for proposed

A proposal, not yet adopted as the site's own wording: our mission is the celebration of arts and culture, starting in the built environment, and our line is Our culture, our history, our art, on our way. The National Register is where it starts; public art, monuments and the events around them come next.

Now

Every National Register listing placed inside a city, ranked within Census size classes on four measures, with the records behind every number one click away. Architectural styles read from the nomination texts for all 50 states and the District of Columbia (finished 15 October 2026), each claim resting on a quoted sentence and marked not yet verified until a person checks it. Pages for every style, category and size class. Search & explore on every page: filter all of the listings at once, or say what you are looking for in a sentence. Each source's crawling and reuse terms are recorded with every document, and copies a source allows only for non-commercial use are read for search but never shown.

Next: explore everything, live in progress

Start with every listing and filter down. A nine-square grid of filters (style, building type, period, evidence, significance, area of significance, where, and what to show) narrows all 100,793 listings at once, with a live count on every option and the ranked cities for exactly that selection beside the results. Picking a city in the ranking narrows the listings to it. Every view is a link you can share. A first version is up as a preview at /explore/ (13 October 2026): any mix of styles, types and places is ranked as one new category. With several styles you choose how they combine (14 October 2026): pooled counts every listing in any of them together, blend ranks each style on its own and averages the scores, so every style has an equal say.

Search in your own words (13 October 2026): type a sentence such as round barns in Indiana or Indianapolis buildings by Rubush and Hunter in the 1920s in the box on any page. Claude reads it into filters you can see and remove (the state, the city, the architect, the years), and the listings are ranked by how well they match the rest.

Photos and plans (14 October 2026): the scanned pages of the nominations themselves, the photographs, site plans, floor plans and maps, searched by what they show rather than by their words, including pages whose text could not be read. The search starts up when you open the page and shuts down when you leave, so the first search takes a moment. It covers the states whose pages are indexed so far, the Great Lakes first, and grows state by state.

Searches that go both ways (built 15 October 2026, going live with the next query deploy): a sentence now sets styles, building types, National Historic Landmarks, significance, areas such as Black history, Criterion C, regions and cities, and understands exclusions: mid-century modern houses outside California leaves California out instead of searching the whole West. Only what you named outright is applied; anything guessed or ambiguous (Columbus with no state, Gothic, a building use where nominations are not read yet) is offered for one tap instead. Every search has a precise written form, such as style:prairie-school -style:craftsman state:MN, which will become the link you share. Next: the filters and the sentence editing each other on the page.

The leaderboards are saved searches (14 October 2026): the engine that answers Explore computes every published ranking, so a leaderboard and the live answer cannot disagree, and each leaderboard page opens live in Explore to be narrowed further.

Breadcrumbs follow your real path (21 October 2026): a page opened directly shows only itself, and a crumb back to a leaderboard appears only when you came from one, such as Leaderboards › Modern Movement › Plan a tour after building a tour there. The path is kept in your browser tab and never sent anywhere.

Next: facts about the buildings in progress

What a building is and what it is made of: its use (house, church, school, courthouse), when it was built, its architect and its materials, read from the nomination texts with the page each fact rests on, so the filters can be about the buildings rather than about the paperwork. Indiana's 1,911 nominations are read (13 October 2026) and shown marked unchecked until a checked sample confirms them. Every state now has its own 50-listing sample: a stronger model checks each fact against the page it came from, and a person checks ten listings per state to measure how far that model can be trusted. Indiana's check found the reader taking years from the history as build years and naming people the history mentions; a second round of the reader fixed most of the style and key-date errors, and build years and people come next. The other Great Lakes states follow. Architects and build years published by the Register Atlas and Wikidata are used everywhere already.

Next: a map you can travel with in progress

The ask that comes up most: "I'm going to a new city; show me every Modern house on a map and let me drive to them." Today each city's panel has a map of its listings coloured by the style or category in view, a driving tour link that opens the listings in view as a Google Maps route in shortest-next-stop order from the city centre (or from where you are, if you have shared your location), and a map link on every listing. The listings in a city's panel are ordered by official importance: National Historic Landmarks first, then national, state and local significance.

Now: Plan a tour picks a city and a style and gives you the stops on a map in driving order, a route link and a link to share. Coming: a full-screen map of everything around you, filtered by style, period or category; a "most important works here" list for any city, built from designations, criteria and the nomination texts rather than taste; tour vendors and places to stay, integrated; and the same for sculpture and public art once a second register is in the index.

Next: architecture along the way in progress

You are driving from Chicago to Columbus, Indiana. Tell the site where you start and end, how often you are happy to stop and what you like, and it finds the stops worth making on the way: a Frank Lloyd Wright house six minutes off your route, ninety minutes in. Paste a route you already planned in Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze and it reads that too. Built so far (14 and 15 October 2026): reading pasted route links, the search for listings within a set distance of a route, our own routing, and "A route I'm taking" on Plan a tour, which puts them together and sends the trip back to Google Maps or Apple Maps with the stops added. Since 16 October: several places at each stop, as a walk from the car and back (the shortest round trip, worked out exactly, or a longer scenic one) or a short drive that keeps heading your way, with what is just out of reach and the landmarks worth a detour listed beside it. Stops stay in the order the road takes you, even when you pick one behind you. One route box at a time (21 October 2026): paste a directions link, or switch to typing a start and an end, each with its own Find stops, so a phone never shows two sets of boxes. Next: your trips saved in this browser, so you can plan several and come back to them; trip dates, to show the events on your way (kept in your browser, never sent anywhere); places you've seen and want to see; and our own map to drag the route on.

Next: human verification coming soon

Thousands of style tags were read from nomination texts by a model and each carries the sentence it rests on. The verify link beside a tag will open a short form: is this right, how do you know, who are you. A verified answer becomes a row of public data and overrides the inference; a disputed one removes the tag. Until the form exists, the link brings you here, and the tag stays marked unverified.

With it comes a queue near you: pin your city and see the tags, and the listings without a style, that could use someone who can walk past the building.

Next: accounts coming soon

Today, without an account, the site remembers your lens and your tour in this browser, on this device, and that is enough to plan a trip. An account would add the same on every device, tours with names you can save and share, the right to verify tags and propose listings, and a public record of the places you have seen. Accounts will be light: a name, an email, a record of what you have verified.

Next: adding and correcting coming soon

A listing in the wrong city, a style the nomination names that the reader missed, a place that is not in the index at all. "Missing a place? Tell us" will open a form for exactly that, with the source asked for every time. Until then it brings you here. The form is designed (14 October 2026): one on every page, open to anyone with an email address, kept privately, and turned into fixes with a record of which change answered it.

Next: a community forum coming soon

A place to argue about whether a courthouse is Richardsonian or merely Romanesque, with the nomination open beside the thread. It depends on accounts and verification, so it comes after them.

After that

• Learning what people look for. Live since 15 October 2026: the site counts page views from its own server logs, and searches, filters, tours and the records opened with one small request of its own. No cookies, no IP addresses kept, and nothing sent when your browser asks not to be tracked. The counts show which searches found nothing, so those gaps can be filled first. Google Analytics counts visits too (since 16 October 2026); it sets a cookie only if you allow it, and shares nothing for advertising.
• Check the style read. Every state is read; next, a sample in each state checked against the texts (by a stronger model, and a few by a person), so each state's style tags carry a measured accuracy. Five early states (Arkansas, Alabama, Indiana, Arizona and California) were read before the reader's rules were tightened and get a re-check first: about 1,200 claims nationally, most of them in these five, whose wording only hedges ("Tudor elements"), are re-read against the passages that could settle them. The territories come after.
• Recent listings. Most places listed since 2020 have no nomination online at the National Park Service or the National Archives yet. Several state preservation offices post their own copies; those come in state by state (Tennessee, Oregon, Alabama, Montana, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Mississippi and Kansas are ready to collect), and the rest are being requested from the National Register and the states.
• Monuments and public art. A second register beside the National Register. First, finding where each state keeps its inventory: preservation offices, historical marker programs, arts councils and city public art collections, and the Smithsonian's sculpture inventory, following the national monument audit Monument Lab published.
• One search everywhere. The same search and filters on every page that has a search, Plan a tour included, and your search kept as you move from page to page, in your browser only, with one tap to clear it. Designed and approved 16 October 2026; the first part, your search following you with a chip in the menu to clear it, is built.
• For travel assistants. The same live search offered to AI assistants, so someone planning a trip around architecture can ask for mid-century landmarks near where they are going and get cited listings back.
• Findable from search engines. Every city and saved search described in structured data (each listing's name, style, date, place and photo), so search engines know what is here and that it can be searched.
• City, state and listing pages. A page for each of the 1,587 ranked cities and each state, with the listings, the style mix and the city's rank in every category, and a page for every listing, so a search for a building by name finds it. Designed 12 October 2026.
• Use cases. Travel planning around a style or a period; pages that answer a question rather than show a table.
• Cities like this one. Grouping cities by the mix of styles they hold, once the reading is national enough to be fair.

How the order is decided

Whatever makes the numbers more trustworthy comes first. Verification before accounts, accounts before the forum, national reading before any ranking that depends on it. If something here matters to you, the credits page says who is building it.