A Beautiful, Bewitching Map of Portland's Aging Buildings

With this kaleidoscopic map, Justin Palmer takes a digital chainsaw to Portland and shows the world its rings. Track the color changes to see where old neighborhoods meld with new ones: Structures shown in aquamarine date from the 1890s, purple from the 1950s and hot pink to white from 1970 onward.

There are more than half a million building records in Portland's archives that have dates attached to them. Perhaps because he was deprived of such reams of information growing up in a picayune Mississippi town, Palmer felt compelled to map them in dazzling peacock hues. "I thought it could be cool to see what the data would look like on a map using a style similar to what Eric Fischer used for MapBox and Open StreetMap," says Palmer, a 33-year-old Pearl District resident who works at GitHub.