Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time, 1880 to 2026

A new browser tool renders Los Angeles County as a city grown from grey boxes: every building standing today appears as a block on a 3D map in the year it was built, and pressing play runs the county's construction history from 1880 to the present in about forty seconds.

The project is called Parcelscope, and it is best understood as a census of survivors rather than a reconstruction. Buildings that were later demolished are simply absent, so the view shows the county as it exists today, not as it looked at any point in the past.

One box per surviving building

Footprints come from LARIAC 2020 building outlines, while the year built and the height of each structure come from the Los Angeles County Assessor's roll. Heights are exaggerated when the camera is zoomed out so that the low-rise sprawl stays visible next to the towers. Tax-exempt property — schools, hospitals and government buildings — carries no construction year on the roll and appears in a separate "no year" category; a few dozen landmarks have curated dates, and public school campuses use the year the school opened from the state directory.

What the growth curve shows

The dataset covers 2,987,782 buildings, which is how many stand in the county today. Only 427 of them predate 1880, and just 561 existed when the timeline starts. Growth accelerated sharply in the 1920s, which left 428,876 surviving buildings, stalled in the 1930s, and then exploded after the Second World War: 519,033 buildings from the 1940s and 753,298 from the 1950s are still standing, the largest single decade. Post-war momentum carried the county past a million surviving buildings in 1944, 1.5 million in 1951 and 2 million in 1957. It crossed 2.5 million in 1977 and has added roughly half a million since; only 7,657 of the structures standing today were built in 2020 or later.

Built on open web technology

Behind the page are MapLibre GL and PMTiles, with a Protomaps basemap that carries only water, so the whole county streams as static vector tiles from cloud storage instead of a tile server. Users can filter by decade or by height, from single-storey buildings to the tallest towers, and search by street address or parcel number; clicking a building shows its construction year, height, footprint and type. A companion view narrows the same animation to the city of Los Angeles alone.