About Cultured Eye
An app for anyone who wants to learn to tell the buildings around them apart – made for studying, not just browsing. The focus is on Western architecture, with glimpses of other traditions.
The idea is that you read the basics, work through one style at a time, look at the buildings around you and write in the journal – and let the exercises show what has stuck.
You shouldn’t have to guess exactly right. On the profile questions, being one step out earns half a point, and when you date a building, an answer within sixty years earns half a point.
Each card – a style or a building in one question type, or a knowledge question – has a level from 0 to 4. A good answer moves it up one step; a poor one sends it back to zero. The level decides when the card comes round again: after ten minutes, one day, three days, one week or three weeks.
The content is general knowledge of the kind found in encyclopaedias and survey books. Cultured Eye makes no claim to original research or unique interpretations.
The texts, translations and questions have been produced with the help of AI (large language models) and summarise established architectural history. They have not been reviewed by a subject expert. Dates for older buildings are often approximate and may differ between sources, and the boundaries between periods are simplifications.
The style profiles are typical pictures, not measurements. They are there to sharpen your eye, and real buildings often deviate – especially those rebuilt over several centuries.
What is distinctive is the way the material is presented: timelines and country-by-country tracks, maps, a wealth of photographs from open collections, drawings and interactive illustrations that explain the concepts, and side-by-side comparisons. Everything is built around learning through quizzes and repetition – exercises that come back less and less often the better you know them.
Found a mistake? Report it and it will be corrected where needed. The same link is at the bottom of every style, building and architect page.
The drawings in the app – the silhouettes, the temple, the cathedral, the columns, the plans and the façade – were drawn for the app, with shading and hatching as on an architectural drawing.
The photographs are fetched from Wikimedia Commons via the buildings’ Wikipedia pages. Which image belongs to which building is worked out in advance, so the page makes no searches. Only freely licensed images are used, and the photographer and licence are shown beneath each image. If there is no free image, or it fails to load, the style’s drawing is shown instead.
Progress in the exercises and notes in the journal are stored only in this browser. No account is needed.
One thing does leave your computer: the image files, fetched from Wikimedia Commons. The details about them are prepared in advance, so no searches are made there. Visitor statistics are collected only if you have agreed to it – more on the Cookies and visitor statistics page.
The app is available in Swedish, English, French, Italian and Spanish. All text is kept in language files separate from the code, so that more languages can be added without changing anything else. Names of buildings and architects stay in the original language where that is customary.
The look borrows from the drawing board: tracing paper with a grid, ink, dimension lines, drawing numbers and a title block at the bottom. Two Swedish building colours set the accents – Falu red and verdigris.
Built with TypeScript, React and Tailwind on Vite. Charts, maps and drawings are drawn with SVG and D3. The texts are kept in language files and the structure of the content in ordinary data files, so it is easy to correct and expand.