Across the Huangpu River, in stunning contrast to the stately European-era structures, the city's most fantastic skyscrapers loom.
Many Soviet-era structures have been pulled down in Dushanbe over the past few years, despite widespread public opposition.
Dozens of Soviet-era structures have been callously destroyed during the last decade even as Mr. Pare was meticulously working to document them.
Forty years ago, Santa Cruz was a hot and dusty honky-tonk of dirt streets, crumbling colonial-era structures and grizzled frontiersmen.
In June, Isis blew up two ancient shrines in Palmyra that were not part of its Roman-era structures but which the militants regarded as pagan and sacrilegious.
Among other colonial-era structures are the Church of Santo Domingo, with its elaborate gold-leafed Chapel of the Rosary, and the Franciscan Convent of Cuauhtinchan (1528 54).
He aptly notes that "despite the efforts to break down its bulk, this building bears no appreciable spatial relationship to Union Square or to the Civil War and City Beautiful-era structures that surround it".
In the years after the war, some Nazi-era structures were preserved as monumental testaments to an inhuman regime, while others were pragmatically transformed into offices, army barracks and spaces for other uses.
The Umayyad Mosque in Deraa, one of the oldest Islamic-era structures in Syria, built at the request of the Caliph Omar Ibn al-Khattab, has also been damaged.
Developers say the appeal of renovating Victorian-era structures or building on their sites results as much from the spacious grounds and perfect locations as from the elegant buildings.
Yet along with freedom has come risk, as socialist-era structures are dismantled and powerful cultural traditions that value men over women, long held in abeyance by official Communist support for women's rights, return in force.
