Mapparium

Most globes show the world from the outside. The Mapparium puts you in the middle of it. Visitors walk a glass bridge through the centre of a three-story globe made of 608 stained-glass panels and look out at continents and oceans as they were drawn in 1935.

The globe was designed by Boston architect Chester Lindsay Churchill, who had been commissioned to design the Christian Science Publishing Society building, home to The Christian Science Monitor. The Monitor reported in 2005 that he took his idea from a large spinning globe in the lobby of the New York Daily News and decided to turn the globe inside out. Boston Magazine reported that New York’s Rambusch Company spent the better part of a year hand-tracing sections of a Rand McNally world map for it. The Monitor added that the glass was coloured with sprayed powdered-glass mixtures and fired in a kiln, and that longitude and latitude lines are a network of bronze. It measures 30 feet in diameter.