Interactive map animates every surviving LA building by the year it was built

Parcelscope is a browser-based visualization that renders Los Angeles as a stack of blocks, one per building still standing today, each appearing in the decade it was constructed across a timeline running from 1880 to 2026. Users can pan, tilt, and zoom the 3D scene, filter by height, and inspect individual structures for their build year, footprint, and type. The data comes from LARIAC 2020 building outlines paired with the Los Angeles County Assessor roll, and building heights are deliberately exaggerated at zoomed-out views to keep the low-rise fabric legible.

The project’s key framing is a survivorship caveat: it maps only the buildings that exist now, not the city as it looked at any past moment. Anything demolished along the way is absent, so the animation shows the accretion of the surviving city rather than a true historical record. That distinction matters because early decades appear sparse not because little was built, but because little from that era remains standing.

Beyond the visual novelty, the piece is a compact example of turning public municipal datasets—assessor records and LiDAR-derived building outlines—into an accessible, exploratory web tool, illustrating both the value and the limits of open property data for understanding urban growth.