1000 BC Ohio burial mounds
Burial mounds feature in the Ohio valley, built first in the Adena culture and then by Hopewell tribes

1770 Jefferson builds himself a house
27-year-old Thomas Jefferson begins constructing a mansion on a hilltop in Charlottesville, calling it Monticello ('little mountain')

1800 President moves into White House
US president John Adams moves into the newly completed White House, named for its light grey limestone

1881 Adler and Sullivan join forces
The Chicago architects Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan set up a partnership

1901 Wright's Prairie Houses
Frank Lloyd Wright designs low residential buildings, suitable for the plains around Chicago, and calls them Prairie Houses

1904 Schlesinger and Meyer Department Store
US architect Louis Sullivan completes the Schlesinger & Meyer Store (later known as the Carson, Pirie & Scott Store) in Chicago

1906 Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple
Frank Lloyd Wright builds a Unity Temple for the Unitarians in Oak Park, now a suburb of Chicago

1911 Penn Station completed
Pennsylvania Station opens in New York, designed by McKim, Mead & White

1911 Wright designs Taliesin
Frank Lloyd Wright designs Taliesin, as his own home and studio, near Bear Run in Wisconsin

1913 Grand Central Station
A new and spectacular Grand Central Station opens in New York, designed by Charles Reed and Alan Stern

1913 Woolworth Building is world's tallest
The Woolworth Building opens in New York as the world's tallest skyscraper, a distinction it retains until 1930

1930 Chrysler Building
The Chrysler Building opens in New York as the world's tallest skyscraper, but holds the record for only one year

1931 Empire State Building
President Hoover switches on the lights to inaugurate the world's new tallest skyscraper, the Empire State Building in New York

1935 Wright designs Fallingwater
Frank Lloyd Wright designs Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, for Edgar Kaufmann

1936 Frank Lloyd Wright designs low-cost housing
Frank Lloyd Wright experiments with prefabrication for low-cost housing in a style he calls Usonian (meaning 'in the US style')

1937 Wright designs Taliesin West
US architect Frank Lloyd Wright designs Taliesin West in Arizona as his winter home and studio

1938 The Culture of Cities
US architectural critic Lewis Mumford publishes The Culture of Cities

1949 Johnson's Glass House
US architect Philip Johnson builds the Glass House in Connecticut in the International Style

1953 Kahn's art gallery for Yale
US architect Louis Kahn makes his reputation with the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven

1958 Seagram Building
Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson complete a skyscraper for Seagram in New York

1959 Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum opens in New York after seventeen years of work on the project

1962 Saarinen's TWA building
Finnish-born US architect Eero Saarinen completes his TWA terminal for New York's Kennedy airport

1966 Work begins on Twin Towers
Construction work begins on the twin towers for the World Trade Center in New York, designed by US architect Minoru Yamasaki

1967 Geodesic dome at Expo 67
The US pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal is a geodesic dome by the architect Buckminster Fuller

1973 Sears Towers
The Sears Tower opens in Chicago, displacing the Empire State as the tallest building in the world

1983 A.T. & T. skyscraper in New York
Philip Johnson completes the A.T. & T. skyscraper in New York, an early example of Post-Modernism

1988 Gehry House in Santa Monica
US architect Frank Gehry builds a strikingly unconventional house for his family in Santa Monica