"A Map of Every Building in America" from the First Comprehensive Database Covering the Entire United States

"THERE WAS A TIME when every car's glove compartment was crammed with tattered fold-out road maps, trim rectangles that became table-size monsters that challenged you to refold them neatly.

We traced our proposed routes ahead of time, seeing that, say, after New Jersey would come Pennsylvania, which would take forever to cross, and then Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and beyond. The maps connected us to the places.

Fewer of us use maps like that today. We gaze at our phones, pinching and stretching an image but seeing the world through a little rectangular window.

The phone’s guidance is better, but the view is not. We’re less likely to know what we are driving past.

“We lose what’s fascinating about a place by not having this bigger picture,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School whose work involves cities and technology, who looked at the images at our request. “They make you think big thoughts. Everybody becomes Robert Moses looking at these maps.”

"These images are drawn from a huge database that Microsoft released to the public this year. The company’s computer engineers trained a neural network to analyze satellite imagery and then to trace the shapes of buildings across the country. Such information has been available before in some places, but this is the first comprehensive database covering the entire United States."