Baku

Baku's first oil boom built the Beaux-Arts mansions of the old town's edge; the second, after 2000, produced the Flame Towers and Zaha Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Centre, a building with no straight lines and no visible columns. Beneath both lies the walled Icherisheher, inhabited since the twelfth century, with the Maiden Tower whose purpose nobody has established.