World Monuments Watch List: The Latest Architecture and News

The World Monuments Fund (WMF) has announced its 2025 World Monuments Watch, highlighting 25 sites facing significant challenges. This biennial program, launched in 1996, aims to raise awareness and mobilize action for the preservation of cultural heritage worldwide. The 2025 list includes diverse locations across five continents and, notably, the Moon, representing the need to protect artifacts from humanity's first lunar missions. The selection process involved over 200 nominations, revealing regional trends such as climate change impacts in Sub-Saharan Africa and urbanization challenges in Asia and the Pacific.

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The World Monuments Fund has released its 2022 World Monuments Watch list, a selection of 25 sites from across the globe that hold great cultural and heritage significance but are being faced with economic, political or natural threats. This year's selection highlights themes of global issues such as climate change, imbalanced tourism, underrepresentation, and recovery from crisis, urging for prompt preservation plans.

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The World Monuments Fund has announced their 2018 World Monuments Watch, highlighting 25 cultural sites from across the globe currently at risk due to economic, political or natural threats. Covering more than 30 countries and territories, these monuments represent sites of exceptional cultural value dating from prehistory to the 20th century.

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The World Monuments Fund has released its 2016 World Monuments Watch list of 50 cultural heritage sites at risk in 36 countries around the world. The list, in its twentieth year, seeks to identify sites “at risk from the forces of nature and the impacts of social, political, and economic change,” and direct financial and technical support towards them.

The 2016 list includes the entirety of post-earthquake Nepal, an underwater city, the only surviving quadrifrons arch in Rome, and a structurally significant hyperboloid tower, among others. The Fund even featured an “Unnamed Monument” on the list, in honor of all sites at risk of damage from social and political instability around the globe.

Learn more about some of the featured monuments, after the break.