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Jerusalem takes its architecture seriously. Just ask the two architects legend has it were buried just inside Jaffa Gate, killed by an Ottoman sultan for leaving Mount Zion out of the city's walls. From antiquity to today, buildings and public monuments have held a central place in the lives and hearts of Jerusalemites, from holy edifices to towering tributes to the triumph of man.

In recent decades alone, no less illustrious names as Santiago Calatrava, Moshe Safdie, Joseph Klarwin, David Kroyanker, Ram Karmi, Lawrence Halprin, David Kroyanker and Arieh Sharon have left their mark on the city. Read on for GoJerusalem.com's list of the top 40 still-visible architectural landmarks in Jerusalem.

Houses of worship

1. The Belz World Center is hard to miss for anybody traversing the northwest reaches of the city. Designed by Isaac Blatt to look like the Second (or maybe the Third?) Temple, the imposing structure serves as a spiritual center for the large (and largely well-off) Belz Hasidic community in Jerusalem.

2. For Modern Orthodox adherents, the large Great Synagogue in the center of town also carries traces and flourishes of the style many believe to have graced the Second Temple, though in this case blended with brick facing and an eclectic mix of neo-Gothic and Brutalist touches. The massive church-like sanctuary can hold thousands and on Friday nights is home to a large, church-like, but quite Orthodox, men's choir.

3. The panoptic dome (pictured) of the Hurva Synagogue challenged even the Dome of the Rock in its heyday, until it was destroyed by Jordanian legionnaires in 1948. Painstakingly restored, the synagogue is now among the Old City's most striking landmarks.

4. Chagall's famous stained glass windows (pictured) peek out of the ground in front of Hadassah Ein Karem Hospital's mother and baby wing, but venture underground, and you will have a chance to enter the the impeccably designed synagogue that holds them, revealing the 12 tribes in their luminescent glory.

5. Haneviim Street is no slouch when it comes to great buildings, but perhaps greatest in the area is the Ethiopian cathedral, a massive arena-like structure in the round that serves as a home to the city's Christian Ethiopian community.

6. Nothing says Russian architecture like the great onion domes that grace Moscow, St. Petersburg and Jerusalem. That's right. As home to a large Russian Orthodox population, Jerusalem sports many edifices that offer pilgrims a taste of the motherland, like St. Mary Magdalene Church, constructed in 1888. Sergei's courtyard, in the Russian Compound, also gets an honorable mention.

7. The holy grail of Christian sites is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and as such, it has gotten the most royal treatment. The gilded edifice is decorated from head to toe in Byzantine and proto-Gothic touches, lending the church airs of appropriate grandeur. While many elements seen in the main rotunda evoke the original 4th century design, it "only" dates back to the 1300s, when crusader forces renovated the building in efforts to restore its glory.

8. The domed Basilica of the 12th century Church of St. James is one of the super-secret Armenian Quarter's more recognizable landmarks.

Historical

9. Today the Temple Mount is home to the 7th century Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosques, two buildings that certainly hold their own as prime bearers of early Islamic architecture. But before the mosques, the mount was home to the two Jewish Temples, the second of which, as rehabbed by the Rome-influenced Herod, was a massive structure that was probably the most awesome architectural feat in the history of the city. Today all that remains of the gargantuan complex are its outer retaining walls (pictured), themselves holy sites and testaments to the edifices the builders of yesteryear could erect.

10. Just below the mount's southern wall, the Davidson Archeological Center blends styles modern, ancient and in-between to create a functional building highlighting ruins dating back thousands of years.

11. The Tower of David in its current form is decidedly newer, but after the dome, the sprawling citadel is probably Old Jerusalem's most recognizable feature. Its turret soars over the Jaffa Gate, and much of the old fortress is still standing as a confirmation of Ottoman and Arab might.

12. The Damascus Gate, called Bab al Amoud for the large Roman statue that used to stand there, is considered one of the city's best examples of Ottoman architecture, with ornate battlements decorating the spear-shaped opening in the wall (pictured). Peter Bugod's amphitheater-arranged, terraced plaza at the gate was built in the mid-1980s.

Government

13. Ram Karmi's Supreme Court (pictured) is considered one of contemporary Jerusalem's finest architectural achievements. The building invokes a hodgepodge of styles that are uniquely Jerusalemite, encompassing a series of different shapes and open and closed structures. A compelling free tour conveys how age-old symbolism informed the structure's design, although not everyone believes that the symbolism here is so benign.

14. The building now housing the Belgian Consulate in Talbieh was once home to the neighborhood's founder, Constantine Salameh. The villa was built as an International-style riff on Jerusalemite architecture, with rectangular shapes and sharp angles playing off Jerusalem stone and a series of colonnades. Today the building still elicits double takes, even in a neighborhood that is home to le tout Jerusalem.

15. The thoroughly modern Knesset building, as drawn by Joseph Klarwin, has touches of the classical, with a series of pillar supports lining the buildings, harkening back to Greco-Roman civicus, a fitting theme for the building.

16. Safra Square, created in the 1990s as part of Jack Diamond's City Hall renovation plans (pictured), blends old and very new, with an arcaded plaza running between post-modern, constructivism-inspired municipality buildings whose style has led (or been led by) the prevalent contemporary Israeli and Jerusalemite style.

Hotels

17. Moshe Safdie's David Citadel Hotel is a fine example of what happens when neo-traditionalism meets neo-Orientalism meets Jerusalem stone meets luxury.

18. The Mamilla Hotel and mall was designed to be light and airy (pictured) while taking in the feel of the city around it. The result is a modernist arcade mimicking and even retsoring the destroyed neighborhood it was built upon, offering a striking contrast between the aincent Old City and the best of contemporary western Jerusalem.

19. The YMCA is hard to miss, with its trademark tower and arches. If it looks like something out of Gotham, that's probably webcast it was designed by the same man, A.L. Harmon, who drew up the Empire State Building.

20. The American Colony Hotel, first built as a home for a Turkish pasha in the 19th century and later turned into a compound for American pilgrims, is a taste of the Oriental with a dash of luxe digs.

Museums

21. All of the Israel Museum is an architectural gem, the sharp angles of the recently retooled boxy buildings playing off the rounded Jerusalem Hills (pictured), but real design buffs will take note of the white topped Shrine of the Book, a love letter to one of the country's greatest treasures: The Dead Sea Scrolls. “We will showcase the making of material culture from antiquity to contemporary times — for both the region and the world,” James Snyder, the museum's director, recently told the New York Times.

22. A blend of late German and Ottoman, the Ticho House was once one of the city's finest residences and is now a storied part of the Israel Museum.

23. Why are asylums and leper hospitals always the coolest looking? The walled compound of Hansen Hospital in Talbieh is no exception, and award-winning civil servant David Kroyanker has been charged with its presenvation.

24. No stone was planned in the massive Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial campus (pictured) without a copious amount of thought and intention. Thus, every one of the structures there, from the valley of the communities to the entrance hall, children's memorial and 30-foot cone-topped main museum, are built stylistically, with layers upon layers of meanings.

City landmarks

25. Hebrew University's Mount Scopus campus contains many interesting archteural forms, but it's the affiliated school of design, Bezalel, that takes the cake. The modernist building is light and airy and flows along with its mountside location.

26. Looking like a landed utilitarian spaceship, the Bank of Israel's headquarters is a paean to brutalist architecture by the godfather of Israeli urban design, Arieh Sharon.

27. The Jerusalem Theatre, with flowing modernist touches and a Jerusalem stone and concrete facade, is modern Jerusalem incarnate.

28. With its trademark crenelations, the broad Mishkenot Sha'ananim (literally "habitations of the tranquil") could have justifiably been called Misheknot Shinaim ("habitations of the teeth").

29. The curvy lines and oval shape of Malcha's post-modern, ultra-functionalist Teddy Stadium (pictured) are two of the most distinctive features of what is probably the country's most recognizable soccer venue.

30. The myriad arches at Bringham Young University's Jerusalem campus stand out on the slopes of Mount Olives and have become a recognizable part of the northeast Jerusalem landscape.

31. The long Sha'arei Tzedek hospital building on Jaffa Road is one of the city's finest and most famous examples of Ottoman/German architecture that has stood the test of time, though the hospital long ago decamped for more modern quarters.

32. Jerusalem's newest major architectural landmark is also it's tallest structure. The Bridge of Strings, designed by Santiago Calatrava (pictured pondering his creation) at the city's entrance evokes David's Harp and it's towering apex is the beacon towards the Jerusalem always meant to be.

33. The black and white (yin and yang?) gravestones of Yitzhak and Leah Rabin on Mount Herzl are modernist monuments to the assassinated prime minister and his wife, a reminder that sometimes, things are as simple as black and white.

34. The former home of the British High Commissioner and current UN local headquarters is on a mountain overlooking the whole of the city and the Judean desert. But the real attraction of Armon Hanatziv are the landscaped promenades that wend their way around the mountain, as designed by Lawrence Halprin.

35. Zebra-striped, squat and circular, the John F. Kennedy Memorial (pictured) on the outskirts of Jerusalem is a mostly-forgotten sight to behold and a fitting memorial for the slain American leader.

36. The Van Leer institute in Rechavia is a fine example of International-style architecture with some modernist panache thrown in.

Neighborhoods

37. The Nachlaot neighborhood started off as a working-class Old City outpost and has since blossomed to become a hispter haven in the center of town. With a warren of winding streets and an eclectic mix of old stone buildings (pictured), it's not hard to see why the neighborhood is among the city's most distinctive. Nearby, Rechavia, originally designed by Bauhaus architect Richard Kaufmann in an effort to provide gardened homes to Jerusalem's growing middle class, today boasts some of the city's most ambitious retro-fit green structures (the Jerusalem Seminar in Architecture's Green Design initiative holds conferences every few years).

38. On the edge of Jerusalem, in the somewhat remote Ramot neighborhood, is a Safdie modernist structure (pictured) that looks more like a honeycomb than housing. Known as the beehive, the building is a peculiarity in a neighborhood of lookalike concrete houses and apartment buildings.

39. With an anti-design utilitarian look, the Histadrut tenement houses on the edge of Kiryat Moshe are a slice of the realities of pioneering and kibbutz life in the heart of the city.

40. Now serving as a quaint artists' colony, Yemin Moshe preserves Jerusalem as it was, complete with the experimental, and now essential windmill that most people know the neighborhood by.