A new app tells you who designed the buildings around you

Acarta is a Swedish field guide to architecture and public art. The app brings together more than 10,800 buildings, parks, and artworks on a single map and tells you who designed them and why they look the way they do. Acarta is free for iPhone, Android, and the web.

Interest in architecture and the built environment has grown quickly in recent years, not least since the Swedish television series "Så byggdes Sverige" (How Sweden Was Built). Yet the knowledge remains scattered across books, reports, and individual websites, and usually reaches only those who already know the subject. Acarta gathers it in one place and connects the things that belong together.

Stand at the Stockholm Public Library and the app leads on to Gunnar Asplund, and from there to everything else he designed, in the city and elsewhere. Filter by era or building type and patterns emerge that are otherwise hard to see: that the same architect designed half the block, that the school and the library build on the same ideas.

At launch, more than 5,800 architects, artists, and landscape architects are included with their works. The everyday gets as much room as the famous landmarks: schools, apartment buildings, churches, factories, parks, and sculptures. The places span 250 cities around the world, though the focus at launch is on Sweden. Each place has its own, easy-to-read description and images, and the content then grows with users' own photos and additions.

The app is built for your home city but works just as well when you travel: it puts together themed walks in every city. The map also shows which places are protected or award-winning, more than 1,200 of them, from UNESCO World Heritage Sites and Swedish listed buildings to those that have won the Kasper Salin Prize.

Acarta is made by the siblings Adam and Evelina Strandberg in Stockholm. The service began as a way to share personal maps with friends before a trip and grew into a platform where you can log your visits, collect badges for styles, cities, and designers, and build your own maps to follow and share with others.

"Today we have to care for our resources and make use of what has already been built," says Evelina Strandberg, architect and co-founder. "My hope is that the map will also lift up the places that are not the obvious destinations; those stories are often just as interesting. Knowing about different kinds of environments creates respect for the people who have built, used, and shaped places, and makes it easier to see the value in what you might otherwise have walked past."

It is free to explore, check in, and follow friends. A Pro version unlocks the longer texts about each place, all photos, and the option to download whole cities for offline use. In Sweden, Pro costs SEK 599 per year or SEK 79 per week through the App Store. Local pricing is shown before purchase.