Benjamin Franklin's heirs were not sentimental people. In 1812, just 22 years after his death, they tore down the three-story brick house where he had lived out his retirement and replaced it with rental row houses. By 1948, the site sat inside the worst slum in Philadelphia.

What stands here now is the Fragments of Franklin Court: skeletal steel frames designed in 1976 by the architects Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, who scaled the structures from dimensions found in Franklin's old property insurance papers. Viewing portals at ground level look down into Franklin's original cellar kitchen, one of the few pieces of the property to survive.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours use the court to trace Franklin's tangled path from printer to electrician to diplomat, and to explain why postmodern architects in the bicentennial year chose ghost outlines over a full reconstruction.