The Leaning Tower was supposed to stand straight and plumb, an imperious monument to the trading power of 12th century Pisa. Built on soft clay, however, the tower began to list only a few years after construction began. Upon completion in 1350, the tower leaned about four and half feet, but as time passed, the angle of the 16,000-ton tower became more precarious. By 1990, the tower leaned about 13 feet off kilter, and nearly two million pounds of lead ingots had to be placed on one of its sides to prevent its collapse. But the nearest the tower has been to destruction had nothing to do with its famed tilt. Allied forces ordered an American sergeant to blow it up during World War II when they thought the Germans were using it as an observation post. Only the reticence of the 23-year-old American saved the tower.
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Pisa's famous tilt may have been an accident, but the tipsy new addition to Abu Dhabi's skyline is not. The United Arab Emirates' Capital Gate tower pushed its Tuscan cousin out of the limelight this week when the Guinness Book of World Records certified the new building as the "World's Furthest Leaning Manmade Tower." It's not clear how stiff the competition for that category ever really was, but the 35-story structure does lean a gravity defying 18 degrees — nearly five times further than its Italian inspiration. Like Bilbao, Sydney and Kuala Lumpur, the UAE built Capital Gate to put its premier city on the world's architectural map. The sloping result — "designed to provide no symmetry" — looks a little like a shiny drunk slouching against a wall. Built with over 15,000 cubic meters of concrete reinforced with 10,000 tons of steel, the tower houses over 20,000 feet of "premium" office space and a five-star Hyatt. Whether hotel guests will be inclined to sleep in this off-center wonder is another question.
When the Het Oosten Housing Association in Amsterdam requested 100 social housing units for the elderly, Dutch architectural firm MVRDV found itself in a fix. Only 87 apartments would be able to meet regulations on adequate sunlight and still fit neatly onsite. Fortunately, uniformity wasn't the architects' top priority. Rather than take up more green space in a garden city threatened by development, they cantilevered — or fastened — the leftover 13 units onto the building's northern façade. The suspended suites look like a series of open, wood-sheathed drawers in an oversized glass dresser. Jutting out of the main block, the lower boxes hang just above street level and the heads of apprehensive passersby. The southern façade is checkered with haphazardly placed windows and protruding balconies like transparent, technicolor containers. But despite their gravity-defying convolution, the WoZoCo Apartments were completed between 1994 and 1997 with "the lowest building costs in Amsterdam," according to MVRDV. "This was the result of inexperience," says the firm's website. "Nowadays we would have told the client that he should increase his budget."
Perched atop towering rock pillars, a cluster of medieval monasteries called Meteora crown Greece's Pindus Mountains. Meteora means "suspended in air," and it was an apt description for centuries. Until less than a hundred years ago, one could only scale the sheer cliffs in a hanging basket or by climbing flimsy rope ladders. According to legend, one monastery founder could only reach the mountain peaks on the back of an eagle. As early as the 11th century, the region's caves sheltered hermitic monks, but by the 14th century the orthodox monks were constructing elaborate stone and terracotta buildings, safe from marauding raiders below. Even in the 18th and 19th century, the monasteries remained secure hideouts, housing not just persecuted monks but also guerrilla fighters called klephts who fought for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Today, of the 24 original monasteries, only six are active, but the remaining monks still have the same heavenly views. Plus, these days they can eschew the basket or the eagle and just take the stairs.
The old gateways of Spain's capital, Puerta de Alcalá and Puerta de Toledo, were built in the late 18th to early 19th centuries to mark the eastern and southwestern boundaries of the city's main roads. Their contemporary counterpart, Puerta de Europa, was completed in 1996 as a joint project between American and Spanish architectural firms. Reflective of Madrid's evolution from an old kingdom to a modern city, the "Gate of Europe" does not have its predecessors' granite build nor their neoclassical arches. And, unlike the older puertas, Puerta de Europa is also a functional corporate space. Twin steel-and-glass towers form a single, implied gateway leading into the northern end of Madrid's business district. Each building has a vertical of 374 feet (26 floors) with a 15 degree incline toward its other half. This sideways tilt put the Puerta de Europa on the map as the world's first leaning high-rise office buildings.
The city of Archangel in Russia's far northwest is an ice-encrusted port that is home to Arctic fishermen, lumberjacks and people like Nikolai Petrovich Sutyagin, a Russian businessman and convicted arms racketeer. Sutyagin, once the wealthiest man in the city, started construction of his house in 1992 and kept at it for fifteen years. "First I added three floors but then the house looked ungainly, like a mushroom," explained Sutyagin to the Daily Telegraph in 2007. "So I added another and it still didn't look right so I kept going." His efforts yielded this 13-floor phantasmagorical pile, considered by some to be the tallest wooden structure in the world. It even housed a five-story bathhouse where Sutyagin entertained his associates and girlfriends. But Sutyagin's fortunes would dip following a four-year prison term and, in 2008, his home was condemned as a fire hazard by the city government. It was slowly demolished the following year.
Finished in 1971, the Astra Tower loomed over Hamburg's red light district for more than three decades. The modernist edifice, which housed the brewery that made Astra beer, resembled a cross between a Barnett Newman sculpture and the early stages of a Jenga game. Located on top of a hill in Hamburg's St. Pauli neighborhood, the building became an iconic part of the area's skyline. In the 1990s, however, the brewery kept being bought out by larger and larger beverage companies, and production of Astra beer was eventually transferred elsewhere. Despite initial promises to revamp the building, the original Astra Tower was demolished five years ago. The replacement building, also called the Astra Tower, hints at the original building with an all glass-façade on the fourth floor but doesn't have the gravity-defying feel of the original, or for that matter, a brewery.
In many ways, Japanese architect Terunobu Fujimori's Takasugi-an is a traditional Japanese tea house — its design seeks to instil simplicity and tranquility. Like the tea masters of old, Fujimori maintained complete control over the construction of the house, building the entire structure himself on a plot of family land in Nagano. Takasugi-an, which translates as "a teahouse [built] too high," is a single-room structure lofted atop a tree. The tall stilts upon which the house sways make it look the vision of some surreal Dali painting. The room rests above two perfectly balanced chestnut tree trunks that were cut and transported from a nearby mountain. Climb the free-standing ladders for a peaceful afternoon of tea and meditation — only if you're not afraid of heights.
Perched on a forested crag in the foothills of the Alps, Lichtenstein Castle is the archetypal fairy-tale keep. It was built between 1840-42 by Count Wilhelm of Württemberg, then an independent kingdom in southern Germany. Wilhelm was inspired by a novel popular at the time called Lichtenstein, a romantic portrayal of the region's chivalric warriors in the Middle Ages. His neo-gothic citadel was erected on the supposed foundations of an earlier stronghold of the noble knights of Lichtenstein — not to be confused with the Principality of Liechtenstein — whose lineage faded by the 17th century. The castle's keep and outer buildings are linked by a narrow causeway; its broad crenellated stone walls meld into a cliff face that drops down into the Echaz Valley below. But its seeming impregnability ought not deter visitors — nowadays, the castle is a popular spot for weddings.
The Xuan Kong Si, or "Hanging Temple," does not so much hang as it does cling to a vast rock face at the foot of Hengshan Mountain in China's Shanxi Province like a cast-off regretting an earlier decision to jump. About 300 miles south west of Beijing, the entire complex — a cluster of yellow-capped pagodas linked by lean planks — is kept in place with wooden crossbeams fitted into holes chiseled into the stone. Flattened against this roughhewn wall, it seems that one splintered log (or an unkind word) could send the temple tumbling off its 75-metre-high cliff. But it has managed to stay put for some 1,400 years, prompting architects and engineers from around the globe to stop in and marvel at its assembly. According to legend, construction began with a single monk, Liao Ran, at the end of the Northern Wei Dynasty. In time he got help from Taoist builders, pleased at the prospect of a distant sanctuary where practitioners could meditate in true silence. They did not count on it becoming a teeming tourist draw.
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