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Construction on the tower began in 1173 and it started listing soon after as it settled on soft soil. Over the centuries labourers and engineers tried to compensate for the lean but none of the measures succeeded . In 1990 the tower was closed to the public when a similarly constructed tower in Pavia collapsed. An international team devised a plan that included steel bands and lead weights and extracting soil from beneath the tower’s northern foundation. It appears to have worked, at least for the time being. Engineers predict the structure will remain stable for at least another 200 years.
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Hey, it’s hard to keep a tower on the straight and narrow! The Leaning Tower of Pisa may be the most famous, but there are towers that lean all over the world. Web Urbanist looks at thirteen of them, including the Round Tower of the Kilmacduagh Monastery in Ireland pictured. It leans 1.5 feet, but is in no danger of falling over. And its door is 26 feet off the ground! Link -via Unique Daily
Surely you’ve heard of the Great Wall of China, but how about a Leaning Tower? Turns out, China’s Huzhu Pagoda may just be the most tilted building in the world, beating out the Leaning Tower of Pisa …
The Huzhu pagoda leans over Tianma village in Songjiang suburb, its seven-story structure so lopsided it seems in imminent danger of toppling over altogether.
It was built in 1079 — well before Italy’s famous Leaning Tower of Pisa — by Gen. Zhou Wenda to house five Buddha relics given to him as a reward by Emperor Song Gaozong of the Southern Song dynasty. But from the start, it began to tilt.
“Part of the foundation was built on rock, part of the foundation was built on mud,” explains Yang Kun, who works at the Songjiang Museum and has studied the pagoda’s history.
Link [Update 3/13/09: reader beware: the website (NPR.org of all places) may have trojan in a rogue ad]
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