Why is something like the Leaning Tower of Pisa so rare? In the past, there was no way to ascertain what kind of subterranean support existed, so how did they know whether a new building could be supported . . . especially something as heavy as a cathedral or colosseum? I’d think there’d be leaning buildings all over the world. Obviously, many wound up leaning to the point of collapse, or demolished for being uninhabitable or dangerous. But some of them - like a few houses I’ve seen in Amsterdam - don’t lean to the point of collapse. Why are there so few?
It’s kinda hard to sell a house which leans to the left.
Well, if you look at the history of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it’s a triumph of sheer bloodymindedness over engineering practicality. Having started it in 1173 and having it start to tilt in 1178, they then took almost 100 years to think about what they’d done, and then tried to patch it up rather than starting over. They took another 100 years to finish it.
According to the Wikipedia article, this 100 year pause allowed the ground to compact, preventing it from tipping over. So probably most equally flawed projects either collapsed during construction or were abandoned once it became clear that some one had cocked it up a couple of generations previous.
You would think that, given 100 years, they could have just removed each block, one at a time, back down to the foundation, and then leveled the base and put the blocks back in reverse order.
It’s a matter of the ratio of the weight to the footprint. A tower on unsecured footing will visibly lean, while a collosseum or a cathedral will not, because the building sits on a great deal more base. If one end sinks a foot or two and the other end doesn,t it will not be noticed.
Here is a list of 66 leaning towers.
There have been plenty of leaning buildings. Once they lean all the way to the ground (the last part of the lean coming very rapidly) they aren’t considered buildings anymore and tend not to be left there to gawk at.
Meidum, aka The Broken Pyramid is an example of the ancient Egyptians failing to provide a solid foundation for a large structure which eventually collapsed to some degree. Of course pyramids have the advantage of not leaning, simply collapsing.
Even modern buildings can exhibit the same phenomenon, due to the nature of towers and their narrow footings. Such as the water tower, in Groom, Texas.
Gravity provides a good foundation given enough weight on the ground. I’ve been involved in several friends house renovations. Usually putting in damp membranes or digging down the living room to get better headroom, ive yet to see any foundations at all on houses built before WW2 in this area (UK Cornwall). One notable house had dead grass under its walls, they hadn’t even stripped off the turf before setting to with granite rubble and hammers. Hundreds of tons of stone makes a pretty stable house! I had imagined foundations to be huge structures securely underpinning buildings but experience shows that not to be true at all. Even new build foundations are not nearly as substantial as one might expect. And historical foundations were sometimes not there or just a wider under ground step to level the ground.
What is remarkable about the Tower in Pisa is not so much that it leans, but that, despite the fact that it visibly leans, it has not actually fallen down. Most other buildings that developed noticeable leans quite soon ceased to be buildings at all.
The only “leaning” houses that I’ve seen in Amsterdam have only a single wall leaning–to allow easier access to upper floor warehouse rooms. The other three walls are vertical and the leaning wall is pretty carefully constructed/anchored to be a deliberate feature.
(There may be leaning hoses in Amsterdam that I missed, but the ones I’ve seen were deliberate.)
Amsterdam: Architecture
But you also see a lot of Amsterdam canal houses whose window openings are, at best, now parallelograms rather than rectangles.
Brick/block buildsings fall apart if the lean is so bad . This is actually not so much lean that its uncomfortable to be in then.
Here’s a whole set of leaning buildings.
These apartments are safe because they are reinforced concrete.
(the whole building leans as one block. ), And so they live on… they are getting so bad a lean as to be uncomfortable for human occupation.
There are other leaning towers.
eg the Frankenhausen church tower leans more and is taller.
A tower in Bolagna , ital is much taller, but only has 1.3 degree lean
I’ve tried using a spirit level in our 18 century house and wall wise, its pointless, nothing is level or straight…
I used to frequent an old pub sunk by underground mineshafts in England’s Black Country called ‘the Crooked House’ - you could place a ball on one end of the bar and it looked like it rolled up hill. That place was weird, and definitely leaned.
I think there’s loads of wobbly buildings around, it’s just that the Leaning Tower of Pisa is a really extreme example. Most building that lean that much have, basically, collapsed. The Tower of Pisa leans a* lot*.
Lots of buildings have liens on them.
What??
Yes, the remarkable thing aboutthe LToP is not that it leans, but that it stopped (mostly) before it fell over. When the restoration/stabilization was started about 2 decades ago, the computer models suggested it was about to fall or should have already.
If you look at the photos closely, it leaned one way, they eventually tilted the next floor to compensate, it leaned the other way, and they did it again before finishing the tower. It kept leaning a little bit more each century until the scientific analysis suggested it was about to fall, and serious efforts were made to fix the problem. IIRC some earlier attempts made the problem worse.
There are plenty of out-of-kilter buildings in the world. Most are rectangular, built on a rectangular footing, and so one wall or one side would drop relative to others. Then the building might go parallelogram. The construction of the tower appears to be such that it tilted instead of drooping. (Large blocks and good mortar? One-piece base?)
There are plenty of old buildings where sections are drooping and the brick pattern is shifted and broken, and the brick lines are visibly wavy.
Venice is a good example. the foundations of many of the oldest buildings are pine logs pounded into the lagoon mud. Over the centuries, some are sinking faster than others and many buildings are uneven. the floor of St. Mark’s has some serious wave action. There are hundreds of buildings you can see around Venice where there are flat iron pieces and bolts on them, on the outside walls. long steel rods have been pushed though the buildings and bolted to a flat on opposite outside walls to stop the walls from falling outward due to building movement.
TheOude Kerk in Delft, Netherlands has a distinct lean to it.
Maybe you’d have better luck in a blue state.
Its pretty common round here too, either a big X or a round plate with a socking great threaded rod through the building under a floor holds the walls in…