Architecture Facts

The Taj Mahal took 20 years and 20 thousand men to finish!

The World Trade Center towers used to have two zip codes, 10047-10048, one for each building.

Because heat expands the metal, the Eiffel Tower always leans away from the sun.

The word 'attic' comes from Attica, the region around Athens, Greece, where a distinctive architectural style featured decorative columns on upper facades.

Jericho is the oldest walled city in the world at 9,000 yrs old!

One percent of Greenland's population lives in a single apartment building!

Sheikh Hamad, billionaire and royal family member in the United Arab Emirates, had a huge carving of his name that's even visible from space etched into a private island.

In 2007, a woman named Erika La Tour Eiffel married the Eiffel Tower.

Over 10,000 birds a year die from smashing into windows!

There is a basketball court on the top floor of the U.S. Supreme Court Building. It’s known as the “highest court in the land.”

The Gate Tower Building skyscraper in Japan has a highway passing through its fifth, sixth and seventh floors.

Instead of McDonald's tearing down a ~230-year-old Georgian mansion, citizens of a small NY town forced them to renovate it instead, resulting in a uniquely historic franchise location.

The Lincoln Memorial has a secret: a 43,800 sq ft cave beneath it - nearly twice the floor space of the memorial above. Rainwater seeping through the marble has grown real stalactites, and 1914 construction workers left cartoon graffiti on the columns, now preserved behind plexiglass. It opens as a public museum for the first time on June 25.

A London skyscraper accidentally became a giant curved mirror. Its glass facade focused sunlight into a beam so intense it melted a parked Jaguar, scorched a shop, and let a reporter fry an egg on the pavement. The architect had built the same flaw in Las Vegas years earlier.

Tyler Perry bought a former US Army base in Atlanta for $30 million and turned it into Tyler Perry Studios - bigger than Disney, Warner Bros., and Paramount combined. He built an 80%-scale White House replica for his BET series "The Oval." In 2023, the Secret Service used it for training because they lacked their own facility.

The Gateway Arch was built as two separate legs measured to meet precisely at the top. On October 28, 1965, the morning sun expanded the south leg. The last piece would not fit. Workers ran fire hoses to the top and soaked the steel until it shrank. Hydraulic jacks applied 450 tons of force, and the final section slid in.

A 43-year-old French postman tripped over a stone on his rural mail round in 1879 and decided to build a palace. Ferdinand Cheval collected stones on his 18-mile route for 33 years - first in his pockets, then a basket, then a wheelbarrow. Neighbors called him insane. He carved into the wall: 10,000 days, 93,000 hours of struggle. 170,000 people a year now pay to see it.

Gustave Eiffel built a secret apartment at the top of his tower - 906 feet above Paris - with a piano, sitting room, and three small desks for science. Paris's wealthy offered him fortunes to rent it for a single night. He refused every offer. On September 10, 1889, Thomas Edison climbed up and gifted him a phonograph. The apartment still exists, with wax figures of Eiffel, Edison, and his daughter Claire inside.

Sears sold up to 75,000 complete houses by mail-order between 1908 and 1940. You picked a model for $360 to $2,890, and a railroad boxcar arrived with 30,000 pre-cut pieces, 750 pounds of nails, 27 gallons of paint, and a 75-page manual. An estimated 70% are still standing, built by the company that later failed to adapt to e-commerce.

Kowloon Walled City crammed 33,000 people into just 6.4 acres - one city block. That made it the densest place in recorded human history. About 300 towers rose 14 storeys high, packed so close that sunlight never reached the alleys. Neither Britain nor China governed it, so residents built their own unlicensed economy. It was demolished in 1993-1994. The site is now a park.

The Pantheon has stood in Rome for nearly 2,000 years, its concrete dome outlasting every modern equivalent. For centuries, engineers blamed the white chunks in Roman concrete on sloppy mixing. In 2023, MIT found the opposite: those "lime clasts" are the secret. When a crack forms and water seeps in, they react and recrystallize to seal it - the concrete heals its own cracks, 2,000 years before we understood the chemistry.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa closed in 1990 for the first time in 800 years. Engineers warned it was close to collapse. Over 11 years, they drilled beneath the north side and extracted soil. The tower settled back by 44 centimeters. It reopened in December 2001. Experts say it is now safe for at least 300 more years.

William Van Alen hid a 185-foot steel spire inside the Chrysler Building's own crown, assembled in secret. His rival H. Craig Severance had designed 40 Wall Street two feet taller - thinking he'd win. Van Alen raised the hidden spire through the roof in 90 minutes on October 23, 1929. The Chrysler Building jumped to 1,046 feet, the first skyscraper to top 1,000 feet. It held the record for 11 months.

The Washington Monument is two different shades of marble. Construction started in 1848 but funding collapsed in 1854, halting work for over 20 years. When the Army Corps of Engineers resumed building in 1879, the original Maryland quarry could no longer supply matching marble. Builders used stone from a new source - and it aged to a slightly darker shade. The color line sits about one-third of the way up the 555-foot tower.