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.

Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant tile mason, spent 33 years building the Watts Towers in Los Angeles entirely by hand - no machines, no scaffolding, no bolts, no welds, no blueprints. His only tools were pipe-fitter pliers and a window-washer belt. The tallest spire reaches 99 feet. When he finished in 1954, he deeded the land to a neighbor, boarded a bus, and never came back.

The Empire State Building's spire was designed as a boarding dock for airships. Passengers would cross an open gangplank 1,250 feet above the street, then ride an elevator down. In September 1931, a small airship docked there for three minutes in 40 mph winds. Two weeks later, a blimp lowered newspapers to the tower on a 100 foot rope. Updrafts made the mast unusable. No airship ever truly docked there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

London Bridge, the real one from the Thames, now stands in the Arizona desert. In 1968, developer Robert McCulloch bought it for .46 million. Workers numbered every exterior granite block, shipped them 10,000 miles through the Panama Canal, and rebuilt the bridge over a canal in Lake Havasu City. It reopened in 1971 and still draws tourists today.