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.

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.

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.

Roman concrete has lasted nearly 2,000 years and can self-heal cracks: lime clasts from hot-mixing dissolve and recrystallise when water seeps in. MIT identified the mechanism in 2023.