Useless Facts on Architecture And Construction
The base of the Great Pyramid in Egypt is large enough to cover ten football fields. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, it took 400,000 men twenty years to construct this great monument.
Many houses in the rural districts of Nepal are constructed of cow dung mixed with mud, sand, and clay.
In 1711, when work on St. Paul's Cathedral in London was completed and was shown to George I, the King is reported to have exclaimed to its architect, Christopher Wren, that the work was “aweful” and “artificial.” In the eighteenth century, “aweful” meant awe-inspiring, and “artificial” meant full of great art.
Japanese farmers, after removing the hulls from their rice crop and sorting out the white kernels, take the hulls from the leftover rice, mix them into a kind of paste, mold the substance into brick-shaped blocks, and build houses with them. Such buildings are known in Japan as “houses of rice skin”.
The only man made structure visible from space is the great wall of China.
The Washington Monument sinks 6 inches every year.
The Statue of Liberty's mouth is 3 feet wide.
The largest pyramid in the world is not Egypt but in Cholulu de Rivadahia, Mexico. It is 177 feet tall and covers 25 acres. It was built sometime between 6 and 12 A.D.
Boulder Dam is as thick at its base (660 feet) as a city block is long.
Bricks are the oldest manufactured building material still in use. Egyptians used them 7,000 years ago.
The world's two largest dams in terms of height are both in Russia. They are the inguri (988 feet high) and the Nurek (984 feet high)
The Egyptian pyramids were once faced completely with marble. The Parthenon was once painted.
Nobody knows who built the Taj Mahal. The names of the architects, masons, and designers that have come down to us have all proved to be latter-day inventions, and there is no evidence to indicate who the real creators were.
There is a house in Rockport, Massachusetts, built entirely of newspaper. The paper House at Pigeon Cove, as it is called, is made of 215 thicknesses of newspaper. “All the furniture is made of newspaper,” its builder reports, “including a desk of newspapers relating Lindbergh's historic flight.”
The pyramids of Egypt contain enough stone and mortar to construct a wall 10 feet high and 5 feet wide running from New York City to Los Angeles.
Many of the first houses in the American colonies (including the home of William Penn) were built from bricks used as ballast in the holds of ships. These ships arrived in the new World filled with bricks, the bricks were unloaded and sold, and the cargo hatches were refilled with export goods in their place. The bricks were then used by the colonists to construct their homes.
In 1830 the Taj Mahal was sold to a British merchant who planned to dismantle it stone by stone and ship the marble back to England, where it would be used to embellish English estates. Though wrecking machinery was brought into the gardens of the Taj, the plan was discourage; the project turned out to be too expensive.
The Incas considered bridges to be so sacred that anyone who tampered with one was put to death. Among the most impressive Inca bridges were the chacas, or rope bridges, that spanned great distances over gorges and rivers. They were made of plaited grasses woven together into a single cable as thick as a man's body, and they sometimes extended for 175 feet. It took as many as a thousand people to build such a bridge, and many of these remarkable structures lasted more than five hundred years.
In 1931, an industrialist named Robert Iig built a half-size replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa outside Chicago and lived in it for several years. The tower is still there.
In the city of Washington, D.C., no building maybe be built taller than the Capitol.
The Empire State Building (1,250 feet) exceeds the height of the Eiffel Tower (984.5 feet) by only 265.5 feet.
It takes a person fifteen to twenty minutes to walk once around the Pentagon.
There are 10 million bricks in the Empire State Building.
The Empire State Building was built with 60,000 tons of steel, 3 million square feet of wire mesh, 70,000 cubic yards of concrete, 10 million bricks, and can accommodate 15,000 people.
A bridge built in Lima, Peru, in 1610 was made of mortar that was mixed not with water but with the whites of 10,000 eggs. The bridge, appropriately called the Bridge of Eggs, is still standing.
The Column of Trajan, built in 113 A.D. To commemorate the Roman Emperor Trajan's victories against the Dacian tribes of the lower Danube, contains a continuous frieze a yard wide and 218 feet long in which more than 2,500human figures as well as hundreds of boats, horses, vehicles, and pieces of military equipment are depicted. This great column, still standing today, rises 128 feet from the ground, is 12 feet thick at the base, and is made entirely of gilded bronze. Inside is a circular staircase where the ashes of Trajan were sprinkled.
The Escorial, the famous palace located outside Madrid, was built in the shape of a gridiron because Saint Lawrence, to whom the palace was dedicated, was roasted on one.
In the mid-sixteenth century Hideyoshi, the so-called peasant ruler of Japan, ordered that all the swords in the nation be collected and melted down. The metal was then used, in 1586, to construct an enormous Buddha. It took 50,000 artisans more than six years to build the statue, and exactly ten years after it was completed an earthquake razed it. Not a trace of this giant figure remains today.