Karishma brings you seven things you could really do without, but are better off knowing.
Her warning: You may not like what you find. And you may not believe what is in fact, fact.
But share them with your children. Step into someone else’s shoes. Imagine.
Standing in the middle of the street in Hong Kong with 40-storied buildings towering down over me, the only thing I could think was, ‘How do they even make these things?’ So here are some unique construction facts from around the globe that’ll take you by surprise!
The base of the Great Pyramid in Egypt is believed to be large enough to cover ten football fields. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, it took 400,000 men, and twenty years, to construct this great monument.
A bridge built in Lima, Peru during 1610 was made of mortar that was mixed with the whites of 10,000 eggs. The bridge, appropriately called the ‘Bridge of Eggs’, is still standing today.
After removing the hulls from their rice crop and sorting out the white kernels, Japanese farmers take the hulls from the leftover rice, mix them into a kind of paste, mould the substance into brick-shaped blocks, and build houses with them. Such buildings are known in Japan as ‘Houses of Rice Skin’.
An underground building, known as an earth-scraper is being built in Mexico City, and will be 65 storeys deep. The earth-scraper will be called ‘The Heart of The City’ and will be pyramid-shaped. The idea of building it beneath the soil is to maintain the Aztec tradition of building underground.
During the months of July and August, the height of the Eiffel Tower is typically at its maximum. The tower stands 320 meters (1,050 ft) tall, about the same height as an 81-storey building. Because of thermal expansion, the height varies by 15 cm (5.9 in) depending on temperature.
The 16-story Gate Tower in Osaka has an extremely unique feature. The Hanshin Expressway runs through the fifth to seventh floors, an area which contains nothing but elevators, staircases, and other machinery. The highway is surrounded by a structure to protect the building from noise and vibration.
The Moonlight Rainbow Fountain in Soeul is the world’s longest bridge fountain that set a Guinness World Record with nearly 10,000 LED nozzles that run along both sides. It has 38 water pumps, 9,380 nozzles, and shoots as far as 43 meters horizontally. The water used is pumped directly from the river itself, and continuously recycled.
