![]() in the case of the Tower, the combination of rounded arches, sturdy pillars, and white marble have it looking like an elegant giant-sized wedding cake. The beautiful romanesque style of architecture used when building not only the Tower but also the Cathedral and the Baptistery resulted in this assemblage of buildings being the most splendid example of its kind in Italy. Upon entering the Piazza dei Miracoli, we were confronted by the massive white marble Cathedral of Pisa that dwarfs its own bell tower. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, or Tower of Pisa for short, is one of four buildings that make up the cathedral complex known as Square of Miracles. We achieved our destination after a long 4 hours. Unfortunately, a major problem on the expressway had traffic there stopped and held captive for hours, but our GPS unit foresaw the problem and directed us alternately through the countryside on some pretty obscure routes. As we were becoming quite familiar with the roads leading north from our little corner of Tuscany, we so saw no reason why we couldn’t be at the Leaning Tower of Pisa by 9 a.m. This world-famous freestanding bell tower is considered one of the most remarkable architectural structures from medieval Europe and possibly the tallest bell tower in Europe. Still, the task force urged that all new buildings be monitored for at least a decade after construction.Despite our intentions of arriving at the Leaning Tower of Pisa early in the day, we found ourselves landing at the popular tourist destination alongside hundreds of fellow sightseers. A tall building task force separately concluded that high-rise buildings - with properly designed foundations - should not sink more than four inches. San Francisco building officials say the city has long-term plans to shore up the seawall that protects the Embarcadero. “If you have all of this going on when you're right near the waterline, in some cases in San Francisco, then you have to worry about big storms that sea level comes up and inundation more frequently.” Parsons points out that ground level and sea level heading in opposite directions is a dangerous scenario for coastal cities. Parsons says he’s now studying Manhattan, because it is also sinking and faces the same threat as San Francisco from climate change. Not on this sort of scale that you're talking about,” Poulos said. “I've been doing foundation design for, I guess, nearly 30 years now, and it's not something that we've actually ever even thought about. “If you have a series of buildings, fairly heavy buildings all clustered together, they're going to influence each other,” said Harry Poulos, an internationally recognized expert on tall building foundations. He says while there may be no seismic concern for San Francisco, there’s been little research about the collective impact of entire corridors of high rises on the earth below. jail escapee still being found reward increases Groundwater loss from adjacent construction has been blamed for the problem by the tower’s developers, while geotechnical experts say the key is that its foundation is not rooted in bedrock. ![]() The top nine all weigh more than 300-million pounds, but the only one that’s leaning significantly is the Millennium. Turns out that at an estimated 686 million pounds, the Millennium Tower is the third heaviest building in the city. “Clearly, the most density and the tallest buildings are centered in that downtown San Francisco area, and that's where we see the most calculated cumulative settlement from all of those buildings together," he said. “I looked at every building in the Bay Area, so just under a million buildings,” said U.S Geological Survey research geophysicist Tom Parsons, who estimates that over the last century, 3.5 trillion pounds of development and human activity – including the subsidence tied to loss of groundwater - have led to an estimated settlement of three inches across the entire Bay Area. The Millennium Tower may be the most recognizable sinking building in the city, but one researcher says earth-based and space-based observations confirm the entire downtown area around it is sinking as well. ![]()
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