On the south side of the tower, the soil is slightly more compressible, which is why the foundations of the building sank in that direction. Why does Pisa Tower lean?Īssuming the design was not intentional, the most popular theory about the tower’s lean is simply that the soil it was built on wasn’t strong enough to support the weight – basically it had too much sand and silt in it from the flooding of a nearby river estuary. It’s fascinating to discover that the architecture of almost a thousands years ago still baffles experts of today. For years scientists and engineers have studied the building, trying to work out how it happened, how to fix it and how to stop it unexpectedly falling on top of a bunch of tourists one day! What better way to make your city renowned through all the lands than with an iconic building that has no equal in the world? Well, maybe, but… These ‘experts’ claim it may have been because of Pisa’s rivalry with Florence at the time that the city wanted something to distinguish itself. There’s a school of thought that says the slant of the tower in Pisa was no accident. Perhaps it was meant to be built like that! There is an old story that Galileo Galilei used the Tower for a physics experiment.Perhaps it’s all a marketing scam, this leaning tower thing. Construction was stopped for almost 100 years because the people of Pisa were often at war with Genoa, Lucca, and Florence. The design of this tower was bad from the beginning. This was because it had a small three-meter foundation in soft soil. When the second floor was built in 1178, the tower started to lean. The height of the tower is about 56 metres from the ground. On 26 April 2011, the last bit of scaffolding was removed so that the tower can be seen properly again. There was scaffolding all around the tower for 20 years. After that, much restoration work has been done to stop it from falling over completely. In 1990 the tower was leaning at 5.5 degrees and increasing. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is a building in Pisa, Italy.
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