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These Buildings Are Leaning Into It

Splendid structures, slightly slanted.

by allegrarosenberg
15 Places

The Leaning Tower of Pisa gets all the love, but it’s certainly not the only structure out there standing with a proud slant. Tbilisi, Georgia has its very own leaning tower, as does a spot along the old Route 66 in Texas. 

Residents of the Chicago suburbs are fond of their replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, originally intended as water storage. Its slant was no accident but engineered on purpose to mimic the original. Many leaning structures are places of worship, such as Qatar’s Leaning Mosque and Germany’s tilted Suurhusen Church.

For centuries, Zaragoza, Spain had its own rival to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, perhaps the second-most-famous leaning tower in the world—until 1892, when it was demolished because its tilt had become too dangerous. Today, a statue of a boy looking up at where the tower used to be commemorates the legendary structure.

This is an acknowledgement that to demolish a leaning tower is to rob a populace of something to admire: a fascinating and enthralling kind of precarity which can lend instant landmark status to an otherwise unremarkable building. 

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