Architecture is full of surprises. These stories run from a pyramid builder later worshiped as a god to a London tower that melted parts of a car, and from a Gothic cathedral with Darth Vader on its tower to a lighthouse rolled 2,900 feet inland. Along the way you will meet a doctor who designed the U.S. Capitol, an architect who learned to draw upside down, and a basilica that went 137 years without a permit.
Every tile in a Architecture game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Buildings
nine stories
1Two long pauses kept Pisa's tower from falling
On the tile: Pisa Tower1173–1370
Work on Pisa's bell tower began in August 1173 and stopped around 1178, a quarter of the way up the fourth story. Nobody knows why. Engineer John Burland writes that if building had continued, the soft clay beneath would not have carried the load and the tower would have fallen over. When work resumed nearly 100 years later, the clay had grown stronger under the tower's weight. A second long pause did the same. Builders also tried to correct the lean with tapered blocks, so the tower's axis actually bends.
2The basilica that went 137 years without a permit
On the tile: Sagrada1882–2019
Barcelona's Sagrada Família has been under construction since 1882, yet for more than a century it had no building permit. People connected with the project applied for one in 1885, three years after work began, with a blueprint signed by Antoni Gaudí, but city officials said it was never recorded as granted or rejected. The oversight came to light only in 2016. In 2019 Barcelona finally issued a permit, and the foundation agreed to pay about 4.6 million euros. Gaudí himself lived to see only one bell tower completed.
In 1929 two New York towers were racing to be the world's tallest. William Van Alen was designing the Chrysler Building, while his former partner, H. Craig Severance, was building 40 Wall Street. Severance added a 50-foot flagpole to reach 927 feet. Van Alen had a secret: a spire, delivered in five sections and assembled out of sight inside the building. Late that year a derrick hoisted it up through the middle of the tower, and in about 90 minutes it was riveted in place, lifting the Chrysler to 1,046 feet.
Ise Jingu, where the deity Amaterasu is enshrined, is often called the most important shrine in Japan, and every 20 years it is completely rebuilt in a ritual called Shikinen Sengu. The sacred garments, furnishings and treasures are made new as well. The tradition dates to 690, and the rebuilding completed in 2013 was the 62nd. It is no quick job: the ceremonies stretch over about nine years, including one in which local residents and supporters from across Japan haul fresh lumber to the shrine.
A persistent rumor says the Louvre's glass pyramid has exactly 666 panes, the biblical number of the beast. It does not. The museum's own figures list 675 diamond-shaped panes and 118 triangular ones, and other published counts differ, but none is 666. I. M. Pei, appointed architect of the Grand Louvre project in 1983, wanted the glass perfectly transparent, and developing an extra-clear glass took two years. After four years of work, with help from specialists in ships' rigging, the pyramid was inaugurated on March 29, 1989.
6Hagia Sophia's dome fell, then rose 20 feet higher
On the tile: Hagia Sophia537–562
Emperor Justinian's great church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople went up in about five years and was dedicated on December 27, 537. Its designers, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, were learned men; Isidore edited commentaries on Archimedes. But the dome pushed outward on its supports harder than was safe. After earthquakes in 557, part of it collapsed in May 558 while cracks were being repaired. A younger Isidore, probably his nephew, rebuilt it about 20 feet higher, and the church was rededicated on December 24, 562.
In 1239, after two years of negotiation, King Louis IX of France acquired the relic revered as Christ's Crown of Thorns from Baldwin II, the Latin emperor of Constantinople. The price, 135,000 livres tournois, was half the kingdom's yearly revenue. To house it, Louis built the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris in under seven years, a monumental reliquary whose 15 windows, up to 15 meters tall, hold 1,113 stained-glass scenes. The shrine inside was melted down during the Revolution, but the crown survived and went to Notre-Dame's treasury in 1806.
Borobudur, in central Java, was built in the 8th and 9th centuries as a Buddhist temple: five square terraces, three circular platforms and 72 openwork stupas, each holding a statue of the Buddha. It was abandoned sometime between the 10th and 15th centuries, and volcanic eruptions and rainforest hid it. In 1814 Thomas Stamford Raffles, who oversaw a brief British occupation of the island, backed an expedition by Dutch explorer Hermann Cornelius, who found it. Yet the temple never left Javanese stories. UNESCO helped restore it in the 1970s.
Dubai's Burj Khalifa stands 828 meters tall. In 2013 the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat studied what it called vanity height: the distance between a skyscraper's highest occupiable floor and its architectural top. For Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on Earth when the study appeared, that is a 244-meter spire, nearly 30 percent of the total. Without it, the tower would stand 585 meters and lose no usable space. As the report put it, the spire could be a skyscraper on its own.
Imhotep is famous as the builder of King Djoser's Step Pyramid at Saqqara. His titles survive on the base of a statue of Djoser, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo: prince, royal seal-bearer, high priest of Heliopolis and director of sculptors. Being named on a royal statue was an extraordinary privilege. Later legends said he invented building in stone around 2600 BC, and in time Egyptians worshiped him as a god of healing. The Greeks identified him with their own god of medicine, Asclepius. His tomb has never been found.
2Brunelleschi's egg, and the rival he had to share with
On the tile: Brunelleschi1420Legend
The story goes, as Giorgio Vasari told it, that Filippo Brunelleschi won the job of building Florence Cathedral's huge dome with an egg. He challenged rival architects to stand one on end. When all failed, he cracked its bottom on the table and left it upright. The others said they could have done that, and he replied that they could have built the dome too, had they seen his plans. In reality, in April 1420 he was appointed to oversee the dome jointly with his old rival Lorenzo Ghiberti. The dome was consecrated in 1436.
As a young man, Sinan was taken into the Ottoman devshirme system, which took Christian youths and trained them as officials or soldiers, and he made his name in the elite Janissary corps as a military engineer. Only in the late 1530s did he become the empire's chief architect. In a career of more than 50 years he produced more than 300 buildings, from mosques and schools to bridges and public kitchens. He called Istanbul's Sehzade Mosque his apprentice work, and according to UNESCO he considered the Selimiye complex in Edirne his best.
Before he was an architect, Christopher Wren was an astronomer. In 1657 he became professor of astronomy at Gresham College in London, and in 1661 he took Oxford's Savilian chair of astronomy. He was a founding member of the Royal Society, and Isaac Newton ranked him among the leading mathematicians of the day. After the Great Fire of 1666, Wren supervised the rebuilding of 51 London churches. In 1675 he designed the Royal Observatory at Greenwich for John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal.
In 1792 the commissioners of the new federal city offered $500 and a city lot for the best plan for the U.S. Capitol. None of the 17 plans submitted fully satisfied them. That October a letter arrived from Dr. William Thornton, a Scottish-trained physician living on Tortola in the British West Indies, asking to present a plan even though the competition had closed. They agreed. President Washington praised Thornton's design for its "grandeur, simplicity and convenience," and it was accepted in 1793. Thornton later ran the U.S. Patent Office.
6Three failed exams, then a first for women in Paris
On the tile: Julia Morgan1898
Julia Morgan was one of the first women to study engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She then set her sights on the all-male École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After three failed attempts, she passed its entrance exam in 1898 and became the first woman to enroll there in architecture. Back home she became California's first licensed woman architect, designed more than 700 buildings and spent 28 years on Hearst Castle. Yet LIFE magazine's 1957 tour of San Simeon, published months after her death, did not mention her.
Paul Revere Williams was orphaned at four in Los Angeles, and his elders discouraged him from becoming an architect. He became one anyway, designing more than 3,000 structures over almost six decades, including homes for celebrity clients. Because some white clients might be uneasy sitting beside an African American, he learned to draw upside down, so he could sketch for them from across the table. He was the first African American member of the American Institute of Architects, which posthumously awarded him its Gold Medal for 2017.
8A class assignment that became a national memorial
On the tile: Maya Lin1981
When a national competition for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial was announced, Yale professor Andy Burr had his architecture students design entries as a class project. Over Thanksgiving break, undergraduate Maya Lin visited the site in Washington, saw people playing Frisbee and decided she did not want to destroy a living park. Her design set a V-shaped wall into the earth, inscribed with the names of the dead in chronological order. Entries were judged without the designers' names, and hers beat more than 1,400 others. She was 21.
9Three wins for an opera house that was never built
On the tile: Zaha Hadid1994
In September 1994 Zaha Hadid, then relatively unknown in Wales, won the competition for the Cardiff Bay Opera House from a field of 268 entries. Doubts followed. Officials questioned whether it could be built, then took the unusual step of judging her design again against two runners-up. She won again, and in all she won the same competition three times. The project still lost funding from the Millennium Commission and was never built. Ten years after that first win, in 2004, Hadid became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
1The Parthenon's curves may not be an optical trick
On the tile: Parthenon5th century BC
The Parthenon in Athens contains almost no straight lines or right angles. Its base bows upward, rising about two to four inches toward the middle of each side, and its columns swell slightly. In the first century BC the Roman architect Vitruvius explained such curves as corrections for optical illusions, so that straight lines would not seem to sag, and the idea became Parthenon lore. In 2026 Oxford mathematician Alain Goriely challenged it, saying there is "strictly no evidence" the refinements produce the proposed illusions. The curves are real; their purpose is open again.
Andrea di Pietro was born in Padua in 1508 and apprenticed as a stonemason. His patron, Count Giangiorgio Trissino, renamed him Palladio in 1540, a reference to the wisdom of Pallas Athena. Palladio's treatise, The Four Books of Architecture, crossed the Atlantic: Thomas Jefferson called it the Bible for architectural practice and drew on its principles for Monticello, and its influence reached the U.S. Capitol and the White House. In 2010 Congress passed a resolution recognizing Palladio's "tremendous influence on architecture in the United States."
A favorite Roman tale says that on Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, the statue of the Nile covers its head so it need not look at the church of Sant'Agnese in Agone, designed by Bernini's great rival Francesco Borromini. Another river god supposedly raises a hand in case the church falls down. It is a good story, but the fountain was unveiled on June 12, 1651, well before the church was built. The Nile's head is veiled for another reason: its source had not yet been discovered.
High on the northwest tower of Washington National Cathedral, built in the style of a 14th-century Gothic cathedral, sits a stone Darth Vader. In 1984 the cathedral publicized a Design-A-Grotesque competition in National Geographic World magazine, and 1,400 children from 16 countries sent entries. Chris Rader, 13, of Nebraska drew Vader and was one of the runners-up. Sculptor Jay Hall Carpenter modeled the head, and carver Patrick J. Plunkett cut it in limestone. It is a grotesque, not a gargoyle, since gargoyles' mouths work as water spouts. Bring binoculars.
The style of the Chrysler Building had no single name in its heyday. In the 1920s and 1930s people called it moderne or jazz modern. The label Art Deco was coined in the 1960s, taken from the 1925 Paris exposition of decorative and industrial arts where the style had one of its most important showcases. It caught on after the historian Bevis Hillier's 1968 book, Art Deco of the 20s and 30s. Hillier later recalled that when he wrote it, Art Deco was a despised style.
6The Bauhaus taught no architecture for eight years
On the tile: Bauhaus1919–1933
The Bauhaus is a byword for modern architecture, yet the German school that architect Walter Gropius founded in Weimar in 1919 did not add architecture to its curriculum until 1927. Until then students worked in painting, sculpture, weaving, furniture design, typography, bookbinding, carpentry and metalwork, even though Gropius's 1919 manifesto had called for a new structure of the future uniting architecture, sculpture and painting. Under Nazi pressure the school closed in 1933. Many of its teachers went to the United States, where Gropius taught at Harvard.
In 1928 Pierre and Eugénie Savoye asked Le Corbusier to design a weekend house at Poissy, outside Paris. The Villa Savoye became an icon of modern architecture, raised on slender pillars, with a long band of windows and a flat roof holding a solarium. Soon after moving in, the family found water leaking through the skylights and along the ramp, and the house was hard to keep warm. They complained in letters and ended up visiting only on sunny days. Later threatened with demolition, it was saved and became a historic monument in 1965.
Dramatic angles, neon and rocketship dreams made many postwar American coffee shops look ready for liftoff. The style got its name from Googies, a Los Angeles coffee shop designed in 1949 by John Lautner, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Critic Douglas Haskell, driving past it, decided he had found a name for the look. He did not mean it kindly. His February 1952 article in House and Home, titled Googie Architecture, satirized the style, partly in the voice of a fictional Professor Thrugg. The name stuck anyway.
Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower, completed in Tokyo's Ginza district in 1972, was a landmark of Metabolism, a Japanese movement built on the idea that buildings should be renewable. Its 140 single-occupancy capsules were fastened to two concrete towers with high-tension bolts so they could be replaced as they aged, and the plan was to renew them every 25 years. It never happened, because replacing only part of the structure proved too complex. The tower was dismantled in 2022, and the Museum of Modern Art acquired one restored capsule in 2023.
1The geodesic dome came decades before Fuller's patent
On the tile: Geodesic Dome1923Myth busted
Buckminster Fuller made the geodesic dome famous and patented it in 1954, so many assume he invented it. But the first geodesic dome went up about three decades earlier. Walther Bauersfeld, chief engineer at the Carl Zeiss optics company in Jena, Germany, designed it to test a new planetarium projector, and in early 1923 it was built on the roof of the Zeiss works. Its shell, an icosahedron with each face subdivided, was formed from nearly 3,500 thin iron rods sprayed with a thin layer of concrete. Fuller did give the structure its name.
From across London, St. Paul's Cathedral seems to wear a single great dome. Christopher Wren built it in layers. The outer dome on the skyline is timber clad in lead. Hidden inside is a brick cone just 1 foot 6 inches thick, its base reinforced with a wrought-iron chain. With the sloping inner wall of the drum, that cone carries the tall stone lantern, which only appears to rest on the outer dome. Below the cone sits a separate inner dome. The dome was completed in 1708.
Tokyo Skytree rises about 634 meters, and it borrows an idea from Japan's wooden pagodas, which are said never to have fallen in earthquakes, perhaps thanks to their central pillar. A concrete cylinder eight meters across, holding emergency stairs, runs up the middle of its steel frame. Above 125 meters it is linked to the tower only by oil dampers, so its upper part sways out of step and acts as a counterweight, cutting the shaking force by about 40 percent in a major earthquake. It is called the shinbashira, after the pagoda pillar.
Hanging between the 87th and 92nd floors of Taipei 101 is a giant tuned mass damper: a gold sphere about 5.5 meters across, welded from 41 layers of steel plate and weighing 660 metric tons. It hangs from 92 steel cables. When wind makes the tower sway, the ball lags behind, and eight hydraulic dampers beneath it soak up the motion. Its main job is to reduce sway in strong winds so that working in so tall a tower stays comfortable. Most dampers are hidden; this one is a tourist attraction.
When the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was completed in 1870, it stood a safe 1,500 feet from the ocean. Shoreline erosion later left it just 120 feet from the water's edge. In 1999 the National Park Service had it moved. Crews lifted the 4,830-ton tower, the tallest brick lighthouse in the United States, off its foundation and set it on roller dollies riding steel track beams. Jacks clamped to the track moved it forward 5 feet at a time. Starting June 17, it traveled 2,900 feet and was placed on its new foundation on July 9.
6The famous elevator stunt the papers barely noticed
On the tile: Elisha Otis1854Myth busted
Legend says the skyscraper age began in 1854 at New York's Crystal Palace exhibition, when Elisha Otis rode his elevator platform up, had the rope cut, and was saved by his safety brake before an amazed crowd. He did demonstrate the brake there. But historian Andreas Bernard found that the major papers and magazines of the day barely mentioned it: a Scientific American article and a brief New York Daily Tribune note about an inventor who occasionally cut the rope. The dramatic version grew later, helped by a 1911 account by Otis's son Charles.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater cantilevers its concrete terraces out over a waterfall in Pennsylvania. The terraces soon began to droop. By 1955 the Kaufmanns had recorded about four inches of downward tilt, and a 1994 study found as much as almost seven. Engineers at Robert Silman Associates found the concrete and steel overstressed because of errors in the design of their reinforcement. In 2001 and 2002, bundles of high-strength steel cable were anchored into the piers, attached to three of the four main living room beams and tightened, stopping the sag.
Chicago's Sears Tower, now the Willis Tower, was built as nine tubes in one. Engineer Fazlur Khan designed a bundle of nine square tubes, each 75 feet wide, rising to different heights; only two go all the way to the top. The story goes that the look was settled over lunch, when architect Bruce Graham pulled a handful of cigarettes from his pocket and held them bundled at different heights. Khan's daughter has said the design was modeled on a pack of cigarettes.
In 1916 German saboteurs set off explosions at Black Tom Wharf in New Jersey, damaging the main building on nearby Ellis Island. In the repairs, its Registry Room gained a soaring arched ceiling of tile, installed in 1918 by the Guastavino company. Its founder, Rafael Guastavino, had come to the United States from Spain in the late 19th century, and his firm went on to work on hundreds of buildings. Guastavino tile vaults appear in Grand Central Terminal, the Biltmore Estate, Washington National Cathedral and Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.