From giant feats of engineering inspired by nature, to quirky housing that is energy efficient,
here are 10 of the most impressive modern buildings in the world.
10.
Biosphere Environmental Museum, Montreal Built as the United States’ pavilion for
the 1967 World Expo in Montreal, Canada, the Biosphere was built to impress!!
It was a massive geodesic dome designed by architect Buckminster Fuller.
It looks like the one at Epcot, doesn't it!?
The structure was originally an enclosed dome made up of steel and acrylic cells that was
248 feet in diameter and over 203 feet high!
The architect tried using a complicated system of shades to control the dome’s internal
temperature, experimenting by trying to imitate pores and skin the way that the human body
does.
The idea was revolutionary but never really worked, so the shading system was disabled.
It was a great success!
The pavilion attracted over 5 million visitors!!
There was a collection of American culture and exhibits inside the dome.
It had the world's longest escalator ever built at 121 feet (37 meters) long.
After the fair the US announced that it would donate the Biosphere to the city of Montreal.
Sadly, it caught fire and burned to a crisp in 1976, when welders were doing some work.
Everything burned down but the steel skeleton, and for a long time it was left abandoned.
in 1990, Environment Canada purchased the site for $17.5 million and converted it into
an interactive museum of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River water ecosystems!
Additional buildings were added to the dome by architect Éric Gauthier, with a number
of smaller buildings enclosed inside the original steel dome.
The Biosphère de Montréal, as it’s now known, presents visitors with interactive
activities and exhibits about environmental issues like water pollution, climate change,
air quality, ecotechnology and sustainability.
There are both guided and self-guided tours, and admission is free to anybody under the
age of 17.
It is advertised as the only environment museum in North America.
Fun fact, it made an appearance in Battlestar Galactica!
9.
Sydney Opera House, Australia In 1957, Danish Architect Jørn Utzon won
an international competition to design a new theatre complex in Sydney.
Construction began in 1959 on Bennelong Point in Sydney Harbor.
Even today, the building is considered one of the most famous and most photographed buildings
in the world.
The opera house is actually a collection of multiple performing spaces, including the
Concert Hall, the Joan Sutherland Theatre, the Drama Theatre, a playhouse, a drama studio
and a recording studio.
Covering over 4.4 acres of land, the Opera House is made of precast concrete shells mounted
on a frame of concrete ribs.
Although the building looks uniformly white from a distance, the shells are actually covered
in glossy white and matte cream tiles in a chevron pattern making it look almost like
skin.
The exterior walls are covered in an aggregate material using pink granite mined in Australia.
Utzon was inspired by Mayan temples he had seen in Mexico.
And he wanted the geometric shell formations to look like they had been pulled out of a
sphere and also like bright sails of a ship.
The Sydney Opera House cost over $102 million to build and took ten years longer than anticipated
to complete.
Part of the delay was the revolutionary design, which required a great deal of trial and error,
as well as computer modelling to properly account for the stresses that the shells would
encounter.
Not only were the standard problems of gravity and load-bearing an issue, but the architects
had to find a way to make the building strong in the face of the wind and weather that could
arise in the harbor.
He also was inventing new kinds of tile!!
This long delay resulted in conflicts between Utzon and local officials, and Utzon abruptly
resigned from the project before it was completed.
Australian architect Peter Hall took the reins and saw the Opera House through to her grand
opening in 1973, which was presided over by Queen Elizabeth II.
8.
The Wave, Denmark In 2009, the little Danish town of Vejle gained
an architectural marvel, courtesy of Henning Larsen Architects.
Inspired in part by the Sydney Opera House, the Wave is a luxury apartment enclosing roughly
150,000 square feet of space.
The town of Vejle is in a valley, and the building’s form mimics both the hills around
the town and the waves on the water.
It sits on the waterfront promenade of the Skyttehusbugten Bay in the Vejle Inlet, right
next to a marina.
The Danish name for the building is Bølgen, meaning “the Wave” (of course).
It consists of five concrete structures, covered with tiles, which climb straight up nine storeys
before sloping down like the leading edge of a wave of water.
There are five waves in all, the last one completed in 2018, and each wave holds 20
luxury apartments.
Architecture daily reports that the form and material of the housing allows to be a constantly
changing landscape element.
During the day they white waves are reflected in the water and at night, the lights make
them look like mountains.
The Wave has won many awards, including 2010’s Building of the Year.
7.
The Dancing House, Prague Designed by Croatian-Czech Vlado Milunic and
Canadian-American Frank Gehry, it was built between 1992 to 1996.
The Dancing House was controversial – and in some quarters still is – because it is
such a dramatic departure from the gothic and baroque architecture of the rest of the
city.
The building is unconventional, to say the least.
It’s built in the deconstructivist style, and its unique shape is created by 99 separate
concrete panels, each with a different shape and size.
The walls seem to bend like a pair of dancers, and the building is made up of two separate
structures.
The first is a glass tower, which is almost hourglass in shape, supported by curved pillars.
The second is a longer building and features wavy moldings and unaligned windows.
Do you like it?
Do you think it is too different from the rest of the city?
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The Dancing House is nine stories tall, with two floors underground.
It features mostly offices, with a restaurant called Fred and Ginger operating on the ninth
floor, named after American dancers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
The building is unexpected, and not something that is easily forgotten.
6.
The Gherkin, London Speaking of building that stand out, In the
heart of London’s financial district, a striking contemporary tower rises over 590
feet into the air.
This is 30 St. Mary Axe, better known as the Gherkin.
(Although that’s not necessarily their favorite nickname!)
Designed by Norman Foster and the Arup Group, the Gherkin has 40 floors and a distinctive
curved glass shape reminiscent of a pickle – (or many people say, something else…)
hence the name.
The majority of the occupants of this building are business offices, but floors 38 through
40 are dedicated to food service and entertainment.
A restaurant operates on the 39th floor, with private dining rooms on the 38th.
The 40th floor is a bar that features panoramic views of London.
Everyone likes to talk about it as if it were weird but for many architects it is something
to be admired.
It is more a work of art, like a sculpture but love it or hate it, it makes you think
about architecture in a new way!
Not only is the building striking from a visual perspective, it has remarkable energy efficiency.
It uses double glazing and ventilation techniques to heat and cool the space, something that
allows the Gherkin to use only half the energy that would normally be used by another tower
of its size.
Remarkably, the Gherkin can be seen from as far as 20 miles away.
5.
Birds Nest Stadium, Beijing, China Officially named the Beijing National Stadium,
the Birds Nest Stadium was built for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.
It was designed jointly by architectural firm Herzog and de Meuron, architect Stefan Marbach,
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and CADG (Central Asia Development Group)’s chief architect,
Li Xinggang.
The stadium cost nearly $428 million to complete using 121,000 tons of steel.
The design is striking, with two separate structures incorporated into one.
First, there is the red concrete bowl where the spectators sit and whose focal point is
the stadium field.
Next is the concrete exoskeleton, which gives the building its trademark birds’ nest appearance.
The stadium is supposed encompass Chinese culture and the pattern is representative
of that on pottery.
The east and west sides of the stadium are taller than the north and south sides, adding
to the “nest” impression.
Rainwater is collected 24 hours a day near the stadium, and after the water is purified,
it is pumped through pipes under the field to either heat the area in the winter or cool
it in the summer.
The stadium seats 80,000, and every single seat was considered in the design stage for
maximum ventilation and air flow.
The stadium will be used again for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, making the Birds Nest
the only stadium in the world to host both a summer and winter Olympiad.
4.
Bayterek Tower, Kazakhstan Located in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan,
the Bayterek Tower is a monument and observation tower that’s become a hit with tourists
for its distinctive style.
The tower is meant to symbolize an old Kazakh folktale about a magical bird that had laid
an egg in the crevice between two branches of a poplar tree.
The bird was the bird of happiness and the tree was the tree of life.
The tower stands 344 feet tall and features an observation deck that offers amazing views
of the surrounding cityscape.
The tower itself is made up of a single narrow shaft surrounded by white girders – the
“branches” - that flare out at the top, where they support a huge, gold-mirrored sphere
– the “egg”.
There are two elevators that go up to the observation deck, which is located inside
the egg, almost 100 feet above ground level.
The observation deck itself consists of two levels, one with a full, 360-degree view of
the city, and a second level one flight up.
The second level features a gold handprint of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the first
president of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
Visitors can put their hand against the handprint and make a wish.
There’s no word if wish-granting was included in the architectural designs, but you know
architecture is art!
3.
Guggenheim Museum, New York The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, called the
Guggenheim for short, is an art museum located in Manhattan, New York.
Established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939, it was originally called the Museum
of Non-Objective Painting, and it celebrated – and continues to celebrate – impressionist,
post-impressionist and modern art.
It was renamed after its founder when Mr. Guggenheim passed away in 1952.
As modern in appearance as its contents, the museum was designed by famed architect Frank
Lloyd Wright, possibly the most famous American architect.
The building is a cylinder, wider on the top than on the bottom, and is actually a long,
winding ramp gallery that starts at street level and winds around until it reaches a
skylight on the top level.
The spiral is inspired by a nautilus shell, and this is the only museum that Frank Lloyd
Wright ever designed.
It was proof of what amazing things modern architecture could do!
2.
The Shard, London The Shard is a skyscraper in Southwark, London,
England.
It’s the tallest building in the United Kingdom, standing 1,016 feet high.
It was designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano and was built between 2009 and 2012.
The View from the Shard, a privately-operated, open-air observation deck, opened in 2013.
The Shard is a supertall skyscraper, 95 stories tall.
It is clad in glass and is shaped like a tall, narrow pyramid.
Because of the narrowness of the top of the building, only 72 of the Shard’s 95 floors
are habitable.
The observation deck is at the top of those habitable levels, at 801 feet off the ground.
The Shard was one of the first buildings to take into account the findings of the NIST
(National Institute of Standards and Technology) after the collapse of the World Trade Center
following 9/11.
By incorporating the findings of the NIST’s report, it is hoped that the Shard would be
more resistant to catastrophe in the event of an attack or freak accident.
1.
Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur The Petronas Twin Towers are located in Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia, and until 2004, they were the tallest buildings in the world.
Even today, they are the tallest twin towers in existence.
Designed by Argentinian architect César Pelli, the towers were constructed over the course
of two years with a distinctly modern sensibility.
Made of reinforced concrete behind a steel and glass façade that was designed to resemble
motifs from Islamic art, the towers are built on the world’s deepest foundations, something
made necessary by the depth of the bedrock itself.
There are 104 concrete piles that go from 197 to 374 feet into the ground, and the raft
foundation itself required 470,000 cubic feet of concrete, which was poured continuously
for 54 hours straight for each tower!!
Wind and earthquakes can wreak havoc with tall buildings, but these towers are built
with a tube-in-tube design that makes them more flexible in the face of such challenges.
Because it would have been difficult to import enough steel for the construction, the builders
turned instead to high-strength reinforced concrete, which has the benefit of giving
the towers reduced sway.
It also makes the towers heavier by far than their steel cousins, which is one of the reasons
for that massive foundation, which is the largest in the world.
While most of the tenants of the Petronas Towers are businesses, the ground floor features
Suria KLCC, which is a massive (1.5 million square feet!) shopping mall carrying foreign
luxury goods.
It also has an aquarium, a science center, and an art gallery.
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There are many more amazing architectural marvels out there!!
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