In 1178, after completing the first four stories, work was abandoned for nearly a hundred years. Almost from the beginning, there were problems. "He (Beck) is totally out of court on this one." "That's clearly not true," said Burland, an expert in soil mechanics. If they move the weights away, the tower really may fall," he said. "The best thing they could have done was leave it alone," he told Italian newspapers.īeck says the lead weights have altered the characteristics of the soil beneath the tower. James Beck, an art historian at Columbia University and director of Artwatch, disagrees. At present the tower is hardly moving," Burland said. In 1991, Pisa became the sister city of Niles."This solution has been very successful. Note: The Leaning Tower of Pisa has a "body double" located in Niles, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. "If you take the lean from the Leaning Tower, how many people will still come here to see it?"
"The lean, of course, is essential," he said. Tourists do their bit to keep the tower from falling over.Īnd if the job's $25 million price tag seems a little steep for a seemingly minor repair, well, perhaps CBS newsman Winston Burdett put it best in his 1972 report: In the end, engineers employed a complex array of drills, weights and cables to reduce the tower's 15-foot tilt by about 17 inches, or one-half of one degree, keeping the all-important tilt intact. "I really wouldn't know where to begin," was another man's opinion.
One man offered, "Lift it up from underneath?"
0 kommentar(er)
