Learning from the Leaning Tower

Great post!

I'm pretty sure I said "Leaning tower of pizza" for much of my childhood as well. :)

I'd be scared to go all the way to the top, but I do need to get a picture of me holding it up at some point in my life.

grown to about 90 cm (about 7 feet).

eh?

Thanks for the catch. Couldn't find any other information about the lean at the time of completion, so I just removed it entirely.

Though spectacular, Pisa's tower is not alone. There are buildings in the beautiful Italian city of Venice experiencing similar leans.

Found one!

Great post there Cheme! I very much enjoyed it!!!

If an good sized earthquake occurs in that area the Tower of Pisa will undoubtedly come crashing down like a house of cards. That would be most unfortunate.

IMO, possibly the only way to really prop up the tower in it's original location is to dismantle it, then drive end-bearing piles to bedrock, then rebuilt the tower. A lot of this type of remedial work depends on the actual thickness of the underlying "marine clay" and the depth to sound bedrock to verify if it is even feasible and affordable. It will be a very costly and extensive geotechnical investigation, something the currently floundering Italian economy probably cannot afford.

I personally would love to see it in my lifetime before it falls down!

[Hey Cheme, howz things up in Albany, neighbor?]

Very well said facilitiesmgr!!! Here here!!! GA from me....

Sorry, unlike CaptMoosie, this looks to me like high flown rhetoric without little substance to it. I cannot read the future, I have never known in advance of any major or minor industrial revolution, or the lack of such a revolution. It has been a truism in the engineering fields that engineers should not make long term plans. We had a long period of continuity from the end of WW2 to the seventies, then the revolution happened, jobs left our shores quietly at first but at a great pace when automation kicked in as well. Who could plan for that? Many people planned their future based on the continuation of economic growth. Their plans went to hell in a handbasket, they took three jobs and still made less money. This still didn't stop us from telling school children the same fairy story, with the result that we have hundreds of thousands with mountains of debt and little chance of ever getting out from under. Planning put down them there but doesn't look like lifting them.

When I was a sixteen year old leaving school, somebody asked me what I wanted to do. I said that I had not much idea because that needed knowledge of what each occupation entailed.I muddled along, they put me in a drafting room as a clerk, then draughtsman, then designer, then Licensed Professional Engineer. I enjoyed my career until the lawyers and bean counters stepped in and instead of pursuing excellence we were told to seek only adequacy. That wasn't in the plan.

I guess I rambled too much to make my point. I cannot plan for a future that I cannot see. I cannot aspire to a position, to a future, of which, I have little knowledge or understanding. I wonder what it would be like to dedicate ones life to a plan and fail, especially if it was because of the external changes to the economic environment.

P.S. "draughtsman" because it was in the UK.

Any engineering solution ought not to disregard the historical significance of the original artefact in its past and current condition and the inherent curiosity in it. One of the features of the structure, for example, is that the upper floors were originally crafted so as to counteract the lean that developed as it was being built.

It does have international significance as a historical structure. Some rhetorical questions:

• How far is any correction to be applied to the lean?
• In reassembling it, how much of the original artefact would remain and how would the joins be concealed?
• How significant would be any permanent engineered replacement parts be in terms of sustaining the structure and their impact upon the whole?
• What would be the impact of each engineered solution on the visitor experience both during and afterwards?

For illustration of the considerations needed here is an extreme example: a tower at Pisa that didn't lean any more and had ≈50% replacement material might be as abstruse as, oh, say, shipping London Bridge to Lake Havasu City and rebuilding it there (no disrespects intended, for the engineering in the latter is top notch).

In the case of the LTP, while one must encompass the rights and desires of any ownership to determine the fate of a structure, respect for the historical significance of such a prominent international icon must surely take precedence whatever the first cost of any remedy might be. Indeed, the desire to visit it has been expressed in this thread by several respondents to it so far simply on the basis of curiosity, the distance, and therefore first cost to those individuals, being seemingly of little object.

In the UK, there are a number of agencies set up to conserve historic structures and their surroundings, English Heritage and The National Trust being the most prominent of them. These bodies consider and advocate the most appropriate approach to conservation, long-term care and public access in each case, part-funding conservation and repairs on occasions according to the availability of funding, which comes from a variety of sources both public and private. There is never enough to do it all, and stopping deterioration is more significant than repair in many cases.