The tallest structure ever moved was towed to sea by 10 tugboats.
Troll A, Norway, May 1995:
- 1,549 ft tall
- 738 ft of it underwater
- crawling at 1-2 knots
A week later it settled on the seabed under 994 ft of water.
Its skirts sank 118 ft into the soil. No mooring needed.
JFK can't finish its $9.5B terminal until it knocks down the old one.
Step 1: open 13 gates. Now slated for early 2027, after slipping from 2026.
Step 2: demolish the old Terminal 1.
Step 3: build 9 more gates on that land.
All inside one of America's busiest airports.
Seoul has a bridge that's built to go underwater.
Jamsu Bridge sits low over the Han River, tucked under Banpo Bridge.
When heavy rain lifts the river:
- at 18 ft, walkers are turned back
- at 20 ft, cars are stopped
- higher, the deck disappears
The traffic moves upstairs.
The clearest TV of the first moonwalk came from a dish in country Australia.
July 1969. Gusts over 60 mph slammed the 210-ft Parkes telescope, pushing it past its safety limits.
The team kept tracking the Moon anyway.
NASA used its pictures for the rest of the broadcast.
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Los Angeles closes the Vincent Thomas Bridge for 16 months to replace its deck in a $750 million project. Reopening is targeted for March 2028.
For about 400 years, a medieval crane sat on top of Cologne Cathedral. Waiting.
Work began in 1248 and stopped in 1473, one tower half-built.
Then the original facade plan turned up. Work restarted in 1842, to the medieval design.
Finished in 1880. 632 years after it began.
In April 2019, Istanbul moved its main airport. In 45 hours.
Turkish Airlines hauled its whole base from Atatürk Airport to the new one:
- 10,000+ pieces of equipment
- 47,000 tons, every piece tagged
- highways shut so the trucks never stopped
They called it the Great Move.
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 California clears the final water permit for the $6.2 to $6.8 billion Sites Reservoir, its largest new reservoir in over 50 years. Construction is set to start by July 2027.
The windows on this Dubai museum are Arabic calligraphy.
The script isn't painted on. It is the glass.
How they hold that shape up:
- a steel diagrid shell, no columns in the galleries
- an algorithm that "grew" the steel layout
- 1,024 facade panels
Museum of the Future.
In the Rajasthan desert, water hides underground. So a village built stairs down to it.
Chand Baori, India, around the 9th century:
- about 100 ft deep
- 3,500 steps on three sides
- 13 levels down to the water
The bottom stays cooler, too. A well and a heat shelter in one.
Switzerland's tallest dam isn't filled by its own river.
Engineers brought the water in from other valleys.
Grande Dixence:
- 935 ft tall, the world's tallest gravity dam
- fed by 62 miles of tunnels
- pumps lift water uphill to reach it
One wall, a whole region's water.
The biggest building on Earth isn't a skyscraper.
It's a factory north of Seattle.
Boeing's Everett plant:
- 472 million cubic feet inside
- 98.3 acres under one roof
- built in 1967 for the first 747
Big planes need a big room.
You can now take the metro to the Colosseum.
And pass Roman artifacts on the way to your train.
Colosseo station, opened Dec 2025:
- 4 levels underground
- about 105 ft deep
- a museum of finds from its own dig
The finds kept delaying the work. So Rome put them on display.
Singapore is about a quarter bigger than it was in 1965.
It built the extra land itself, mostly with sand. Then sand got scarce.
So it borrowed a Dutch idea:
- a 6-mile sea dike
- about 2,000 acres of new land
- the land sits about 4 ft below sea level
Pumps keep it dry.
The top of Toronto's CN Tower was built by a helicopter.
1975. The crane came down. A Sikorsky Skycrane nicknamed Olga took over, flying the steel antenna up in pieces.
Every lift made the news.
The last one gave Canada the world's tallest free-standing structure: 1,815 ft.