top 5 living on edge building

#1 Leaning Tower of Pisa, Italy

The Leaning Tower was supposed to stand straight and plumb, an imperious monument to the trading power of 12th century Pisa. Built on soft clay, however, the tower began to list only a few years after construction began. Upon completion in 1350, the tower leaned about four and half feet, but as time passed, the angle of the 16,000-ton tower became more precarious. By 1990, the tower leaned about 13 feet off kilter, and nearly two million pounds of lead ingots had to be placed on one of its sides to prevent its collapse. But the nearest the tower has been to destruction had nothing to do with its famed tilt. Allied forces ordered an American sergeant to blow it up during World War II when they thought the Germans were using it as an observation post. Only the reticence of the 23-year-old American saved the tower.

#2 Capital Gate, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Pisa’s famous tilt may have been an accident, but the tipsy new addition to Abu Dhabi’s skyline is not. The United Arab Emirates’ Capital Gate tower pushed its Tuscan cousin out of the limelight this week when the Guinness Book of World Records certified the new building as the “World’s Furthest Leaning Manmade Tower.” It’s not clear how stiff the competition for that category ever really was, but the 35-story structure does lean a gravity defying 18 degrees — nearly five times further than its Italian inspiration. Like Bilbao, Sydney and Kuala Lumpur, the UAE built Capital Gate to put its premier city on the world’s architectural map. The sloping result — “designed to provide no symmetry” — looks a little like a shiny drunk slouching against a wall. Built with over 15,000 cubic meters of concrete reinforced with 10,000 tons of steel, the tower houses over 20,000 feet of “premium” office space and a five-star Hyatt. Whether hotel guests will be inclined to sleep in this off-center wonder is another question.

#3 WoZoCo Apartments, Amsterdam

When the Het Oosten Housing Association in Amsterdam requested 100 social housing units for the elderly, Dutch architectural firm MVRDV found itself in a fix. Only 87 apartments would be able to meet regulations on adequate sunlight and still fit neatly onsite. Fortunately, uniformity wasn’t the architects’ top priority. Rather than take up more green space in a garden city threatened by development, they cantilevered — or fastened — the leftover 13 units onto the building’s northern façade. The suspended suites look like a series of open, wood-sheathed drawers in an oversized glass dresser. Jutting out of the main block, the lower boxes hang just above street level and the heads of apprehensive passersby. The southern façade is checkered with haphazardly placed windows and protruding balconies like transparent, technicolor containers. But despite their gravity-defying convolution, the WoZoCo Apartments were completed between 1994 and 1997 with “the lowest building costs in Amsterdam,” according to MVRDV. “This was the result of inexperience,” says the firm’s website. “Nowadays we would have told the client that he should increase his budget.”

#4 Meteora Monasteries, Greece

Perched atop towering rock pillars, a cluster of medieval monasteries called Meteora crown Greece’s Pindus Mountains. Meteora means “suspended in air,” and it was an apt description for centuries. Until less than a hundred years ago, one could only scale the sheer cliffs in a hanging basket or by climbing flimsy rope ladders. According to legend, one monastery founder could only reach the mountain peaks on the back of an eagle. As early as the 11th century, the region’s caves sheltered hermitic monks, but by the 14th century the orthodox monks were constructing elaborate stone and terracotta buildings, safe from marauding raiders below. Even in the 18th and 19th century, the monasteries remained secure hideouts, housing not just persecuted monks but also guerrilla fighters called klephts who fought for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Today, of the 24 original monasteries, only six are active, but the remaining monks still have the same heavenly views. Plus, these days they can eschew the basket or the eagle and just take the stairs.

#5 Puerta de Europa, Madrid

The old gateways of Spain’s capital, Puerta de Alcalá and Puerta de Toledo, were built in the late 18th to early 19th centuries to mark the eastern and southwestern boundaries of the city’s main roads. Their contemporary counterpart, Puerta de Europa, was completed in 1996 as a joint project between American and Spanish architectural firms. Reflective of Madrid’s evolution from an old kingdom to a modern city, the “Gate of Europe” does not have its predecessors’ granite build nor their neoclassical arches. And, unlike the older puertas, Puerta de Europa is also a functional corporate space. Twin steel-and-glass towers form a single, implied gateway leading into the northern end of Madrid’s business district. Each building has a vertical of 374 feet (26 floors) with a 15 degree incline toward its other half. This sideways tilt put the Puerta de Europa on the map as the world’s first leaning high-rise office buildings.