20 Famous Landmarks Hiding Secret Last-Minute Changes

When engineers Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier sketched out a design for a bare iron lattice tower for the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, artists denounced it as a “monstrous iron scaffold.” To win official approval, Gustave Eiffel, an industrialist who backed the tower’s construction, hired architect Stephen Sauvestre to add some decorative frills: ornate halls of glass and metal, a fanciful top, and the four arches at the tower’s base. Those arches are only decoration. All the Eiffel Tower’s weight rests on its four diagonal legs.

Former New York governor Alfred E. Smith, who helped lead the Empire State Building project, told his architects to add a tall mast to the top of the building. This brought its total height to 1,250 feet, making it taller than the rival Chrysler Building. The mast was supposedly designed as a docking station for airships, but strong winds made that nearly impossible. In reality, the mast was more about appearances than practical use. Only one Navy blimp ever briefly touched the mast, and even then, it didn’t dock.

The Statue of Liberty’s interior piers were originally designed to be made of brick by architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. Viollet-le-Duc, however, died in 1879 before starting his portion of the work. Gustave Eiffel, who would later gain fame for building the Eiffel Tower in Paris, took over the project. Eiffel discarded Viollet-le-Duc’s design and instead built a flexible, iron interior pylon to support Auguste Bartholdi’s rigid, copper exterior sculpture. Eiffel’s pylon sways in Atlantic winds by as much as three inches, allowing the copper skin to move with it. Had Viollet-le-Duc’s rigid, brick-pier design been used, the statue’s exterior would most likely have cracked.

Construction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa began in 1173. Within just five years, the tower’s foundation had begun to sink into the soft clay and tilt to the south. Wars and other problems meant that construction ground to a halt, not to resume again until 1272, when Giovanni di Simone took over as chief engineer. Trying to compensate for the lean, Giovanni built the arches on the south side slightly taller than those on the north. The added weight caused the foundation to sink even further into the clay, leaving the tower leaning even more than before.

Chrysler Building architect William Van Alen was racing rival architect H. Craig Severance. When Severance finished adding floors and a flagpole to his building to increase its height, Van Alen took matters into his own hands. Van Alen secretly had a steel spire made, which he had workers hoist inside the Building’s framing at the top, out of Severance’s sight. In less than two hours, they craned it through the roof and bolted it on, making the Chrysler Building 1,046 feet tall and the first to surpass the 1,000-foot mark. Walter Chrysler, who paid for his tower out of his own pocket, could finally enjoy bragging rights.

Construction on the Golden Gate Bridge began in 1933. The Army Air Corps wanted the span marked with red-and-white diagonals, while the U.S. Navy wanted black-and-yellow hazard stripes, both looking for a more visible marker for the bay’s entrance. Consulting architect Irving Morrow wanted International Orange instead, which he felt harmonized with the natural colors of the hills while also providing good visibility in fog. Morrow pointed out that the steel had already arrived coated in International Orange, which was originally meant as just a temporary protective coating, and the bridge district agreed with him over the objections of the military.

In 1878, chief engineer Washington Roebling discovered that contractor J. Lloyd Haigh had secretly included inferior, understrength wire within the Brooklyn Bridge’s four suspension cables. Since the wire could not be removed, Roebling’s only option was to add roughly 150 strands of high-strength wire to each cable. The Brooklyn Bridge opened safely in 1883, and the fraudulent steel remains within the cables to this day.

Byzantine Emperor Justinian I commissioned the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, where architect Isidore of Miletus built a dome that was wide and shallow, so that it was gently curving. The problem with this was that the weight of the dome was not being directed straight down, but was putting a lot of stress on the piers to push out. After a series of earthquakes, in 558 CE the dome and part of an adjoining half-dome caved in. Isidore’s nephew, known fittingly as Isidore the Younger, rebuilt the dome, making it steeper and taller, so that more of the weight would be directed straight down into the piers. It has stood ever since.

Sculptor Daniel Chester French was originally commissioned to sculpt a ten-foot seated statue of Abraham Lincoln, but when he placed enlarged photos of the sculpture within the space of the Greek-temple-style memorial designed by architect Henry Bacon, the ten-foot statue looked too small. The finished statue stands 19 feet tall and was carved from Georgia marble by the Piccirilli Brothers. The Lincoln Memorial opened to the public a few years later.

Architect Robert Mills envisioned the Washington Monument with a grand colonnaded base. When construction halted partway up at 152 feet due to financial and political problems, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lincoln Casey took over the project years later. Casey scrapped Mills’s costly design and instead used white marble from a quarry in Massachusetts, since the original Maryland quarry no longer existed. As a result, a color line is visible where the marble changed at the 152-foot mark. The Washington Monument was finally completed years later.

The Gothic design that Christopher Wren presented to King Charles II for a new St. Paul’s Cathedral included a relatively short spire. After receiving the King’s approval, Wren replaced the spire with a 365-foot dome. He was allowed to make variations that were “rather ornamental than essential.” The completed cathedral, finished in 1710, conceals a brick cone inside the lead-covered timber outer shell of the dome. Wren’s innovative design rose from the ashes of London’s Great Fire of 1666.

In 1546, Michelangelo designed a new St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City in the shape of a centered Greek cross. Builders stuck to that design for more than 50 years, but in 1607 Pope Paul V decided that the basilica did not occupy enough ground to be comparable to the old one it had replaced, nor did it offer enough room to accommodate the crowds of the time. He called on architect Carlo Maderno to lengthen it, and by 1614 Maderno had added a long nave and facade, converting the floor plan to a Latin cross. Unfortunately, this change also blocked low views of Michelangelo’s dome.

By the mid-1800s, additions made to the Capitol rendered its original dome, designed by Charles Bulfinch, both fire-prone and undersized. The new dome designed by Thomas U. Walter was to be made of cast iron and have two shells. Despite calls by some to stop work on the dome once the Civil War began, President Abraham Lincoln wanted construction to continue as a way to symbolize that the Union would endure. Before the war was over, the nearly nine-million-pound iron dome was topped with the Statue of Freedom.

Construction of the Sagrada Família began in March of 1882 under Francisco de Paula del Villar, who envisioned the project as a conventional Neo-Gothic church. However, disagreements about costs led Villar to resign in 1883, passing the project to another architect, 31-year-old Antoni Gaudí. Aside from retaining the foundations for a crypt, which had already been dug out, Gaudí entirely rejected Villar’s plans, favoring branching columns and spires that mimicked organic, biological shapes, a hallmark of the Sagrada Família’s design to this day.

Sarah Winchester, the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, had her San Jose mansion constantly remodeled for 36 years, based on her own daily sketches instead of on an architect’s plans. Purchased originally as an eight-room farmhouse, Winchester’s house had ballooned to 160 rooms by the time of her death. Payroll records show that the carpenters tearing down, adding, and sealing off rooms, and installing doors to nowhere and staircases ending at ceilings did their work during ordinary daytime hours, dispelling rumors that the bizarre mansion was built at night.

The exterior of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate in Virginia, evolved over the years. Jefferson, who would later become president, originally designed his traditional British-style house at Monticello himself, completing construction in 1782. Jefferson then served as U.S. Minister to France for several years, where he saw firsthand the beauty of Neoclassical architecture. Upon returning home, Jefferson decided to remodel his house to fit the Neoclassical style, beginning in 1796. Jefferson removed Monticello’s upper story and facade, expanded the home’s footprint, and added an octagonal dome and west portico. Construction was completed in 1809.

While construction of New York City’s Woolworth Building was still in its early stages, businessman Frank W. Woolworth decided he wanted it to be even taller. He purchased more land next to the site and asked architect Cass Gilbert to redesign the building so it would surpass the rival Metropolitan Life Tower, which stood 700 feet tall. Gilbert increased the planned height from 625 feet to 792 feet, but there was a problem. The foundation had already been built for the shorter design. To support the taller, heavier building, engineers added enormous steel beams across the existing foundation supports, allowing construction to continue with the new design.

Construction on Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine started with a Byzantine-Romanesque church designed by architects George Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge. Although the domed crossing was finished and covered with a tiled dome, Heins died, and the Cathedral trustees let LaFarge go. His replacement, Ralph Adams Cram, rejected the Romanesque plans for the rest of the building and raised French Gothic arches and flying buttresses over the Romanesque foundations. The temporary dome remains there to this day atop the crossing.

In late 1947, President Harry S. Truman learned from structural engineers that his home was on the verge of collapse. But before the much larger gutting and reconstruction of the White House could begin a year later, Truman ordered the construction of a recessed balcony in the South Portico to give him some outdoor space, as well as some shade for the Oval Office windows below. The federal review board, the Commission of Fine Arts, objected to Truman’s plans on the grounds that they would disfigure the 1792 facade. But Truman plowed ahead with his balcony anyway, completing the job in March 1948 for a total of $16,050.

During the construction of Fallingwater, a house in Pennsylvania designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, there was talk that his design did not incorporate enough steel. Engineers hired by the client, Edgar Kaufmann Sr., owner of a Pittsburgh department store, advised adding more. Wright threatened to walk off the job if anyone second-guessed his figures. Contractor Walter Hall, however, sensed the potential danger. Before the concrete was poured on Fallingwater’s dramatically jutting main terrace, he snuck in more reinforcing bars than Wright specified. The house is still standing, though over the years the cantilever, a section of the terrace that extends outward without support from below, has sagged and required significant repairs.

This content was created with the help of AI.