Interesting Facts

According to property experts in London, there are up to 1,000 JCB diggers entombed underground in London. (So, is this because of some great calamity? Mud slides? Earthquakes? No. It's simply  because they are cheaper to bury than lift to street level. In London, new luxury conversions, “sub-basements” are all the rage, because let's face it, there's nowhere else left to build. The basements are dug by diggers, and in the past developers would use a large crane to scoop up the machinery, but when they calculated the cost-benefit equation of this procedure: hiring a crane, closing the street etc. it emerged that simply burying the digger; worth only £5,000 or £6,000, in its own hole was cheaper. I wonder what the future will think of us.) Source: http://www.newstatesman.com/

Reflected light cast by a building in London is allegedly so intense that it has melted parked cars. (According to City AM newspaper, the 37-storey tower known as the Walkie Talkie in the financial district, casts a beam of light at certain times of day that has melted parts of cars. It was designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Vinoly, Mr Vinoly probably thought the sun never shines in the UK.)

A housing block in London has been voted the worst building in Britain. (It was built for students from University College London, and initially planning permission was refused, but according to Building Design magazine, the project gained permission after an appeal to planning officials on the grounds that students don’t require the same quality of accommodation as the rest of society. I think we need a list of names from that meeting.)

In France, from July 1, a new law will require shops and offices in France to turn off their lights one hour after the last worker leaves a building.   ( Shop windows may only be lit from 7 a.m. or an hour before opening time, and  shop window displays must be turned off at 1 a.m.   Exceptions will be made during Christmas and other significant events, as well as in some tourist and cultural areas. I wonder what they will do with the Eiffel tower.) Source

A firm of architects, Fosters and Partners, have revealed designs for constructing a building on the Moon. (Following collaboration between a number of organisations including the European Space Agency, the idea is that an inflatable structure would be transported from Earth, then covered with a shell built by 3D printers. The 3D printers would use a material already on the surface of the moon - moon dust aka regolith. Moon-base Alpha, here we come!) Source: BBC News

According to research at the California Institute of Technology, parts of the human brain are hard-wired to respond to other creatures. (The study indicates that the brain's right hemisphere evolved to deal with unexpected and biologically relevant stimuli and that covers a positive reaction to animals like fluffy kittens, as well as a negative response to creepy crawlies. Brain activity was stronger when the people studied looked at cats or snakes versus buildings or people. Maybe that is why more people view my animal vocabulary page , than my building vocabulary page .) Source

The world's newest, and to date, tallest building, Burj Dubai can be seen at a distance of 95 km. (There are 28,261 glass panels on the exterior of the tower, and it has 57 lifts, the main service lift goes up 504 metres. There are 49 office floors with 1,044 residential apartments. The fountain at the foot of the tower is 900 feet long, and is the world's tallest performing fountain.  It is a superlative building.)

British pop star Sir Cliff Richard has been ordered to knock down a £30,000 conservatory built at his house in Surrey because he did not have planning permission. (The conservatory measures 17ft (5.2m) by 13ft (4.2m) and breaks planning regulation because it increased the property's floor area by more than 30%. Basically his conservatory is about the same size as my house!)

According to the organisers of the Conmex construction machinery exhibition, about 30,000 of the world's 125,000 construction cranes are currently operating in Dubai. (When I first heard that they have 24 per cent of the world's cranes, I had thought they meant birds, because they've been nicknamed the national bird of Dubai. I think they would have looked prettier.)