These are the Worst Construction Mistakes Ever Made

mistakes come in all shapes and sizes when it comes to mistakes in construction these can come a great expense be that expense human lives or simply monetary of course sometimes the only cost of these mistakes is the pride of people who simply should have known better but whether they were simple oversights or catastrophic failures that were easily foreseeable today we're going to look at some of the worst and truly most bizarre construction mistakes ever made [Music] this mistake wasn't nearly as devastating as some of the others that we're going to be talking about today but

it is still an entertaining story simply because of where it happens the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is considered one of the best schools in the world and it's certainly a place where one might expect people to know a thing or two about engineering the Green Building was even designed by famous architect I Amai who was himself a graduate of MIT and who had studied engineering at the school as well as architecture though he only completed an architecture degree however when it comes to the initial architectural design for a building style and form take precedence over

practicality it certainly didn't help things that the entire basis for the design of the Green Building or to circumvent the law via a technicality MIT wanted the Green Building to be the tallest building in Cambridge but they couldn't just build it as tall as they wanted a city ordinance limited the number of floors the maximum number of floors a building was to have was 18 or 19 if the ground floor was just lobbies to get around this restriction the ground floor of the Green Building was 30 ft tall essentially the building was put on 30ft

stilts and the ground floor was a mostly open area with no exterior walls there were two enclosed lobbies beneath the building one leading to a set of elevators and one leading to a staircase that would take students to the lecture hall on the first floor it seemed like a clever workaround and from 1964 when construction was completed until 2019 it remained the tallest building in Cambridge the record oh was broken by another building at MIT but although they succeeded in making the city's tallest building there was a major problem with the design the Green Building

was surrounded on three sides by other MIT buildings which were shorter and much longer the fourth side which was the one the students would to enter or exit from faced a large open area leading directly to the Charles River because of the arrangement of the buildings and the high winds that often came off the river this created a powerful wind tunnel wind would build up on the walls of the Green Building and there would be nowhere for it to go except down into the open ground floor the winds that gather beneath the building was so

strong that the lobby doors would become nearly impossible to open sometimes the winds would get so strong that students had trouble even walking to the doors not that they would open to let anybody in and out anyway fortunately the building was connected to adjacent campus buildings through underground tunnels so nobody was ever truly trapped inside the Green Building but it is still the sort of thing that you might expect a bunch of people from MIT to have been able to identify as a problem ahead of time eventually the hinge Lobby doors were replaced by revolving

doors that were left less likely to become impossible due to high winds there's a long-standing myth that a sculpture called the big sail was installed in front of the building to deflect the winds so the doors would open but this isn't the case the sculpture is just there because MIT likes putting art on their campus and it is far too far away from the entrances to have any meaningful impact on the intense wind tunnel beneath the Green Building King Gustavus adulas is considered one of Sweden's most successful wartime rulers however during the 1620s there were

some setbacks Sweden was engaged in Naval Wars on multiple fronts and experienced some serious losses in 1625 a squadron of 10 ships were all run ground and destroyed and in 1627 two of Sweden's large warships were lost during a battle as part of the war against Poland Lithuania the king wanted to send a message and take back control of the Seas and he wanted to do it immediately to do so he ordered the construction of a massive warship with lots of heavy guns to be built as quickly as possible the prevailing tactic at the time

was to achieve Victory by boarding enemy ships but Gustavus adulas believed in the power of artillery both for sinking enemy ships and for demoralizing the opposition by demonstrating the raw Firepower of their military to that end he ordered the construction of the Vasa a ship that he wanted fitted with 72 24b guns although Vasa was going to be neither the largest ship in the world nor the one with the most guns this was still a huge statement and a massive departure from the ships the Swedish Navy had previously used to start it would be their

first ship using 24b guns instead of 12b guns it was also going to be their first warship with two gun decks as 72 guns was too many to fit on a single deck during construction the number of guns was lowered to 56 because they were unable to Source enough guns now because this was not going to be the largest ship ever built in many ways it was a rather ordinary construction job it appears to have been deemed so routine that there weren't any written plans or design sketches for the ship just the specifications ordered by

the King which changed at least once after construction had already begun however while the ship Builders treated this job like the ones they were accustomed to the two decks of guns were much heavier than what the builders were used to this created a major problem the ship was extremely topheavy the typical solution here would have been to balast the ship by adding more weight to the bottom but this wasn't possible for a couple of reasons to start there wasn't really anywhere left to add additional weight but even if that had been it would have presented

a major problem a floating object displaces a volume at vage equal to its mass if more weight was added to the ship it would need to displace more water meaning that more of the hull would be submerged unfortunately in the case of the Vasa this would have left the first deck of gunports underwater rendering them useless obviously in the summer of 1628 construction of the vessel had been completed the captain of the ship ran a stability test for the vice admiral by having 30 men run back and forth across the deck of the ship the

vice admiral stopped the test after the men had only run three laps because it seemed obvious that the ship was about to cap size but for some reason its maiden voyage was not called off August the 10th was a calm and sunny day with barely a breeze a crowd of hundreds or possibly thousands gathered in Stockholm to watch Vasa their nation's new extravagant warship begin her maiden voyage and just minutes later they would also see her sink the ship had traveled just 1300 M less than 20 lengths of the ship itself when the sails suddenly

caught a slight breeze the gust is believed to only been 8 knots that's just over 9 mph but it was enough to make the boat heal the gunports had been open to fire a salute as the ship left stockhom and when the ship healed the gunports fell below the water line causing the ship to take on water vaser had been unstable to begin with but with this additional weight the ship was simply unable to write itself it quickly sank the 30 m to the bottom of the harbor though the ship was 50 m tall so

surviving crew were able to cling to the upper masts that were protruding from the water unfortunately not all the crew was able to escape about 30 sailors who were below de when the ship began to go down were lost the ship's Captain narrowly escaping drowning was ultimately arrested and interrogated in the end no charges were filed against any of the crew or Builders of the ship but on the bright side the puding masks made the Shipwreck easy to find so they were able to salvage the heavy and expensive bronze cannons from the ship the collabs

of blockx s at Lotus Riverside is one of the most unique disasters ever seen the building was one of 11 identical 13 store story buildings in the apartment complex that had nearly finished construction and at about 5:30 a.m. on June the 27th 2009 it toppled over the building collapsed onto its side while remaining almost completely intact even some of the windows remained unbroken after the fall it was a disaster to be sure but it could have been a lot worse the building narrowly avoided colliding into an adjacent building in the complex which could have potentially

caused several of the apartment buildings to collapse like dominoes although the apartments had mostly been sold already because construction wasn't quite complete it was not yet full of residence most of the workers were able to escape in time though migrant worker Shaun did not and became the collapses sole fatality for the most part the mistakes made during the construction of this complex were fairly routine symptoms of greed the apartments were built using substantive materials and unskilled workers in an attempt to erect them as quickly as possible it wasn't in compliance with China's standards for construction

and lots of money have been embedded by the two main shareholders of the project both of whom received life in prison following the incident and it was just generally considered to be a building that was shly assembled this all explains why the building might collapse in general but what could have caused it to topple over in one piece the way that it did while there is some dispute over the course particularly because only one of the buildings fell over there is a generally accepted theory for how this could have happened construction of a garage was

taking place beneath the building requiring massive amounts of Earth to be moved from under the building to somewhere else that somewhere else was directly next to a Creek Running alongside the apartments and it is believed that the weight of this additional Earth caused the river bank to collapse this then caused the water to seep into the ground weakening the foundation and causing block seven to fall onto its side but there was a silver lining to all of this no sooner had the dust settled from This Disaster than Chinese companies began offering tours of the location

allowing tourists in China to visit the famous apartment building that was resting fully intact on its side the Sydney Opera House is one of the most iconic landmarks in Australia and in 2007 it became a UNESCO world heritage site however its construction was destined to be a failure from the outset primarily because of how the design was selected rather than having the Sydney Opera House executive committee hire an architect who they would work alongside instead the design for the opera house was chosen through an international competition there were 233 designs submitted and judges immediately fell

in love with a design submitted by Danish architect y uton however there were a few problems with this process to start competitors were asked to submit designs without being given any parameters within which to work there was no defined budget or timeline for the construction so they were free to submit as ambitious a design as they wanted far more crucially the judges didn't seem to take practicality into account in their decisionmaking process at all Hudson's design may have been beautiful and somewhat revolutionary but it was also incomplete he was upfront about the fact that he

hadn't finished the structural design meaning that he wasn't sure how all of this was going to be built without collapsing in on itself but despite having little more than a few sketches and a dream the executive committee insisted that construction begin immediately this created numerous problems most notably with regards to estimating the budget and the length of the project it was initially estimated that the Sydney Opera House would take four years and 7 million Australian dollars to construct but this seems to have been just the committee's default estimate since there wasn't even a complete design

for the structure there was no way to truly gauge how much it would cost or how long it would take there also wasn't anybody who was actually in charge of the project oton was there to watch his vision come to life but there was also design engineer o Arab who was hired to ensure they constructed a functional building that wouldn't collapse under its own weight unfortunately neither atson nor Arup was officially the project manager they were instead meant to act as partners but with one focusing on Aesthetics and the other on practicality and Logistics this

led to a lot of confusion and conflicting orders in 196 6 7 years into what was originally thought would be a 4-year project the construction hit another hurdle following a dispute over payments and the committee's refus or to let utson use the specific plywood manufacturer that he wanted utson resigned from the project he took all of his design plans with him and left Australia vowing never to return he died in 2008 having never seen the completed opera house with utson and his plans gone Arab and the remaining workers had to redesign The partially completed structure

the redesign made costs balloon and by the time the Sydney Opera House was completed in 1973 it had taken 14 years and $ 102 million Australian dollars to complete but the results spoke for themselves the Sydney Opera House always beautiful iconic and famous for having absolutely horrible Acoustics the construction was designed with visuals in mind rather than Acoustics which is a pretty big mistake when a venue is for live music performances not only do the high narrow shells which the opera house is famous create an inconsistent acoustic experience for the audience but it is extremely

diffult for musicians on stage to hear one another in the decade since it opened over 300 million has been spent on renovations to try and improve the Opera House's sound quality but I mean hey at least it looks cool right [Music]