The F60 is a half-kilometre-long mining machine built in East Germany and among the largest movable machines ever constructed. Excavators fed it soil and rock, which travelled across the open mine on conveyor belts before being deposited on the opposite side. Its purpose was not to extract coal, but to remove up to 60 metres of earth covering it.
Espai Corberó is the architectural world created by Catalan sculptor Xavier Corberó in Esplugues de Llobregat, outside Barcelona. Monumental concrete arches, stairways, pools, courtyards and rooms open to the sky form a labyrinth occupied by sculptures in stone, marble and bronze. Beneath it is a 700-square-metre vaulted auditorium built without a single supporting column.
Villa Durazzo Pallavicini is a nineteenth-century Romantic garden in Genoa designed as a theatrical journey. Its route is divided into a prologue, three acts and an exodus, leading visitors past a hermitage, amusement park, ruined castle, captain’s tomb and Dantean grottoes before emerging beside a lake and the gardens of Flora. Scenery, architecture and Masonic symbolism move the visitor through nature, history and death toward a final act of catharsis.
In 1831, Prussian architect Carl Ferdinand Langhans built the Pleorama, an indoor simulation of a voyage around the Bay of Naples. Twenty-four passengers sat inside a wooden boat floating in a pool while enormous painted coastlines moved past on either side. The boat rocked, a boatman sang, the light changed and Mount Vesuvius appeared to erupt. The journey lasted an hour and went nowhere.
Zoroastrian Towers of Silence, or dakhmas, are roofless circular funerary structures usually built on isolated hills. Because earth, fire and water are sacred, the dead were traditionally neither buried nor cremated. Instead, corpse-bearers arranged the bodies in three concentric rings—men, women and children—beneath the open sky. Vultures removed the flesh, the sun bleached the bones, and the remains were placed in a central well fitted with lime and underground filters. Among Parsis, the body’s final usefulness could be understood as an act of charity to other creatures.
Désert de Retz was the private world of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat who treated landscape gardening as autobiography. He designed the estate himself and disguised his house as the shattered base of an impossibly large classical column. It was less a garden than one man’s attempt to build the ruins of a civilisation that had never existed.
Eben-Ezer Tower is a 33-metre flint monument built near Liège, Belgium, by quarryman Robert Garcet between 1950 and 1963. Conceived as an appeal for world peace, its proportions were derived from Garcet’s reading of the Bible, particularly the dimensions of the celestial Jerusalem. Seven floors rise to four turrets crowned by a bull, lion, eagle and human sphinx. Inside, exhibits connect geology and scripture with Garcet’s personal theories about civilization.
La Pyramide is a fifteen-storey concrete complex completed in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in 1973. It attempted to recreate the activity of a traditional African market vertically, placing shops around a vast central atrium with offices and apartments above them. The experiment proved expensive: circulation consumed much of the rentable space, while elevators and air-conditioning raised operating costs beyond what many traders could afford. It has stood largely empty since the 1980s.
Hôtel du Lac was a 416-room Brutalist hotel completed in Tunis in 1973. Each of its ten floors extended beyond the one beneath it, producing an inverted concrete pyramid whose top was nearly twice the length of its ground floor. Exterior staircases followed the building’s sloping ends like exposed machinery. Built as a symbol of Tunisia’s post-independence modernity, it closed in 2000 and later became the subject of a long preservation battle.
Moskva Pool was a 130-metre-wide outdoor swimming pool built in central Moscow in 1958. Its circular basin occupied the foundations of the Palace of the Soviets, an enormous government building planned after the cathedral previously on the site was demolished, but never completed. The pool was heated year-round, allowing thousands of people to swim through Moscow winters beneath clouds of steam.