Recent News

Well did you know…

A few building related facts to unleash at your next dinner party/networking event/bus queue. Well, we sure found them interesting!

In São Paulo, Brazil, there is a thirty-nine-storey tall building that serves as a cemetery. It is outfitted with 21,000 tombs and room for 147,000 cremated residents. It also has a heliport, an eight-storey parking garage, two churches, and twenty-one chapels.

The smallest chapel in the world can be found on the grounds of a Benedictine monastery near Covington, Kentucky, U.S.A. Not much larger than a telephone booth, it was built by Brother Albert Soltis for his personal use in 1878 and can accommodate no more than three people at once.

The Ice Hotel at Jukkasjarvi, Sweden, offers the ultimate in cold comfort—a building constructed out of ice where the average room temperature is -4°C. The beds are made from packed snow topped with spruce boughs and reindeer skins. The hotel melts every April and has to be rebuilt the following winter.

If the air conditioning at the Astrodome in Houston were turned off, it would rain inside the stadium due to the entrance of humid air.

Overlooking the town of Oban in Scotland is a replica of the Colosseum, known locally as McCaig's Folly. It was the idea of banker and self-styled art critic John Stewart McCaig who, after a trip to Italy, decided to recreate the glory of Rome in Scotland. It was intended as a museum and art gallery, but when McCraig died with only the shell built, everyone lost interest. It now exists as a vast blackened cylinder and encloses a public garden.

The height of the 984-foot (usually) Eiffel Tower is over six inches higher in the summer than in the winter.

The door at 10 Downing Street can only be opened from the inside.