Don’t Believe Everything You Read in Spanish

A story started circulating last week that a 47-storey Spanish skyscraper was nearing completion but with one very big omission — no elevator shafts.

Gizmodo.com reported on an article by El Pais that said the Intempo skyscraper in Benidorm, Spain, although designed to be a symbol of hope and prosperity, was turning out to be a symbol of dodgy financing and walking up a lot of stairs.

It was initially designed as a 20-storey building, but since being bumped up to more than twice its original height, no one had bothered to incorporate elevators into the new design. Gizmodo now says that blogger Barcepundit says it’s a hoax, and there are in fact 11 elevators incorporated into the design for the EU’s tallest residential building. Barcepundit says Gizmodo lost something in translation, although they admit the El Pais article is confusing, which seems fitting since the article’s main thrust is that the construction had been chaotic. For their part, Gizmodo says the El Pais article plainly states the towers lack elevators.

My Spanish is too poor to take sides, but it certainly makes any minor building hiccups Torontonians have experienced look pretty paltry. It may seem incredible that an entire team of builders, engineers and architects could somehow forget about elevators, but they wouldn’t be the first to let a major blunder makes its way well into construction, even to the finished project.

In 2009, the Vdara Hotel & Spa in Las Vegas opened, featuring a reflective, curved design that had the effect of beaming sunlight, death-ray style, into the hotel pool area, singeing guests. A University of Massachusetts library, at 26 storeys the tallest library in the U.S., started spalling, or shedding brick chips, within two months of its opening in the early 70s. Although no cause has ever been disclosed, rumour has it that designers failed to account for the weight of all the books it would house.

Even the greats make mistakes: in 2004, a Frank Gehry-designed centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened with logic-defying angles and whimsical design cues that, within three years, resulted in drainage issues causing cracks in the walls, potentially deadly icicle daggers hanging from the roof, and mold growing on the exterior. It cost the school more than $1.5 million to repair, and since the construction company claimed Gehry had been warned about potential problems, resulted in MIT suing Gehry.

The beautiful, minimalist, 60-storey John Hancock Tower in Boston designed by I.M. Pei & Partners, who also designed Toronto’s landmark Commerce Court, was plagued by problems following its construction in 1976. Windows fell out because of unanticipated repeated thermal stress; while all tall towers are designed to sway imperceptibly to absorb strong winds, the Hancock Tower swayed so dramatically the residents on upper floors complained of motion sickness. Both problems were repaired thanks to a $5 million investment and a Cambridge engineer, respectively.

One of the most famous architectural missteps in history was the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which two years after its 1938 opening, succumbed to a 42-mph wind and crashed in Puget Sound. It bucked so wildly right from construction that the locals called it “Galloping Gertie.” Its steel frame now provides structure for the largest artificial reef in the world.

When you consider how enormously scaled and yet how intimate a big construction project is, it isn’t amazing that such things happen — it’s amazing they don’t happen more often.

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The Toronto Star reports that, in spite of a reputation for excellence including being dubbed world class by the eco-label Blue Flag, Toronto’s beaches remain plagued by old concerns about Lake Ontario’s water quality. Actually, says Blue Flag program coordinator Brett Tryon, Toronto’s beaches have consistently good water quality. Although E.coli does tend to appear in elevated numbers immediately following a big rainfall, levels return to acceptable standards within a few days, which may owe more to Ontario’s very high standards than to the levels themselves; Ontario’s standards raise the red flag at 100 E.coli parts per 100 ml of water, while the rest of the country is OK until 200 parts. Toronto tests the water on a daily basis, too, which is more than what’s required by the province.

Thanks to infrastructure investment in such measures as storm water retention and the closing of many of the industrial plants that used to spew sewage into the water, Toronto’s beaches are indeed some of the best around. With only a scant couple of weeks of summer remaining, it may be time to rediscover Toronto’s beaches for yourself.