--- title: These are the Worst Construction Mistakes Ever Made description: "Mistakes come in all shapes and sizes. When it comes to mistakes in construction, these can come at 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'll be looking at some of the worst and most bizarre construction mistakes ever made.\n\n## MIT's Green Building\n\nThis mistake wasn't nearly as devastating as some of the others we'll be talking about today, but it's still an entertaining story simply because of where it happened. 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.M. Pei, 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 there.\n\nHowever, 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 was 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, so the maximum number of floors a building was allowed to have was 18, or 19 if the ground floor was just lobbies.\n\nTo get around this restriction, the ground floor of the Green Building was 30 feet tall. Essentially the building was put on 30 foot 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.\n\nIt seemed like a clever work around, and from 1964 when construction was completed until 2019, it remained the tallest building in Cambridge. The record was then 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.\n\nThe Green Building was surrounded on three sides by other MIT buildings which were shorter and much longer. The fourth side, which was the one students would 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 to the open ground floor. The winds that gathered beneath the building were 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 or out of the building anyway.\n\nFortunately the building was connected to adjacent campus buildings through underground tunnels so nobody was ever truly trapped inside the Green Building, but it's still the sort of thing you might expect a bunch of people from MIT to have been able to identify as a problem ahead of time. Eventually the hinged lobby doors were replaced with revolving doors that were less likely to become impassable due to the high winds.\n\nThere is 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 is not the case. The sculpture is just there because MIT likes putting art on their campus, and it is too far away from the entrances to have any meaningful impact on the intense wind tunnel beneath the Green Building.\n\n## Sweden's Vasa Warship\n\nKing Gustavus Adolphus 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 ten ships were all run aground and destroyed, and in 1627 two of Sweden's large warships were lost during a battle as part of the war against Poland-Lithuania.\n\nThe 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 Adophus 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 Vasa, a ship that he wanted fitted with seventy-two 24 pound guns.\n\nAlthough 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 24 pound guns instead of 12 pound 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.\n\nBecause 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 so 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 far too top heavy.\n\nThe typical solution would have been to ballast the ship by adding more weight to the bottom, but this wasn't possible for a couple reasons. To start, there wasn't really anywhere left to add additional weight. But even if there had been, it would have presented a major problem. A floating object displaces a volume of water 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 Vasa, this would have left the first deck of gun ports underwater, rendering them useless.\n\nIn 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 evidence that the ship was about to capsize, but for some reason it's maiden voyage was not called off.\n\nAugust 10 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 1,300 meters, less than 20 lengths of the ship itself, when the sails suddenly caught a slight breeze. The gust is believed to have only been 8 knots, or just over 9 mph, but it was enough to make the boat heel. The gun ports had been open to fire a salute as the ship left Stockholm, and when the ship heeled the gun ports fell below the waterline, causing the ship to take on water.\n\nVasa had been unstable to begin with, but with this additional weight the ship was unable to right itself. It quickly sank the 30 meters to the bottom of the harbor, though the ship was 50 meters tall so surviving crew were able to cling to the upper masts that were still protruding from the water. Unfortunately not all of the crew was able to escape, and about 30 sailors who were below deck when the ship began to go down were lost. The ship's captain narrowly escaped drowning, but was immediately arrested and interrogated. In the end, no charges were filed against any of the crew or builders of the ship.\n\nBut on the bright side, the protruding masts made the shipwreck easy to find, so they were able to salvage the heavy and expensive bronze cannons from the ship.\n\n## Lotus Riverside Complex\n\nThe collapse of Block 7 at Lotus Riverside is one of the most unique disasters ever seen. The building was one of 11 identical 13 story buildings in the apartment complex that had nearly finished construction. And at about 5:30 am on June 27, 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.\n\nIt was a disaster to be sure, but it also could have been much 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 dominos. Although the apartments had mostly been sold already, because construction wasn't quite complete it was not yet full of residents. Most of the workers were able to escape in time, though migrant worker Xiao Dekun did not and became the collapse's sole fatality.\n\nFor the most part, the mistakes made during the construction of this complex were fairly routine symptoms of greed. The apartments were built using substandard 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 had been embezzled by the two main shareholders of the project (both of whom received life in prison following this incident), and it was generally just considered to be a building that was shoddily assembled.\n\nThat all explains why the building might collapse in general, but what could have caused it to topple over in one piece the way it did? While there is some dispute over the cause, particularly because only one of the buildings fell over, there is a generally accepted theory for how this could have happened.\n\nConstruction 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 all this additional earth caused the riverbank to collapse. This then caused water to seep into the ground, weakening the foundation and causing Block 7 to fall over onto its side.\n\nBut 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.\n\n## Sydney Opera House\n\nThe 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.\n\nThere were 233 designs submitted, and judges immediately fell in love with the design submitted by Danish architect Jorn Utzon. 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.\n\nFar more crucially, the judges didn't seem to take practicality into account in their decision making process at all. Utzon'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.\n\nThis created numerous problems, most notably with regards to estimating the budget and length of the project. It was originally estimated that the Sydney Opera House would take 4 years and $7 million Australian to construct, but this seems to have just been 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.\n\nThere also wasn't anybody who was actually in charge of the project. Utzon was there to watch his vision come to life, but there was also design engineer Ove Arup who was hired to ensure they constructed a functional building that wouldn't collapse under its own weight or anything. Unfortunately, neither Utzon 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, the result was a lot of confusion and conflicting orders.\n\nIn 1966, seven years into what was originally thought would be a four year project, the construction hit another hurdle. Following a dispute over payments and the committee's refusal to let Utzon use the specific plywood manufacturer that he wanted, Utzon 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.\n\nWith Utzon and his plans gone, Arup 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 to complete. But the results spoke for themselves. The Sydney Opera House was beautiful, iconic, and famous for having absolutely horrible acoustics.\n\nThe construction was designed with visuals in mind rather than acoustics, which is a pretty big mistake when building a venue for live music performances. Not only do the high, narrow shells for which the opera house is famous create an inconsistent acoustic experience for the audience, but it is extremely difficult for musicians on stage to hear one another. In the decades since it opened, over $300 million has been spent on renovations to try to improve the opera house's sound quality. But hey, at least it looked cool.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- MIT's Green Building created a dangerous wind tunnel due to its elevated open ground floor design meant to circumvent a city floor-limit ordinance.\n- The Swedish warship Vasa sank on its maiden voyage in 1628 because it was dangerously top-heavy with two gun decks and insufficient ballast.\n- Block 7 of Shanghai's Lotus Riverside Complex toppled intact in 2009 due to substandard construction, embezzlement, and foundation weakening from nearby earth excavation.\n- The Sydney Opera House's incomplete competition-winning design led to massive budget overruns, a 14-year construction timeline, and notoriously poor acoustics.\n- Multiple catastrophic construction failures stemmed from prioritizing aesthetics, speed, or legal loopholes over engineering practicality and safety.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What was the design flaw in MIT's Green Building that caused wind problems?\n\nThe Green Building was put on 30-foot stilts with a mostly open ground floor to circumvent a city ordinance limiting building height. Because it was surrounded on three sides by shorter, longer buildings and the fourth side faced an open area leading to the Charles River, this created a powerful wind tunnel. Wind would build up on the walls and have nowhere to go except down to the open ground floor, making the lobby doors nearly impossible to open and sometimes making it difficult for students to even walk to the doors.\n\n### Was the sculpture 'The Big Sail' installed to deflect winds from MIT's Green Building?\n\nNo, this is a long-standing myth. The sculpture was not installed to deflect winds; it is simply there because MIT likes putting art on their campus, and it is too far away from the entrances to have any meaningful impact on the intense wind tunnel beneath the Green Building.\n\n### Why did Sweden's Vasa warship sink on its maiden voyage?\n\nThe Vasa was top-heavy due to having two gun decks with heavy 24-pound guns, which was much heavier than what the builders were used to. They couldn't add more ballast because it would submerge the first deck of gun ports. On August 10, 1628, a slight breeze of only 8 knots (just over 9 mph) caused the ship to heel. The gun ports had been left open to fire a salute, and when the ship heeled, water flooded in through the gun ports. The ship was unable to right itself and sank after traveling only 1,300 meters.\n\n### How many people died when the Vasa sank?\n\nAbout 30 sailors who were below deck when the ship began to go down were lost. Surviving crew were able to cling to the upper masts that were still protruding from the water since the ship was 50 meters tall but sank only 30 meters to the bottom.\n\n### What caused Block 7 at the Lotus Riverside Complex to topple over intact?\n\nConstruction of a garage beneath the building required massive amounts of earth to be moved from under the building to directly next to a creek. The weight of this additional earth is believed to have caused the riverbank to collapse, which then caused water to seep into the ground, weakening the foundation and causing Block 7 to fall over onto its side while remaining almost completely intact.\n\n### What were the main problems with how the Sydney Opera House design was selected?\n\nThe design was chosen through an international competition where competitors were not given any parameters—no defined budget or timeline. The judges didn't consider practicality; Jørn Utzon's design was incomplete as he hadn't finished the structural design and wasn't sure how it could be built without collapsing. Despite having little more than sketches, construction began immediately with no way to gauge true costs or timeline.\n\n### How long did the Sydney Opera House actually take to build, and what was the final cost compared to original estimates?\n\nThe Sydney Opera House was originally estimated to take 4 years and $7 million Australian to construct. It was completed in 1973 after 14 years at a cost of $102 million Australian—more than 14 times the original budget and 3.5 times the original timeline.\n\n### What acoustic problem does the Sydney Opera House have?\n\nThe Sydney Opera House was designed with visuals in mind rather than acoustics. The high, narrow shells create an inconsistent acoustic experience for the audience, and it is extremely difficult for musicians on stage to hear one another. In the decades since it opened, over $300 million has been spent on renovations to try to improve the sound quality.\n\n### Why did Jørn Utzon resign from the Sydney Opera House project?\n\nIn 1966, seven years into the project, Utzon resigned following a dispute over payments and the committee's refusal to let him use the specific plywood manufacturer that he wanted. 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.\n\n### What was the 'silver lining' mentioned regarding the Lotus Riverside Complex collapse?\n\nNo sooner had the dust settled from the 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.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original Side Projects video: These are the Worst Construction Mistakes Ever Made](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PSuYZy2PlE)\n- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/St_Clement%27s_Church%2C_Cambridge_2024-03-14_%283%29.jpg) by The wub / openverse, by-sa.\n\n## Related Coverage" url: https://sideprojects.pub/article/worst-construction-mistakes-ever-made.md canonical: https://sideprojects.pub/article/worst-construction-mistakes-ever-made datePublished: 2026-06-17 dateModified: 2026-06-17 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://sideprojects.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Side Projects image: "https://media.sideprojects.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/3PSuYZy2PlE/hero.jpg" type: Article contentHash: 8260940936f8fb65fbbd51d7278dc54285dd475af0b17bdfe7c4bd802ad9fff9 tokens: 5068 summaryUrl: https://sideprojects.pub/article/worst-construction-mistakes-ever-made.md.summary.md --- Mistakes come in all shapes and sizes. When it comes to mistakes in construction, these can come at 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'll be looking at some of the worst and most bizarre construction mistakes ever made. ## MIT's Green Building This mistake wasn't nearly as devastating as some of the others we'll be talking about today, but it's still an entertaining story simply because of where it happened. 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.M. Pei, 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 there. 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 was 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, so the maximum number of floors a building was allowed 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 feet tall. Essentially the building was put on 30 foot 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 work around, and from 1964 when construction was completed until 2019, it remained the tallest building in Cambridge. The record was then 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 students would 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 to the open ground floor. The winds that gathered beneath the building were 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 or out of the building 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's still the sort of thing you might expect a bunch of people from MIT to have been able to identify as a problem ahead of time. Eventually the hinged lobby doors were replaced with revolving doors that were less likely to become impassable due to the high winds. There is 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 is not the case. The sculpture is just there because MIT likes putting art on their campus, and it is too far away from the entrances to have any meaningful impact on the intense wind tunnel beneath the Green Building. ## Sweden's Vasa Warship King Gustavus Adolphus 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 ten ships were all run aground 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 Adophus 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 Vasa, a ship that he wanted fitted with seventy-two 24 pound 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 24 pound guns instead of 12 pound 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. 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 so 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 far too top heavy. The typical solution would have been to ballast the ship by adding more weight to the bottom, but this wasn't possible for a couple reasons. To start, there wasn't really anywhere left to add additional weight. But even if there had been, it would have presented a major problem. A floating object displaces a volume of water 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 Vasa, this would have left the first deck of gun ports underwater, rendering them useless. 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 evidence that the ship was about to capsize, but for some reason it's maiden voyage was not called off. August 10 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 1,300 meters, less than 20 lengths of the ship itself, when the sails suddenly caught a slight breeze. The gust is believed to have only been 8 knots, or just over 9 mph, but it was enough to make the boat heel. The gun ports had been open to fire a salute as the ship left Stockholm, and when the ship heeled the gun ports fell below the waterline, causing the ship to take on water. Vasa had been unstable to begin with, but with this additional weight the ship was unable to right itself. It quickly sank the 30 meters to the bottom of the harbor, though the ship was 50 meters tall so surviving crew were able to cling to the upper masts that were still protruding from the water. Unfortunately not all of the crew was able to escape, and about 30 sailors who were below deck when the ship began to go down were lost. The ship's captain narrowly escaped drowning, but was immediately 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 protruding masts made the shipwreck easy to find, so they were able to salvage the heavy and expensive bronze cannons from the ship. ## Lotus Riverside Complex The collapse of Block 7 at Lotus Riverside is one of the most unique disasters ever seen. The building was one of 11 identical 13 story buildings in the apartment complex that had nearly finished construction. And at about 5:30 am on June 27, 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 also could have been much 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 dominos. Although the apartments had mostly been sold already, because construction wasn't quite complete it was not yet full of residents. Most of the workers were able to escape in time, though migrant worker Xiao Dekun did not and became the collapse's 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 substandard 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 had been embezzled by the two main shareholders of the project (both of whom received life in prison following this incident), and it was generally just considered to be a building that was shoddily assembled. That all explains why the building might collapse in general, but what could have caused it to topple over in one piece the way it did? While there is some dispute over the cause, 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 all this additional earth caused the riverbank to collapse. This then caused water to seep into the ground, weakening the foundation and causing Block 7 to fall over 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. ## Sydney Opera House 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 the design submitted by Danish architect Jorn Utzon. 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 decision making process at all. Utzon'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 length of the project. It was originally estimated that the Sydney Opera House would take 4 years and $7 million Australian to construct, but this seems to have just been 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. Utzon was there to watch his vision come to life, but there was also design engineer Ove Arup who was hired to ensure they constructed a functional building that wouldn't collapse under its own weight or anything. Unfortunately, neither Utzon 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, the result was a lot of confusion and conflicting orders. In 1966, seven years into what was originally thought would be a four year project, the construction hit another hurdle. Following a dispute over payments and the committee's refusal to let Utzon use the specific plywood manufacturer that he wanted, Utzon 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 Utzon and his plans gone, Arup 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 to complete. But the results spoke for themselves. The Sydney Opera House was 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 building a venue for live music performances. Not only do the high, narrow shells for which the opera house is famous create an inconsistent acoustic experience for the audience, but it is extremely difficult for musicians on stage to hear one another. In the decades since it opened, over $300 million has been spent on renovations to try to improve the opera house's sound quality. But hey, at least it looked cool. ## Key Takeaways - MIT's Green Building created a dangerous wind tunnel due to its elevated open ground floor design meant to circumvent a city floor-limit ordinance. - The Swedish warship Vasa sank on its maiden voyage in 1628 because it was dangerously top-heavy with two gun decks and insufficient ballast. - Block 7 of Shanghai's Lotus Riverside Complex toppled intact in 2009 due to substandard construction, embezzlement, and foundation weakening from nearby earth excavation. - The Sydney Opera House's incomplete competition-winning design led to massive budget overruns, a 14-year construction timeline, and notoriously poor acoustics. - Multiple catastrophic construction failures stemmed from prioritizing aesthetics, speed, or legal loopholes over engineering practicality and safety. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was the design flaw in MIT's Green Building that caused wind problems? The Green Building was put on 30-foot stilts with a mostly open ground floor to circumvent a city ordinance limiting building height. Because it was surrounded on three sides by shorter, longer buildings and the fourth side faced an open area leading to the Charles River, this created a powerful wind tunnel. Wind would build up on the walls and have nowhere to go except down to the open ground floor, making the lobby doors nearly impossible to open and sometimes making it difficult for students to even walk to the doors. ### Was the sculpture 'The Big Sail' installed to deflect winds from MIT's Green Building? No, this is a long-standing myth. The sculpture was not installed to deflect winds; it is simply there because MIT likes putting art on their campus, and it is too far away from the entrances to have any meaningful impact on the intense wind tunnel beneath the Green Building. ### Why did Sweden's Vasa warship sink on its maiden voyage? The Vasa was top-heavy due to having two gun decks with heavy 24-pound guns, which was much heavier than what the builders were used to. They couldn't add more ballast because it would submerge the first deck of gun ports. On August 10, 1628, a slight breeze of only 8 knots (just over 9 mph) caused the ship to heel. The gun ports had been left open to fire a salute, and when the ship heeled, water flooded in through the gun ports. The ship was unable to right itself and sank after traveling only 1,300 meters. ### How many people died when the Vasa sank? About 30 sailors who were below deck when the ship began to go down were lost. Surviving crew were able to cling to the upper masts that were still protruding from the water since the ship was 50 meters tall but sank only 30 meters to the bottom. ### What caused Block 7 at the Lotus Riverside Complex to topple over intact? Construction of a garage beneath the building required massive amounts of earth to be moved from under the building to directly next to a creek. The weight of this additional earth is believed to have caused the riverbank to collapse, which then caused water to seep into the ground, weakening the foundation and causing Block 7 to fall over onto its side while remaining almost completely intact. ### What were the main problems with how the Sydney Opera House design was selected? The design was chosen through an international competition where competitors were not given any parameters—no defined budget or timeline. The judges didn't consider practicality; Jørn Utzon's design was incomplete as he hadn't finished the structural design and wasn't sure how it could be built without collapsing. Despite having little more than sketches, construction began immediately with no way to gauge true costs or timeline. ### How long did the Sydney Opera House actually take to build, and what was the final cost compared to original estimates? The Sydney Opera House was originally estimated to take 4 years and $7 million Australian to construct. It was completed in 1973 after 14 years at a cost of $102 million Australian—more than 14 times the original budget and 3.5 times the original timeline. ### What acoustic problem does the Sydney Opera House have? The Sydney Opera House was designed with visuals in mind rather than acoustics. The high, narrow shells create an inconsistent acoustic experience for the audience, and it is extremely difficult for musicians on stage to hear one another. In the decades since it opened, over $300 million has been spent on renovations to try to improve the sound quality. ### Why did Jørn Utzon resign from the Sydney Opera House project? In 1966, seven years into the project, Utzon resigned following a dispute over payments and the committee's refusal to let him use the specific plywood manufacturer that he wanted. 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. ### What was the 'silver lining' mentioned regarding the Lotus Riverside Complex collapse? No sooner had the dust settled from the 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. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: These are the Worst Construction Mistakes Ever Made](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PSuYZy2PlE) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/St_Clement%27s_Church%2C_Cambridge_2024-03-14_%283%29.jpg) by The wub / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage