If asked to name the best-known tow­er in Lon­don, one could, per­haps, make a fair case for the likes of the Shard or the Gherkin. But what­ev­er their cur­rent promi­nence on the sky­line, those works of twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry star­chi­tec­ture have yet to devel­op much val­ue as sym­bols of the city. If sheer age were the decid­ing fac­tor, then the Tow­er of Lon­don, the old­est intact build­ing in the cap­i­tal, would take the top spot, but for how many peo­ple out­side Eng­land does its name call a clear image to mind? No, to find Lon­don’s most beloved ver­ti­cal icon, we must look to the Vic­to­ri­an era, the only his­tor­i­cal peri­od that could have giv­en rise to Big Ben.

We must first clar­i­fy that Big Ben is not a tow­er. The build­ing you’re think­ing of has been called the Eliz­a­beth Tow­er since Queen Eliz­a­beth II’s Dia­mond Jubilee in 2012, but before that its name was the Clock Tow­er. That was apt enough, since tow­er’s defin­ing fea­ture has always been the clock at the top — or rather, the four clocks at the top, one for each face.

You can see how they work in the ani­mat­ed video from Youtu­ber Jared Owen above, which pro­vides a detailed visu­al and ver­bal expla­na­tion of both the struc­ture’s con­text and its con­tent, includ­ing a tour of the mech­a­nisms that have kept it run­ning near­ly with­out inter­rup­tion for more than a cen­tu­ry and a half.

Only by look­ing into the tow­er’s bel­fry can you see Big Ben, which, as Owens says, is actu­al­ly the name of the largest of its bells. Its announce­ment of each hour on the hour — as well as the ring­ing of the oth­er, small­er bells — is acti­vat­ed by a sys­tem of gear trains ulti­mate­ly dri­ven by grav­i­ty, har­nessed by the swing­ing of a large pen­du­lum (to which occa­sion­al speed adjust­ments have always been made with the reli­able method of plac­ing pen­nies on top of it). Owens does­n’t clar­i­fy whether or not this is the same pen­du­lum Roger Miller sang about back in the six­ties, but at least now we know that, tech­ni­cal­ly speak­ing, we should inter­pret the fol­low­ing lyrics as not “the tow­er, Big Ben” but “the tow­er; Big Ben.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Growth of Lon­don, from the Romans to the 21st Cen­tu­ry, Visu­al­ized in a Time-Lapse Ani­mat­ed Map

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Down­load & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Prague Mon­u­ment Dou­bles as Artist’s Can­vas

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In the small town of Clo­quet, Min­neso­ta stands a piece of urban utopia. It takes the sur­pris­ing form of a gas sta­tion, albeit one designed by no less a vision­ary of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture than Frank Lloyd Wright. He orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived it as an ele­ment of Broad­acre City, a form of mech­a­nized rur­al set­tle­ment intend­ed as a Jef­fer­son­ian democ­ra­cy-inspired rebuke against what Wright saw as the evils of the over­grown twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry city, first pub­licly pre­sent­ed in his 1932 book The Dis­ap­pear­ing City. “That’s an aspi­ra­tional title,” says archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Richard Kro­n­ick in the Twin Cities PBS video above. “He thought that cities should go away.”

Cities did­n’t go away, and Broad­acre City remained spec­u­la­tive, though Wright did pur­sue every oppor­tu­ni­ty he could iden­ti­fy to bring it clos­er to real­i­ty. “In 1952, Ray and Emma Lind­holm com­mis­sioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build them a home on the south side of Clo­quet,” writes pho­tog­ra­ph­er Susan Tre­go­ning.

When Wright “dis­cov­ered that Mr. Lind­holm was in the petro­le­um busi­ness, he men­tioned that he was quite inter­est­ed in gas sta­tion design.” When Lind­holm decid­ed to rebuild a Phillips 66 sta­tion a few years lat­er, he accept­ed Wright’s design pro­pos­al, call­ing it “an exper­i­ment to see if a lit­tle beau­ty couldn’t be incor­po­rat­ed in some­thing as com­mon­place as a ser­vice sta­tion” — though Wright him­self, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly, was­n’t think­ing in quite such hum­ble terms.

Wright’s R. W. Lind­holm Ser­vice Sta­tion incor­po­rates a can­tilevered upper-lev­el “cus­tomer lounge,” and the idea, as Kro­n­ick puts it, “was that cus­tomers would sit up here and while their time away wait­ing for their cars to be repaired,” and no doubt “dis­cuss the issues of the day.” In Wright’s mind, “this lit­tle room is where the details of democ­ra­cy would be worked out.” As with South­dale Cen­ter, Vic­tor Gru­en’s pio­neer­ing shop­ping mall that had opened two years ear­li­er in Min­neapo­lis, two hours south of Clo­quet, the com­mu­ni­ty aspect of the design nev­er came to fruition: though its win­dows offer a dis­tinc­tive­ly Amer­i­can (or to use Wright’s lan­guage, Uson­ian) vista, the cus­tomer lounge has a bare, dis­used look in the pic­tures vis­i­tors take today.

Image by Library of Con­gress, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

There are many such vis­i­tors, who arrive from not just all around the coun­try but all around the world. But when it was last sold in 2018, the buy­er it found was rel­a­tive­ly local: Min­neso­ta-born Andrew Vol­na, own­er of such Min­neapo­lis oper­a­tions as vinyl-record man­u­fac­tur­er Noise­land Indus­tries and the once-aban­doned, now-ren­o­vat­ed Hol­ly­wood The­ater. “Wright saw the sta­tion as a cul­tur­al cen­ter, some­where to meet a friend, get your car fixed, and have a cup of cof­fee while you wait­ed,” writes Tre­go­ning, though he nev­er did make it back out to the fin­ished build­ing before he died in 1959. These six­ty-odd years lat­er, per­haps Vol­na will be the one to turn this unlike­ly archi­tec­tur­al hot spot into an even less like­ly social one as well.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Broad­acre City (1932)

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

Build Wood­en Mod­els of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Build­ing: The Guggen­heim, Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters & More

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invent­ed Lin­coln Logs, “America’s Nation­al Toy” (1916)

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Dog­house, His Small­est Archi­tec­tur­al Cre­ation (1956)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Lean­ing Tow­er of Pisa has stood, in its dis­tinc­tive fash­ion, for six and a half cen­turies now. But it has­n’t always leaned at the same angle: to get the most dra­mat­ic view, the best time to go see it was the ear­ly nine­teen-nineties, when its tilt had reached a full 5.5 degrees. Grant­ed, at that point — when by some reck­on­ings, the tow­er should no longer have been stand­ing at all — it was closed to the pub­lic, pre­sum­ably due to fears that the sheer weight of tourism would push it over the tip­ping point. The 1989 col­lapse of Pavi­a’s eleventh-cen­tu­ry Civic Tow­er also had some­thing to do with it: could­n’t some­thing be done to spare Pisa’s world-famous land­mark from a sim­i­lar fate?

Attempts to shore up the Lean­ing Tow­er up to that point had a check­ered his­to­ry, to put it mild­ly. Built on soft soil, it start­ed to lean in back in the twelfth cen­tu­ry, before its con­struc­tion was even com­plete. The process of that con­struc­tion, in the event, took near­ly 200 years to com­plete; dur­ing one decades-long pause dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly embat­tled peri­od for the Repub­lic of Pisa, the tow­er actu­al­ly set­tled enough to pre­vent its lat­er col­lapse, though it remained aslant. In the late thir­teenth cen­tu­ry, the best solu­tion avail­able for this con­di­tion was sim­ply to build the rest of its floors in a curved shape in com­pen­sa­tion.

For cen­turies after, the sight of the Lean­ing Tow­er tempt­ed gen­er­a­tions of struc­tur­al engi­neers to straight­en it out. It even tempt­ed non-engi­neers like Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni, who in 1934 ordered large amounts of con­crete pumped into its foun­da­tion. Like most such oper­a­tions, it only made the tow­er lean more; only in the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry did the tech­nol­o­gy come along to ana­lyze its foun­da­tions and the soil in which they were embed­ded clear­ly enough to devise an effec­tive solu­tion. This end­ed up involv­ing the removal of soil with a slant­ed drill from under the tow­er’s high­er end, which even­tu­al­ly brought it back to lean about four degrees, as it did near­ly two cen­turies ago. After sub­se­quent sta­bi­liza­tion work, it was guar­an­teed to remain upright for at least anoth­er two cen­turies.

You can learn more about the con­struc­tion and re-engi­neer­ing of the Lean­ing Tow­er in the videos above from TED-Ed and Dis­cov­ery UK. But you may still ask, why was it nev­er brought down by an earth­quake? “It turns out that the squishy soil at the structure’s base that caused its fetch­ing infir­mi­ty – the tow­er was tilt­ing by the time its sec­ond sto­ry was built in 1178 – con­tains the secret to its struc­tur­al resilience,” writes Joe Quirke at Glob­al Con­struc­tion Review. This means that “the soft­ness of the foun­da­tion soil cush­ions the tow­er from vibra­tions in such a way that the tow­er does not res­onate with earth­quake ground motion.” The very ele­ment that caused the tow­er to lean kept it from falling over, an irony to match the fact that such a seem­ing­ly mis­be­got­ten build­ing project has become one of Italy’s proud­est tourist attrac­tions.

Relat­ed con­tent:

See Galileo’s Famous Grav­i­ty Exper­i­ment Per­formed in the World’s Largest Vac­u­um Cham­ber, and on the Moon

When the Indi­ana Bell Build­ing Was Rotat­ed 90° While Every­one Worked Inside in 1930 (by Kurt Vonnegut’s Archi­tect Dad)

High-Res­o­lu­tion Walk­ing Tours of Italy’s Most His­toric Places: The Colos­se­um, Pom­peii, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca & More

How the World’s Biggest Dome Was Built: The Sto­ry of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi and the Duo­mo in Flo­rence

Why Hiroshi­ma, Despite Being Hit with the Atom­ic Bomb, Isn’t a Nuclear Waste­land Today

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.