Hamon Observation tower

The Hamon Observation Tower at the deYoung Museum is an excellent place to see the views of San Francisco.

You can even see the Golden Gate bridge from here!

San Francisco sights

You might glimpse some of these sights if you're in San Francisco...

Coit tower in the distance...

The pointy AmeriTrade tower...
















What?  Is that Alcatraz at the end of the street?
Yes.  It is.

The Cologne cathedral

There are over eighty stonemasons, roofers and other specialists constantly at work on the maintenance and restoration of the Cologne cathedral.  So in a way, though it took 632 years to build, it's really still being built. 

I look at it and imagine working on it my whole life and never seeing it completed.  People lived their whole lives--for generations--never seeing what it would look like finished.  For three hundred years it had only one tower.

In all that time, builders kept true to the original design.  The flying buttresses, vaults--everything about the cathedral--points up, intending to show strength and to point to God.  Its design and construction pushed the limits religiously, architecturally, technologically, and financially.
When it was finished, it stood as the world's tallest building at 157 meters.











If they hadn't stuck with it, it would stand like the unfinished Amiens cathedral in France.







At the top of the 157 meters, are nine meter filials.  One stands in the square below to demonstrate how tall they are.

From the ground below, they look rather small and insignificant.

Inside the towers are huge bells weighing over 4 and 5 tons.
The 24-ton 'Bell of St Peter' is the largest free-swinging bell in the world.

I climbed the 532 stairs to the top of one of the bell towers to see the view of Cologne.

The cathedral houses a reliquary said to contain the remains of the three Magi, from the Christmas story.  These relics have made Cologne Cathedral a major pilgrimage destination for centuries.

Other famous artwork and treasures from centuries gone by live in every corner of the cathedral.














I read somewhere that during WWII, the cathedral was not as destroyed as it could have been because airplanes used it as a landmark easily seen and identified from the skies.  Still, inside much restoration had to be done and frescoes like those on these ceiling vaults were redone in a modern style.

Eight hundred years from its first bricks being laid, the Cologne Cathedral still reaches for the skies.

The tower stairs

These are the stairs to go up to the top of the castle tower. 

Cool, huh?

Rothenberg ob der Tauber: towers

Stand and look down any street in Rothenberg ob der Tauber and you'll see a tower peaking out in the distance.
Well preserved towers.  Some as many as eight hundred years old. 

Soleri Bridge

Two silos?

Twin towers?

Bell tower?

Nope, it's the Soleri Bridge on the waterfront in Scottsdale.
Waterfront?  In the desert of Arizona?
Yes, that is apparently how they refer to the approximately 20 foot wide canal running through thes plaza area. 

Scottsdale public art.

Art, waterfront--it's all a matter of perspective.  

Seattle Space Needle

I went up in the Seattle Space Needle to see what I could see.

And the view was very pretty.

Washington showed me some nice weather--blue skies and no rain--so I'm sure I have a skewed impression of what it's like to live there.

From the tower, I could see far enough to spot Mount Rainier. 

I feel like I've seen everything, even a space ship...
but that's probably not accurate either.

Flying over history

I love this view of the ancient standing tall and strong--same as it has for eight centuries--as modern travelers fly over it.
Some towers stand a long time.

Taipei 101

Taipei 101 is one of the tallest buildings in the world.  The third tallest, as I write this, but buildings keep competing for this spot, so who knows how long these words will be up to date.
101 was ranked as the tallest building in the world for only six years.

How many floors do you think it has?
Did you guess 101?
Good.
But there are actually five more floors underground, so it should be Taipei 106.
Or maybe not.

It's more than half a kilometer high.  Whoa.

To get you from street level to the top, the tower has one of the fastest elevators in the world.  It travels
1010 meters per minute.  Which is also:
16.83 meters per second
55.22 feet per second
60.6 kilometers per hour
37.7 miles per hour.
The elevator man will tell you all of that on your way up in several different languages, but it's hard to keep up with him.

The blue-green glass offers UV protection to those inside.  It's also supposed to give the building the look of bamboo--which was intentional, to show strength, growth and resilience.

It may be an engineering feat,but there are elements of design evident all over the place.

The repeating of 8 (a number of luck and prosperity) segments of 8 floors echo the rhythms of a pagoda (serenity) or a stack of Chinese money boxes (prosperity).

Even the emblem over the door is meant to show three coins with central holes implying the number 1-0-1.

And why 101?
Because it commemorates the renewal offered by the beginning of a new year and a new century:  January (1) the first day (01).
101.

The building is even helpful in telling time as a giant sundial when its shadow falls in the adjoining park.

At night, Taipei 101 stands like a candle with a flame at the top, said to symbolize liberty and welcome.

From 6 to 10pm each evening, the tower lights up in a different color for each day of the week:
Monday - red
Tuesday - orange
Wednesday - yellow
Thursday - green
Friday - blue
Saturday - indigo
Sunday - purple
I visited on a Friday.

The more I learn about it, the more impressed I am.  The designers and builders could have just built a building to be the tallest.  That's a pretty top level feat in itself.  But the amount of thought they put into the design and character of the building makes it very likeable.

Swargasuli tower

The only other time I was in Jaipur, my friend and I walked around looking for a tower that was supposed to have an excellent view of the city.
We never found it.
Instead, we found a shoe shop where she bought shoes, and a shopkeeper who let us climb up to see the view from his roof when he couldn't tell us where any tower was located.

This time, I found it.

And yes, what a view.

Built in 1749 to commemorate a military victory, it's the tallest structure on Jaipur's skyline at seven stories high..
It's name, Swargasuli Tower, means "tower to heaven" or "the heaven piercing minaret".  It's also known as Isar Lat--and maybe that's why I couldn't find it the first time:  I was calling it by the wrong name?

Ishwari Singh's victory over his enemies is what instigated the building of the tower, yet there were other rumors as to why he wanted to build it.  One being that from this vantage point, he could watch the neighbor's daughter when she was out in the garden.
It seems he just wasn't very serious about fighting battles, and when they attacked again, he chose to kill himself rather than fight the army that might be too strong for him. 

That's too bad, because what he did like more than anything else was art and poetry.  In fact, he excelled at the art of making designs and figures in paper cutting--his favorite hobby.
Sigh.
The world will never know what great art it has missed with his early demise.

But the tower remains.  And from this lookout far above the city, the view is still pretty spectacular.

Isar Lat (Swargasuli) Tower, Jaipur City View in India