Weirdest Megaprojects In History

There really is no limit to what mankind can build! But while some engineering efforts have given us record breaking skyscrapers and huge tunnels, others have produced some truly mind-blowing megaprojects. From telescope’s with mirrors the size of a basketball court, to structures that can melt diamonds in less than a second, and even cities encased in underground domes! Let's explore some of the strangest and most fascinating megaprojects in history.

The Dubai Frame

Dubai’s iconic skyline is a snapshot of some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, and since the erection of the Dubai Frame, the horizon is picture perfect, literally. At 492 ft tall, this flawless picture frame transports visitors 48 floors up, providing a sky-high view of the city from its 305 ft interior viewing bridge. But as simplistic as its rectangular shape seems, its construction required a lot of heavy lifting.

More than 350,000 cubic ft of reinforced concrete was poured into its foundations and towering pillars, alongside 2,000 tons of steel, and more than 31,000 square feet of laminated glass. That’s enough glass to cover more than half a standard football field! With the final cost of this super-sized structure reaching an eyewatering $43.6 million, you could say Dubai were investing in the big picture. Although, there’s a lot of drama surrounding its seemingly simple design.

The project was conceived by architect Fernando Donis, who submitted the frame’s design as part of a competition hosted by Dubai’s government back in 2008. While Fernando won the competition, along with a tasty cash prize of $100,000, he never received a contract or compensation for the use of his design as promised in the competition rules.

So, Fernando levied a hefty intellectual property lawsuit against Dubai’s government! However, Dubai’s legal system gives the government sovereign immunity against any and all lawsuits. That means you can’t sue the government of Dubai unless it gives you permission to sue it. It looks like this mega project is turning out to be a mega pain in the butt for Fernando.

The Pont Jacques-Chaban-Delmas

Drawbridges are absolutely mesmerizing! There’s just something about watching the lifting sections of the bridge, called bascules, slowly raise up to let river traffic, from tiny boats to huge cruise ships, pass through.

However, you can’t deny that most drawbridges rely on old-fashioned mechanics, from the days where pullies and counterweights raised and lowered each individual bridge section. This amazing megastructure, on the other hand, is the phenomenal future of lifting bridges!

Found in Bordeaux, France, the Pont Jacques-Chaban-Delmas is the tallest vertical lift bridge in Europe. Stretching almost 1900 ft over the Garonne river, its main 383 ft span is hoisted 173 ft up into the air to let river traffic pass. That’s like lifting something as long as an entire soccer pitch up to the height of a 16-storey building! And while it looks a lot more modern than a traditional lift bridge, this design also has one huge benefit over old school drawbridges.

движение моста Pont Jacques Chaban-Delmas by decem_info

This bridge’s counterweights only need to be equal to the weight of the deck, whereas bascule bridge counterweights must weigh several times as much as the span being lifted. So, Tower Bridge’s famous 200 ft bascules, for example, weigh a shocking 2,200 tons in total, but the 383 ft span of the Pont Jacques-Chaban-Delmas is just 2,600 tons!

While that still sounds hefty, it took construction companies just three years to install this essential super structure. But it did cost and eye-watering $195 million to build! Although you just can’t put a price tag on something that satisfying.

Stiletto Church

In the Asian nation of Taiwan, Christianity is a minority religion that makes up just 3.9% of the population’s preferred prayers. It’s so small that the nation barely boasts any significant Christian sites, with one very big, very blue, and very weird exception.

While the phenomenal 55 ft high, 36 ft wide stiletto structure below may look like a supersized Cinderella fantasy, it’s actually a church!

Finished in early 2016, this bizarrely blue place of worship was constructed using a massive steel frame which was adorned with 320 panels of tinted glass. While it may look pretty garish during the day, at night this church is lit, literally, thanks to the hundreds of huge neon lights dotted about its frame!

Granted, it only took two months for the city to build, but all that made-to-measure material and construction cost a colossal $760,000! But why did government officials opt for this super strange design over something more traditional?

It’s been constructed in the Southwest Coast Scenic area, which is highly popular with Taiwanese tourists. So, in making the site strangely ostentatious, officials are making some serious bank by hiring it out for weddings and photoshoots while also attracting more curious tourists to the area.

Although, all those people might not be posing and smiling when they learn what the design is really in reference to. According to officials, it was designed in the shape of a woman’s shoe to commemorate the girls that had their feet amputated in Taiwan’s Blackfoot Disease outbreak in the 1950’s!

Slovak Radio Building

The Slovakian capital of Bratislava has embraced the free market economy in recent years, but its brief stint under a socialist regime left a monumental mark on the city. The strange remnant that is the Slovak Radio Building stands out in the north of the city like a sore, socialist thumb.

Although it looks like someone turned a pyramid upside down and rammed it into the ground, this 262 ft megaproject was once the cutting edge of Marxist structural design. When construction began in 1967, it was the first building in Slovakian Architectural history to use steel for its main frame. Not only that, but the inverted shape maximized the amount of office space available, all while allowing the interior to accommodate an insulated recording studio and 520-seat concert hall.

However, a year after construction started, Slovakia, then Czechoslovakia, was invaded by the Soviet Union. The new, normalized socialism that citizens were forced to live under as an interpretation of Marxism became a despised reminder of oppression. And while construction of the building continued, it took a staggering 16 years to complete. But when it was finally ready, the country viewed it as an ugly symbol of its past.

Initially, this weird, topsy-turvy triangle was meant to be one of many buildings lining the countries green belt. Although, as you can probably guess by how out of place this building now looks, this plan was thankfully never realized.

China’s Quarry Hotel

China is the home of some seriously innovative megaprojects; like the world’s largest air purifier, their trillion-dollar water diversion scheme, and even their huge horizontal skyscraper. But there’s one project that has really hit new heights, or, more accurately, depths!

Back in the 1950’s, the Shenkeng Quarry was just one of many mining operations surrounding Shanghai. However, once the resources dried up, the pit was simply abandoned and left to collect rainwater. But in 2006, a pioneering plan was proposed to transform the huge hole, which was less than 30 miles from the bustling city of Shanghai, into a one-of-a-kind hotel! Instead of building around the pit, the hotel would be anchored inside it, with some sections completely submerged beneath the water.

While the idea looked stunning on paper, building entire floors underwater was a supremely difficult task. Over 2 million cubic ft of concrete, which is more than 22 Olympic swimming pools, were required to create the substructure alone. But pumping all the concrete down that 295 ft drop to the quarry’s bottom caused the mixture to separate.

So, engineers had to come up with brand new ways of pumping and remixing the concrete, and actually ended up patenting 41 different processes throughout the course of the build. But all the hassle was worth it when, in 2018, the InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland Hotel opened with the title of the world’s deepest hotel!

After toiling for 12 years, just two of the hotel’s 18-story are located above ground, while its two lowest floors are completely underwater! But it turns out the only thing deeper than this hotel were the pockets of its owners, Shimao Group, who spent an ungodly $288 million raising this creation from the deep! And even with all that money, a night in this hotel would still, technically, be the pits.

The Beijing Watercube

The Chinese capital of Beijing is home to some of the most impressive, modern megastructures on the planet. But right in the middle of this innovative city is a building that really stands out! Though it looks like a big box filled with building sized bubbles, this is actually China’s National Aquatics Center, though it’s known more simply as the Beijing Watercube.

It sits next to the famous, and equally attention-grabbing, Bird’s Nest Stadium, which you might remember from the 2008 Olympics.

When China was elected this Olympics’ host city in 2001, they wasted no time or expense constructing a variety of brand-new sporting facilities. And while the Birds Nest was their main feature, the Watercube received the same star treatment!

The building was built with more than 750,000 square ft of space: housing 5 swimming pools, a wave machine, rides, and seating for 17,000 spectators. And all of this would be encompassed by more than 1 million square feet of Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene, or ETFE, cladding, shaped into those oddly beautiful bubbles.

But it wasn’t used just to make the building stand out, because the cladding also has a secret second function. Thanks to the design, about 80% more light and heat enters the pool space, reducing the building’s energy costs by a staggering 30%! And just as well, because all that innovation cost a bubble-bursting $140 million to build.

Thirty Meter Telescope

Reflecting telescopes are, arguably, some of the most important pieces of scientific equipment ever invented by man. They work by using a combination of curved, convex mirrors that reflect light back to a focal point, which forms a close-up image of something far away. And the bigger those convex mirrors are, the greater the light-gathering power is, and the further out into the heavens the telescope can see!

Unfortunately, convex mirrors increase drastically in price the larger they get because of the sheer amount of work, time, and specialist equipment they take to get perfect. But just how expensive? Well, the world’s largest single, convex mirror made to date measures in at a colossal 13.7 ft across, weighs 3.5 tons, and cost more than a mammoth $20 million!

Fortunately, in 1992, the first computer controlled segmented mirror was designed for use in Hawaii’s Keck Observatories. Using 36 adjoining mirror segments, engineers created a 33 ft wide mirror, housed in a huge white dome 13,600 ft up the Maua Kea mountainside! At these remote altitudes, the telescope’s images are less affected by atmospheric interference and light pollution.

But, like the stars, science never sleeps. In 2000, scientists proposed making a 30 meter, or nearly 100 ft wide, mirror for a brand-new mountainside telescope! This insane venture would require 492 separate segments, bringing the mirror’s overall size to a staggering 7050 square ft! That’s almost the same size as a standard basketball court.

Although that slam-dunking size would make it 12 times more powerful than the Hubble space telescope! However, big ambitions come with a big price tag, because it’ll cost around a mind-blowing $2.4 billion to complete. Construction of this Thirty Meter Telescope officially began back in 2014, but local demonstrations against the build have ground its progress to a halt.

Alem Center's Indoor Ferris Wheel

Turkmenistan is home to some of the most unusually star-obsessed megaprojects in the world. Like the octagonal-star shaped Wedding Palace, which is an 11-story registry office. Or Turkmenistan’s TV Tower, a communication center which has the world's largest architectural image of a star built into it.

This is because the eight-point starburst is a historic symbol of Islam, one which Turkmenistan embodies in its country’s emblem. But as weird and wonderful as the buildings that incorporate the image look, none come close to the star-struck strangeness that is Turkmenistan’s Alem center.

From the front, this 312 ft high building seems to subtly contain just one eight-pointed star, but from above, the very ground it’s built on incorporates many more! Although that’s not the strangest thing about it. What do you think is inside this perplexingly circular building? Is it a giant spotlight? Or does it house the world’s biggest clock face?

Well, it actually houses the world’s largest indoor Ferris wheel. At 156 ft high, it cost approximately $90 million to build and encapsulate in this insanely ostentatious structure. But for all the delightful, star-spangled views, a ride all the way up has a few unpleasant surprises.

World's Largest Indoor Ferris Wheel - Ashgabat Turkmenistan by Beached Narwhal

As grim as it may be on the inside, the outside at night really makes up for it. Special events like New Year’s celebrations see the building lit up in a dazzling display of countless colors!

The Bailang River Bridge Ferris Wheel

China’s Weifang City is a bustling hub of life perched on top of the historic Bailang river. But it’s not the beautiful river that draws the tourists to the bridge as much as the giant metal eye perched on top of it. Built onto the base of the Bailang bridge, the Bailang River Bridge Ferris Wheel is impossible to miss.

With a diameter of 410 ft and total height of 475 ft, it’s 30 ft higher than the legendary London Eye. But, unlike the London Eye, this Ferris wheel is missing something hugely important, the spokes! Assuming it doesn’t rely on witchcraft to carry people around, how on earth does it work?

This was a question that many people asked during the megaproject’s construction phase, which saw more than 4,600 tons of steel twisted into that intricate lattice design! A huge running gear was then built onto the outer edges of the steel rim, which can rotate a total of 36 cars around it.

With each car able to carry up to 10 people, the wheel offers incredible birds eye views for up to 360 people in every 28-minute round trip! Spinning round at that height without any spokes has also meant that it’s snagged the title of the World’s Largest Spokeless Ferry Wheel!

Weifang , Big ferris wheel close to Bailang River in Weifang,Shandong 潍坊白浪河摩天轮 by Robin Lin

Although that’s not as impressive as the amount of money that went into it. Initially, the wheel was only going measure 290 ft in height, weigh 3000 tons, and cost a staggering $24 million. But the additional 185 ft and 1,600 tons means that figure will be at least 50% higher, so probably closer to an eyepopping $36 million!

The Guangzhou Circle

But when it comes to circular structures, China has more weird and wonderful megaprojects to offer than just a physics-defying Ferris wheel! If you take a look along the banks of the Pearl River in Guangdong, you’ll see a gigantic, golden, circular skyscraper!

At 452 ft tall, making it 1.5 times the height of the statue of liberty, the aptly named Guangzhou Circle is the world’s tallest circular building. Built around two corresponding concrete elevator pillars, a latticed steel structure was designed to hold the golden façade in place.

But it’s the 157 ft void punctuating the 33-storey structure that makes the entire thing cleverly look like a classic jade disc. This is an iconic symbol denoting high rank and status in Chinese culture. And considering the building serves the Guangdong Plastic Exchange, which has an annual turnover of around $48 billion, you can see why!

But there’s even more to this design, which cost around $60 million, than meets the eye. Because of its location on the water, the ring design is reflected as the number 8. In Asian culture, this number is incredibly lucky with regards to wealth and prosperity! So, while it may look weird at first glance, it this ring reflects some sheer structural genius.

The Mir Mine Eco City

Back in 1955, in a part of Siberia that even Siberians consider remote, soviet geologists made a small discovery. But today, that discovery has turned into one of the largest excavations the world has ever seen! This is the marvelous Mir mine, one of the largest diamond mines on earth, with a pit 1,722 ft deep and 3,900 ft in diameter.

That’s so deep that you could stack 75 standard mining dump trucks from the bottom of this thing to the top! Or, if you were to put the Empire State Building at the bottom, it would be more than 250 ft away from reaching the top!

In its heyday, back in the 1960’s, this profitable pit produced 10,000 carats of kimberlite diamond, which is about 2 tons worth! But after the mine ran dry in 2001 it was shut down, having produced around $17.82 billion worth of diamonds in its lifetime!

But the abandoned, gaping aperture was so monstrous to look at from the sky, that rumors began to spread. According to some, helicopters flying over the pit suddenly found themselves being sucked in, with almost no-one making it out alive!

Although no accidents like this were ever reported, its reputation as a potential death-trap wasn’t a good look for the local area. So, in 2010, innovative architectural studio AB Ellis announced that they had plans to convert the vast void into a state-of-the-art Eco City!

Spread over three main levels, this subterranean city would provide shelter for up to 100,000 people, all contained underneath a huge glass dome! The dome itself would incorporate solar panels to help power the city, and sunlight would be channeled down into lower, plant filled layers to boost the oxygen supply.

As cool as it looks on paper, sadly, this project hasn’t managed to get off, or, more accurately, out of, the ground. Though it’s hard to know what’s holding it back; those inevitably high construction costs, or trying to convince 100,000 people to move to Siberia!

The National Ignition Facility

From the outside, the building below may not look like much, but it contains a megaproject that, quite literally, defies physics.

This is the United States’ National Ignition Facility, a laser-based, inertial confinement fusion research device. For those of us that don’t speak science, it’s effectively the largest laser in the world. You’re probably familiar with lasers, and some of you might even own a laser pointer!

But now imagine that device being 3 football fields in size and made up of 192 separate beams. In a billionth of a second, this device amplifies and focuses all those powerful beams into a target the size of a single pencil eraser. This delivers so much power that it can generate temperatures up to a spicy 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, and pressures of more than 100 billion Earth atmospheres.

You wouldn’t want to go flashing that around in people’s eyes! It’s so powerful that when it’s focused on a diamond, which is the hardest material on earth, it doesn’t just crush the precious stone, it completely melts it!

But aside from being impossibly cool, what exactly is this megaproject used for? The facility was designed to help researchers gain new insights into the workings of the universe. Like how stars die out, how black holes really work, and what goes on deep inside giant gas planets. These contained thermonuclear reactions also have the potential to unlock the secrets of limitless clean energy; something our planet desperately needs!

To make this a reality, construction began on the facility in 1997. It required an excavation of more than 5.6 million cubic feet of earth, and almost 2 million cubic ft of concrete to be poured. But the crowning jewel of its construction was the placement of its 32 ft wide, 130-ton target chamber, the point where all those super powerful laser beams would converge.

Made of 4-inch thick, precisely placed aluminum panels, it took a heart pounding 30 minutes to gently lift it into place. Finally, in 2009, after 12 meticulous years of construction, this brilliant $3.5 billion venture was fired up! A staggering 2 trillion watts of electrical power, 4 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, fueled the lasers.

By 2012, that was upped to an unbelievable 500 trillion watts! While they’ve yet to top this peak power performance, it’s clear that this megaproject is helping point the way in the quest for clean energy!

Future Hadron Collider

Buried 328 ft beneath the French and Swiss countryside lies one of the most unbelievably complex machines ever created. This is the inside of the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC for short, which stretches a staggering 17 miles in circumference underground, making it the world’s largest particle accelerator.

For those of us who slept through one too many science lessons, a particle accelerator is a machine that fires elementary particles, such as electrons or protons, to super high energies. How high? In the LHC’s case, two particle beams travel at almost the speed of light before they are made to collide. So, they could make that 17-mile trip in less than a millisecond! You can’t even blink that fast!

They reach these speeds thanks to the ring of superconducting magnets which line the 17-mile structure, which are cooled to a frosty -271.3 degrees to increase their magnetic field. That’s colder than space! A colossal 1624 of these magnets, some of which measure up to a gargantuan 50 ft in length, bend and focus the particle beams. All while accelerating structures dotted around the ring boost the energy of the particles on their way!

And when these two beams collide, the huge amount of energy from their impact is jammed into such a small vacuum of space that it explodes and creates mass in the form of subatomic particles. Like a miniature big bang!

As mind-blowing as this sounds, this structure is only the beginning. In January 2019, a conceptual design was submitted for the Future Hadron Collider, which would be almost 4 times bigger than the LHC, looping around at a staggering 62 miles! At this size, scientists would be able to achieve even greater collisions that would let them look even further into the make-up of our universe.

But this super scientific endeavor won’t be cheap. The LHC alone cost an eyewatering $9 billion to build, but this future collider is expected to cost an eyewatering $24 billion! Damn, looks like this mega science project comes with a mega-price tag.

If you were amazed at the weirdest megaprojects in History, you might want to read about more megaprojects here. Thanks for reading!