Tilt: a Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa

Continuing in the architectural realm, I decided to try Nicholas Shrady's cleverly designed book, Tilt: a skewed history of the Tower of Pisa. Grant you the design of the book is a marketing gimmick, but it works. This is an entertaining and quick read. Shrady quickly recounts the history of the bell tower that was begun in 1173 and not completed until 1370. The tower today continues to captivate the world's imagination.

He summarizes the tower's history, including its importance for the city of Pisa, explains why the story of Galileo's use of the tower to conduct experiments on falling objects was probably fabricated by one of the master's disciples; discusses the 19th-century Romantic poets' fanciful idea that the tower's tilt was deliberate; and tells the story of the tower's near destruction by the Allies in WWII after they discovered that the Germans were using it as an observation post. Perhaps one of the more intriguing aspects of the tower's history is that the original architect is unknown. He probably did not want his name connected to the structure, because the tower was built on unstable subsoil, and started to lean toward the south shortly after construction began.

Shrady also discusses the numerous commissions throughout the tower's history that have studied the problem and outlines a series of unsuccessful stabilizing attempts, until the most recent commission in 1997, which successfully stabilized the tower's TILT through a soil extraction process on the North side of the tower.