The Transamerica Pyramid is the tallest skyscraper in the San Francisco skyline. Its height is surpassed by Salesforce Tower, currently under construction. The building no longer houses the headquarters of the Transamerica Corporation, which moved its U.S. headquarters to Baltimore, Maryland, but it is still associated with the company and is depicted in the company’s logo. Designed by architect William Pereira and built by Hathaway Dinwiddie Construction Company, at 853 ft (260 m), on completion in 1972 it was the eighth tallest building in the world.
Building facts:
There are 48 floors, 15 passenger elevators, 3 freight elevators, and 3,678 windows.
Because of the shape of the building, the majority of the windows can pivot 360 degrees so they can be washed from the inside.
The decorative aluminum spire at the top is 212-feet tall – roughly 20 stories.
The spire is actually hollow and lined with a 100-foot steel stairway at a 60 degree angle, followed by two steel ladders.
The conference room (with 360 degree views of the city) is located on the 48th floor and can be booked for $400-600 dollars…an hour.
The building is covered in crushed white quartz, giving it its pure white color.
It takes 18,000 work hours to get “brightened” every 10 years, last occurring in 2007.
The building is a tall, four-sided pyramid with two “wings” to accommodate an elevator shaft on the east and a stairwell and a smoke tower on the west.
The Battle of Aleppo is a military confrontation in Aleppo, the largest city in Syria, between the Syrian opposition (including Free Syrian Army, and Sunni fighters, including Levant Front) in partial cooperation with the Army of Conquest, which includes within it Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly al-Qaida’s Syrian branch, against the Syrian Armed Forces of the Syrian Government, supported by Hezbollah and Shiite militias and Russia, and against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units. The battle began on 19 July 2012 and is part of the Syrian Civil War.
The battle’s scale and importance led combatants to name it the “mother of battles” or “Syria’s Stalingrad”. The battle has been marked by the Syrian army’s indiscriminate use of barrel bombs dropped from helicopters, killing thousands of people, and purposeful targeting of civilians, including hospitals and schools, by the Syrian government, its Russian allies and rebels. Hundreds of thousands have been forced to evacuate. On 6 October 2016, President Bashar al-Assad offered amnesty to militants in the city, offering to evacuate them and their families to safe areas; the militants refused this proposal because they did not trust Assad and feared such an arrangement would lead to a purge of Sunni Muslims in Eastern Aleppo.
Before and after photos
In late September 2016, Russia and Syria began performing nightly air raids on rebel-held parts of the city. Russian and Syrian forces were also accused of conducting “double tap” airstrikes which purposefully targeted rescue workers and first responders at hospitals and other civilian structures that they had already bombed, however this is disputed by government and Russian sources. To prevent civilian casualties, Syrian and Russian forces opened up humanitarian corridors to allow the civilian population of Aleppo to evacuate, away from the fighting. During evacuation, several East Aleppo residents reported that evacuating civilians were shelled by rebels. During the 2016 Syrian government offensive, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that “crimes of historic proportions” were being committed in Aleppo.
Following the re-capture of parts of Aleppo by the Syrian government in December, the United Nations received reports that pro-government forces were carrying out massacres of civilians in Eastern Aleppo. At least 82 civilians were killed, including children, described as ‘war crimes’.
The battle caused catastrophic destruction to the Old City of Aleppo, a UNESCO World Heritage site. With over four years of fighting, it represents one of the longest sieges in modern warfare and one of the bloodiest battles of the Syrian Civil War, which left an estimated 31,000 people dead, almost a tenth of the overall war casualties.
The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza (known commonly as the Empire State Plaza, and less formally as the South Mall) is a complex of several state government buildings in downtown Albany, New York.
The complex was built between 1965 and 1976 at an estimated total cost of $2 billion. It houses several departments of the New York State administration and is integrated with the New York State Capitol, completed in 1899, which houses the state legislature. Among the offices located at the plaza are the Department of Health and the Biggs Laboratory of the Wadsworth Center.
Architectural style
Modernist, Brutalist, International
The buildings constituting the plaza include:
the four Agency office buildings (numbered “Agency 1” through “Agency 4”)
the Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd Tower
The Egg (a theater)
the Cultural Education Center (State Museum, Library, and Archives)
the Robert Abrams Building for Law and Justice (known previously as the Justice Building)
the Legislative Office Building (LOB)
the Swan Street Building (sectioned into “Core 1” through “Core 4”)
The buildings are set around a row of three reflecting pools. On the west side are the four 23-story, 310-foot (94 m) Agency towers. On the east side is the Egg (Meeting Center) and the 44-floor (589-foot (180 m)) Erastus Corning Tower, which has an observation deck on the 42nd floor. On the south end is the Cultural Education Center, set on a higher platform; and on the north end is the New York State Capitol. While the Capitol predates the plaza, it is connected to the Concourse by an escalator which allows underground access to the rest of the plaza, most notably (to the New York State Legislature, at least), the Legislative Office Building.
Blade Runner is a 1982 American tech noir science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos. The screenplay, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, is a modified film adaptation of the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
2019 is the year where the events of Blade Runner take place. The specific month, November, is given after the opening titles and crawl of the movie have played. The city of Los Angeles of 2019 is depicted as an technologically advanced society.
The Giant Screens on the sides of buildings are some of the most surreal images in the movie.
Beijing is the capital of the People’s Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a total population of 21,150,000 as of 2013. The city proper is the 3rd most populous in the world.
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