What is the name of the furthest leaning tower in the world? The Leaning Tower of Pizza (Pisa), right? Wrong.

The answer is in fact, the Capital Gate. The Capital Gate is a skyscraper in Abu Dhabi, adjacent to the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre. Unlike the mistake of the leaning tower of Pisa, the Capital Gate was purposely designed with a striking lean using a number of clever architectural principals.

The Impressive Capital Gate

At 160 m (520 ft) and 35 stories, it is one of the tallest buildings in the city as well as leaning an impressing 18° to the west. It’s more common used name is ‘The Leaning Tower Of Abu Dhabi’ and in 2010 it was listed in the Guinness World Records for being the “Worlds furthest leaning man-made tower”. The tower is owned by the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre and is the focal point of the city capital center.

The Architects that designed the Capital Gate used an architectural term called ‘pre-cambered core’, a core of concrete, reinforced with steel. The core was deliberately built slightly off-center to give the building its famous lean. To keep the strength in the foundation of the impressive skyscraper, architects also designed the structure to be anchored to the ground by 490 piles (deep foundational structures) which are drilled 20-30 meters underground to combat gravitational pull.

Along with this reinforced strength, the building has a diagrid especially designed to absorb the strong forces of the wind and seismic loading contributing to the structure by both its lean and height.

The lean of the building was achievable by particularly well planned engineering that allows floor plates to be stacked vertically and then stacked over each other up to the 12^th storey.  This allows the tower to lean.

This fantastic world icon was designed by architectural firm RMJM and houses the 5-starr Hyatt Capital Gate Hotel as well as office space.