In what will surely go down in history as one the greatest architectural blunders, the town of Benidorm in Alicante, Spain, had almost completed its 47-story skyscraper when it realized it excluded plans for elevator shafts.
Impossible. There is literally no way that it got to this stage of development without people realizing there weren't elevators. Corruption, greed.. sure. But this wasn't a blunder in the sense that they recently realized they were missing. Odd.
This is the Seattle Central Library: It was designed by Rem Koolhaas, and is the crown jewel of Seattle Architecture. I did not work on it, but I know a lot of people who did. It does not have "floors" it has "spirals" (which are not ADA compliant, by the way), whereby if you walk around the perimeter of the 9th floor, you will find yourself on the 1st floor after nine revolutions. Because of this "feature" it was determined that the best way to navigate the structure was to take the central escalator, which only lets you off on the 5th and 9th floors. In other words, if you need to get to the 7th floor your choice is to get off at 5 and walk 800 yards left or get off at 9 and walk 800 yards right. Which would be one thing. Hey, you're getting your exercise. Unless you have a cane or crutches, in which case you hate life, or unless you're in a wheelchair, in which case you get to ride a 4-person elevator to the 9th floor and then ride the brakes all the way down. Where things go truly pear-shaped is when you've gotten your book off the 7th floor and now you need to get back. Because the "down" escalator got value-engineered out at 95%CD. Remember that 4-person handicapped elevator? Yeah. You get to "spiral" up to the 9th floor and ride it down to 1. No wonder most of the people in the library itself are homeless folx looking for shelter.