The top 10 Modern Architectural Wonders of the World Tourists Must Visit are:
- Sydney Opera House, Sydney
- Eiffel Tower, Paris
- Christ the Redeemer statue, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- The Palm, Dubai
- Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco
- Petronas Twin Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
- The Kremlin, Moscow
- Ground Zero, New York
- CN Tower, Toronto, Canada
- The Atomium, Brussels, Belgium
The Sydney Opera House’s distinctive shell-shaped architecture make it one of the is one of the most recognizable performing arts venues in the world. It is located on Bennelong Point in Sydney Harbor, near the Sydney Harbor Bridge, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Opera House contains numerous theaters, rehearsal studios, restaurants, bars, and gift shops, and has been a venue for a variety of performing arts.
Keep a look out for more information about Sydney in the very near future.
The Eiffel Tower, designed by engineer, A. G. Eiffel, is 984 feet tall excluding the antenna and was originally built for the Paris Exposition in 1889. It is one of the most well known and tallest structures in Paris and most frequently visited sites in Europe. The Eiffel Tower is built on the Champ de Mars beside the River Seine in Paris, France.
3. Christ the Redeemer statue, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
With arms spread wide — as if to embrace the whole city of Rio de Janeiro sprawling below in spectacular disorder — the Cristo Redentor statue can be seen from all over town.
For a pedestal, the statue has the 2,310-foot mountain called Corcovado. The Christ figure on top rises another 100 feet, its arms extending nearly 92 feet from fingertip to fingertip, with a weight of some 700 tons.
French sculptor Paul Landowski and his team of artisans erected the impressive statue to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Brazil’s 1822 independence from Portugal. Due to budget constraints, however, the centennial artwork was finished nearly a decade later in 1931, and then only with help from the Vatican. Sleekly contemporary in appearance, the statue was fashioned of soapstone and concrete.
The Cristo Redentor figure vies with Sugarloaf Mountain as the emblem of the city of the cariocas. And its site offers a view over Rio that is even more spectacular than Sugarloaf’s, taking in the famous beaches at Copacabana and Ipanema, tree-lined residential neighborhoods, the bay, and a blue lagoon called Rodrigo de Freitas. Corcovado itself is enveloped within a tropical reserve where waterfalls tumble and butterflies flit through thick forests.
Local residents like to go up to see the statue by riding on a 2.3-mile cog railway whose tracks for cogwheel steam engines were laid up the mountainside in 1885. During the 20-minute ride, the train passes through leafy green tunnels of trees and provides views of Brazil’s city of pleasure and poverty, carnival and beaches, far below.
In the evening, powerful spotlights illuminate the statue of Christ, making it glow and appear almost to levitate above the darkened peak. By day or night, no matter where you may go in the city of Rio, the statue has the presence of an icon.
Rising above the waves with its fronds reaching far out into the Arabian Gulf, The Palm Jumeirah offers a perfect getaway-lifestyle within easy access of the dynamic metropolis of Dubai. Dubbed the eighth wonder of the world, The Palm Jumeirah is at the forefront of Dubai’s innovative property market and is the ultimate residential and recreation destination. With an impressive infrastructure including golf courses, luxury hotels, underwater car parks and a water-based theme parks. Property owners will also benefit from luxurious entertainment and shopping multiplexes.
The Island will comprise of 2,000 villas and 2,500 apartments in a variety of styles from Signature Villas to beachfront town homes. The Golden Mile located on the Trunk of the Palm spans 60,000 square metres and will contain 750 luxury apartments and 220 boutique shops and restaurants. The Trunk will have hotels and 22 boutique resort hotels on the Crescent. The Marina Village Centre is in the very centre of the island community. The Atlantis on the expansive beaches of the Crescent will offer various recreational amenities and entertainment. The Dive Experience, a man-made water park offers underwater adventure for both beginners and advanced divers and snorklers.
5. Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco
The Golden Gate is the North American strait connecting San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. Since 1937 it has been spanned by the Golden Gate Bridge. Technically, the ‘gate’ is defined by the headlands of the San Francisco Peninsula and the Marin Peninsula, while the ‘strait’ is the water flowing in between.
During the last Ice Age, when sea level was several hundred feet lower, the waters of the glacier-fed Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River scoured a deep channel through the bedrock on their way to the ocean. The strait is well known today for its depth and powerful tidal currents from the Pacific Ocean. Many small whirlpools and eddies can form in its waters.
Before the arrival of Europeans in the eighteenth century, the area around the strait and the bay was inhabited by the Ohlone people.
The Golden Gate is often shrouded in fog. During the summer, the heat in the California Central Valley causes the air there to rise. This can create strong winds which pull cool moist air in from over the ocean through the break in the hills caused by the Golden Gate, commonly causing a stream of dense fog to enter the bay. The strait was surprisingly elusive for early European explorers, presumably due to this persistent summer fog.
The first recorded observation of the strait occurred nearly two hundred years later than the earliest European explorations of the coast.
6. Petronas Twin Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
The Petronas Twin Towers (also known as the Petronas Towers or Twin Towers), in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia were the world’s tallest buildings, before being surpassed by the Taipei 101. However, the towers are still the tallest twin buildings and office building in the world. Tower 1 was built by Hazama Corporation and Tower 2 by Samsung Engineering & Construction and Kukdong Engineering & Construction (both of South Korea). They were the world’s tallest buildings from 1998 to 2004 if measured from the level of the main entrance to the structural top, the original height reference used by the US-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat from 1969
The Moscow Kremlin usually referred to as simply The Kremlin, is a historic fortified complex at the heart of Moscow, overlooking the Moskva River (to the south), Saint Basil’s Cathedral and Red Square (to the east) and the Alexander Garden (to the west). It is the best known of kremlins (Russian citadels) and includes four palaces, four cathedrals, and the enclosing Kremlin Wall with Kremlin towers. The complex serves as the official residence of the President of Russia.
The World Trade Center/ Ground Zero was destroyed by terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The WTC was a complex of 7 buildings in Lower Manhattan of which the Twin Towers were best known.
The Twin Towers. The two towers were different in height, the first one, built in 1972 being 417 meter and the second one, finished on year later measured 415 meter. The One World Trade Center was the highest building in the world World Trade Center until 1974, when the Sears Tower was built in Chicago. When destroyed, the Twin Towers still ranked in the top 10 of the highest buildings in the world and dominated the skyline of lower Manhattan.
The CN Tower, located in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada, is a communications and observation tower standing 1,815 ft. 5 inches (553.34 m) tall. It surpassed the height of the Ostankino Tower while still under construction in 1975, becoming the tallest free-standing structure on land in the world. On September 12, 2007, after holding the record for 31 years, the CN Tower was surpassed in height by the still-under-construction Burj Dubai.It remains the tallest free-standing structure in the Americas and the signature icon of Toronto’s skyline, attracting more than two million international visitors annually.
Despite the loss of its title as the world’s tallest freestanding structure, the CN Tower remains a symbol of Canada in a similar manner as the Empire State Building remains a symbol of the United States.
10. The Atomium, Brussels, Belgium
The Atomium is a monument built for Expo ’58, the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Designed by André Waterkeyn, it is 102-metres (335 ft) tall, with nine steel spheres connected so that the whole forms the shape of a unit cell of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times.
Tubes which connect the spheres along the 12 edges of the cube and all eight vertices to the centre enclose escalators connecting the spheres which contain exhibit halls and other public spaces. The top sphere provides a panoramic view of Brussels. Each sphere is 18 metres in diameter. Three spheres are currently (2008) closed to the visitors, others are easily reachable with escalator. The vertical vertex contains a lift which was considered very fast and advanced at the time of building (the speed is 5 m/s).
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