Building things underground can sometimes be even more of an architectural feat than building them aboveground. Underground structures are difficult to build for a variety of reasons, including the fact that underground structures have a lot of weight over top of them. That means the biggest underground structures are always an architectural feat. Here are six of the largest man-made underground structures.
Deepest Subway Station: Ukraine
Although you might have some experience with going underground to catch the subway, you probably don’t have as much as experience as people catching the metro in Kyiv, Ukraine. It’s 346 feet below ground, making it the deepest subway station in the world. This is largely because the town of Arsenala, which is where the station exits, is on top of a tall mountain. However, the two stations surrounding it are at ground level. The metro goes through the mountain, stops in the center, and then exits the other side.
Deepest Basement: Australia
The Sydney Opera House may be one of the most distinctive buildings out there, but its below-ground side is just as distinctive to people who are interested in architecture. The underground parking garage underneath the Sydney Opera House is the world’s deepest basement at 120 feet. Plus, to stick to fire escape regulations, this design is truly innovative.
Longest Underground Tunnel: Switzerland
The Swiss Alps is one of the most beautiful mountain ranges in Europe and it also includes the Gotthard Base Tunnel, which is a 35-mile tunnel that opened to the public back in 2016. It’s a flat tunnel that includes absolutely no elevation climb, which means that construction workers had to remove around 28 million metric tons of 73 different kinds of rock to create the tunnel.
Biggest Underground City: Turkey
Underground cities have always been an interesting point of research for many people, and they’re proof that engineering feats have existed for decades. Cappadocia has underground cities that date back to 1200 B.C, with a specific area that reaches 18 stories deep. The city was actually discovered in 1963 by accident; a Turkish man knocked down a wall in his basement, which led to a tunnel that opened up to the city underneath Cappadocia.
Deepest Building Foundation: United States
Salesforce Tower is one of the tallest buildings in the United States at 1,070 feet or 61 stories, and that means it also needed an extremely stable foundation. Plus, because it’s in San Francisco, which is well-known for having earthquakes, it needed an even more stable foundation than taller skyscrapers in other areas. That’s why the Salesforce Tower has a 310-foot-deep foundation, making it the deepest building foundation in the world. This foundation also set new standards for seismic safety, as it was necessary to build it in San Francisco.
Deepest Underground Research Center: China
There are many reasons to have an underground research center; when doing extremely sensitive physics experiments, cosmic radiation can actually have an impact on the outcome of the experiments. However, doing these experiments a mile underground can reduce the cosmic noise impact by a factor of 10 million. The Jinping Underground Laboratory, which is 7,900 feet deep, is the perfect place for people to do these extremely sensitive experiments. Plus, because it’s in a former gold mine in the center of a mountain, vehicles can simply drive to the laboratory.
Conclusion
Underground structures are one of the perfect places to expose how incredible architectural feats can be. It takes building teams and design teams years to craft these structures, even today. Whether you yourself are an architect or you’re just an everyday individual with a love of architectural phenomena, anyone can appreciate how much work went into making these incredible architectural feats possible.
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