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Rome: The leaning tower of Pisa has been successfully stabilised and is out of danger for at least 300 years, said an engineer who has been monitoring the iconic Italian tourist attraction.
"All of our expectations have been confirmed," Michele Jamiolkowski, an engineer and geologist, was quoted as telling Italy's leading newspaper, the Corriere della Sera.
"Now we can say that the tower can rest easy for at least 300 years," Professor Jamiolkowski said in an article published yesterday.
The tower's tilt of about four metres off the vertical has remained stable in recent years, after a big engineering project that ended in 2001 corrected its lean by about 40 centimetres from where it was in 1990 when the project began.
The tower was shut to visitors for almost 12 years from 1990 - when it was sinking about a millimetre a year - and reopened in December, 2001 at the end of the biggest phase of the consolidation and restoration project.
The 14,000-tonne bell tower, an internationally recognised architectural symbol of Italy along with Rome's Colosseum, was built in several stages between 1174 and 1370.
Tower to rival the eiffel
Norman Foster, the British architect, was beaten by a Frenchman on Tuesday to the prize of building a skyscraper in Paris to rival the Eiffel Tower.
Jean Nouvel's design was chosen over four rivals for the Signal Tower in La Defense - Europe's biggest business district. Rising to 990 feet - just short of the Eiffel Tower - the winning design is intended to give a lift to a district often criticised as coldly professional and dead after office hours.
Set in parkland, the rectangular edifice, which will be covered in matt stainless steel, will contain offices, flats, hotels, shops and restaurants.
Nouvel, winner of this year's Pritzker Architecture Prize - the industry's top award - said the building would resemble superimposed boxes, with huge open terraces. Foster, who designed the Gherkin in London and the Millau bridge in southern France, had proposed a 974-foot spiralling tower including offices, a hotel and a design foundation, but no flats.
"The Signal Tower will be the reference building for Greater Paris," said Patrick Devedjian, the president of the Hauts-de-Seine council, the body overseeing building at La Defense.
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