Within the next couple of years, 80 percent of the Turkish town of Hasankeyf will be submerged. The country’s water-resources agency plans to flood the area, home to 12,000 years of history, as part of the reservoir of a massive new hydroelectric dam. In preparation, workers are loading some of the town’s landmark structures onto wheeled platforms and moving them to higher ground.
This isn’t the first time engineers have been tasked with relocating massive structures. China has relocated a number of buildings over the past 20 years, from temples and homes to a four-story, 1,149-seat concert hall. In the U.S., the Hotel Pelham in Boston was moved way back in 1869, and other hotels — as well as theaters, office buildings and even lighthouses — have been relocated in the decades since.
These structures sometimes are moved to get them out of the path of urban redevelopment plans or infrastructure projects, other times to protect them from sea level rise and erosion — which, increasingly, leaves coastal buildings on shaky footing. Sometimes, critics oppose such moves, arguing they destroy a site’s cultural context.
Either way, structural relocation — generally done by towing buildings whole along roads or rails, or by disassembling and then reassembling them — presents massive engineering challenges.
Here’s how experts handled one of the trickiest moves in the United States, back in 1999: the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
