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This skyscraper in Manchester howls when it's windy and it isn't even one of those art projects

The architect has acknowledged that it's causing 'distress'

Christopher Hooton
Monday 30 November 2015 13:58 GMT
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(place910)

In Estonia they quite intentionally have a 230ft organ that’s played mellifluously by the sea. In Manchester they have a skyscraper that accidentally shrieks pure sonic fear into your soul whenever there’s a strong wind.

Yes, as if blighting our skylines weren’t bad enough, the UK’s vertiginous glass skyscrapers are now screaming at us.

Manchester’s Beetham Tower has been terrorising locals for a while now, and on Sunday a video of it was posted on YouTube.

It starts off calmly enough, sounding almost like a whale, but as the wind picks up it moves into banshee/air ride siren territory before just sounding like the part of a horror film score when the protagonist is walking through her now strangely alien house, knife in hand.

"I am completely aware of the noise because I live at the top of the building," architect Ian Simpson said back in 2012 (no-one’s done anything about it), after explaining that the noise is caused by wind rushing over the blade at the tower's top.

"At the end of the day it's not supposed to make noise. We have got to address that because it's causing distress."

(via Mashable)

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