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McGruber writes:

Eugeniu Iordachescu, a Romanian civil engineer who helped save some of Bucharest’s most emblematic churches from destruction in the 1980s by literally rolling them to safety, died on Jan. 4 at his home in Bucharest. He was 89.

[...] In the 1980s, Mr. Iordachescu was working at the Project Institute of Bucharest, a design and engineering center. Around that time Romania’s dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, set about radically redesigning the center of the city, inspired by the architecture and the style of city planning he had seen on a visit to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.

[...] Mr. Iordachescu came up with the idea of digging under the buildings and putting a reinforced concrete support beneath them; the structures could then be placed on tracks. After that, engineers would sever the foundations and use hydraulic levers and mechanical pulleys to move the buildings to their new locations. Foundations would be put in place at the other end to support the relocated structures.

When he had first raised the idea with colleagues, Mr. Iordachescu was told that it wasn’t possible, that the buildings would fall over. He persuaded some engineers to try, and received verbal permission from government officials — though no one was willing to give permission in writing, in case the experiment failed.

“I find what they did extraordinary,” Viorel Speteanu, the editor of the book “Eugeniu Iordachescu: A Savior of Architectural Monuments,” said in an interview. “The ideas flew around. The movements of these buildings, both churches and civil buildings, I think this is an extraordinary achievement, and I will never stop praising him for his accomplishment.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/obituaries/eugeniu-iordachescu-dead.html

Original Submission