Not Too Tall to Fail

In an epic failure, according to Madrid’s El Pais newspaper, a 20-story condominium building (InTempo, likely the tallest residential edifice in the European Union) in the resort town of Benidorm, Spain, was hastily upsized to a planned 47 stories, but a series of architectural mistakes and developer bankruptcies has left it limping, still 65 percent unsold. Most notably, El Pais discovered in 2012 that the then-current design made it impossible to build an elevator shaft to go past the 23rd floor because of space limitation. The architects resigned, and unconfident developers were forced to turn to financing from one of the shakier banks in the country’s feeble economy.