Lampposts and other items from the streets were hurled through the walls of the ground floor.

CNN: Doctor's quick thinking saves patients

These walls were a testing ground where Aalto experimented with different textures, materials and designs, playing with brick, stone and ceramic swatches and setting them against various finishes and ornamental plants.

BBC: An Alvar Aalto tour of Finland

Two teams of engineers, one funded by the state of Louisiana and one based at the University of California, Berkley, have previously put the blame on the Army Corps of Engineers and on a weak layer of ground below the canal walls.

NPR: Panel's Report Assigns No Blame in Levee Failures

Then, we are on the ground within the high boundary walls of the military base and right in the heart of Helmand province.

BBC: Afghanistan: Landing in the camp

But it was a miserable place to stay, its attic full of manic squirrels, its floor a dull smear of ground-in soot and dirt, its walls impregnated with the oily emanations of ten thousand meals.

NEWYORKER: Idols

Lovingly nicknamed Anna Konda (no explanation necessary), the Norwegian bot was assembled using 20 hydraulic motors powered by a regular fire hose, whose 100 bars of pressure give it enough strength to break through walls and even lift a car right up off the ground.

ENGADGET: Anna Konda: the firefighting snakebot

The building, designed by the Rockwell Group, uses a flowing design throughout the hotel -- literally, through the lights moving up and down its walls, and symbolically, as people spill out onto the street corners from its ground floor nightclub.

BBC: The City of Light becomes the city of design

It is expected to reveal the less salubrious parts of Roman London outside of the City walls with archaeologists anticipating to encounter Roman timber-framed buildings and a street surface 6m below ground level.

BBC: Crossrail dig unearths forgotten London

Voices travel up from the ground floor in a smokestack effect and ricochet around the preserved glazed-white brick walls. (The "new" library prefers buzz over the code of silence of the old library.) How different from the older sections of the library where, for instance, one reading room has restored its carved plaster ceiling reproducing Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence.

WSJ: The Library's Future Is Not an Open Book | By Julie V. Iovine | Public Library Renovation