Ostankino Tower

The Ostankino Tower is a television and radio broadcasting tower 540.1 meters tall in the Ostankino district of Moscow, the tallest structure in Russia and in Europe. The tower replaced the former transmission center at the Shukhov Tower on Shabolovka Street, whose capacity was sufficient only for receiving the signal within Moscow and its surrounding region. In 1953 engineers proposed building a television center in the capital with an antenna tower about 500 meters high, and on 15 July 1955 the USSR Council of Ministers issued a resolution on the construction of a new television transmission center; a suitable site was found on the grounds of the Ostankino tree nursery.

An all-Union competition for the tower's design was won by an institute that proposed a lattice steel structure similar to the Eiffel Tower, but the engineer Nikolai Nikitin put forward an alternative — a tower of monolithic concrete, stabilized by 149 tensioned steel cables. According to Nikitin himself, the idea for the conical base came to him in a dream image of an inverted lily; the engineering solution was also based on earlier work by Yuri Kondratyuk. Construction began in the summer of 1960 but was suspended in the spring of 1961 over doubts about the reliability of the shallow foundation; work resumed after the number of supports was increased from four to ten on the recommendation of the German engineer Fritz Leonhardt. The final design was approved in March 1963, and the ultimate height was set at 540 meters.

The television tower, named in honor of the "50th Anniversary of October," began transmitting a signal on 4 November 1967 and was fully commissioned on 26 December 1968; at the time of its completion it was the tallest structure in the world, but in 1975 it ceded that record to Canada's CN Tower. In 1969 an observation deck and a three-story revolving restaurant, "Seventh Heaven," opened at a height of about 340 meters.

On 27 August 2000 a major fire broke out in the tower, caused by an overload of high-frequency cables: the blaze destroyed three floors, damaged the elevators and communication systems, and three staff members died in the accident. Thanks to the fire resistance of its concrete shaft, the tower continued to operate throughout the 2000–2007 reconstruction that followed. Guided tours resumed in 2009, the observation deck reopened in 2011, and the "Seventh Heaven" restaurant was restored only in 2016. Today the tower's broadcasts reach a population of more than 15 million people, and it is a member of the World Federation of Great Towers.