Twin Landmarks and Famous Replicas

Kuala Lumpur's matching pair

The Petronas Twin Towers rise 451.9 meters over Kuala Lumpur, two identical 88-storey skyscrapers designed by architect César Pelli. From 1998 to 2004 they were the tallest buildings in the world, and they still hold the title of tallest twin towers anywhere. Their steel and glass skin draws on geometric patterns from Islamic art, and each tower's floor plan grows out of an eight-pointed star.

The twins are joined by a double-decker skybridge on the 41st and 42nd floors, the highest two-story bridge in the world. It helps people move between the towers, and visitors can walk across it too, although daily tickets are limited.

Lady Liberty's little sister in Paris

New York's Statue of Liberty has a smaller twin in Paris. Americans living in the French capital gave it to the city in 1889, only three years after the original was unveiled. At 11.5 meters it is a quarter-scale version, and it stands on the Ile aux Cygnes, a narrow man-made island in the Seine near the Pont de Grenelle.

At first the statue faced east toward the Eiffel Tower. In 1937 it was turned around to face west, toward its big sister across the Atlantic. Its tablet carries two dates: July 4, 1776, and July 14, 1789.

A Greek temple in Tennessee

Nashville likes to call itself the Athens of the South, so for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897 it built a full-scale copy of the Parthenon. Architect William Crawford Smith designed it, and it was the only building at the fair that was an exact reproduction of an ancient original.

It was made of plaster, wood and brick and was never meant to last, but locals loved it too much to let it go. Today it is an art museum in Centennial Park, and inside stands Alan LeQuire's 1990 re-creation of the giant statue of Athena that once filled the original temple in Athens.

Eiffel towers everywhere, and a second Hallstatt

The 330-meter Eiffel Tower has inspired more than 50 lookalikes. The Paris Las Vegas resort has a half-scale copy that rises 540 feet, with an observation deck at 460 feet. Paris, Texas, built its own 65-foot tower in 1993, with members of the local welders' union doing the work, and in 1998 it was crowned with a shiny red cowboy hat. In China, the Tianducheng estate near Hangzhou has a 108-meter replica at the heart of its Paris-style streets.

Whole towns get copied too. Hallstatt, a lakeside salt-mining village in Austria and part of a UNESCO World Heritage landscape, gained a twin in 2012, when a full-scale replica of the town opened in Huizhou in China's Guangdong province.

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