KEY POINTS:
Auckland's Sky Tower celebrates its 10th anniversary today, with a weekend celebration of fireworks and birthday cakes to mark becoming one of the country's most iconic buildings.
The controversy and debate around the decision to build the Sky Tower has long subsided, despite it dramatically changing Auckland's skyline
forever. The tower is now a major tourist attraction for the city.
Construction of the tower was something unlike anything undertaken in New Zealand at the time and sophisticated techniques were needed to ensure the tower was perfectly straight.
During construction of the shaft laser beams were used to ensure its vertical lines.
The tower, constructed from a high-strength, high-performance concrete, is a reinforced concrete shaft 12 metres in diameter, supported by eight reinforced concrete "legs" at the base.
The tower's foundations go down more than 13 metres.
It is higher than the Eiffel Tower and Sydney's Tower.
Safety was also crucial and it was designed to provide a high level of performance during an earthquake, severe wind storms or a fire.
As a result the tower can remain undamaged during storms with winds gusting to 200km/h and studies show the tower can resist a 7.0 strength earthquake - if it's located 40km from the tower (on the Kerepehi Fault) - leaving it essentially undamaged.
But apart from its size and sturdiness, the tower has become a major attraction for overseas visitors and New Zealanders.
It has also attracted the unwanted.
On election night, September 19 2005, the tower was evacuated after an Auckland man hijacked a light aircraft and threatened to crash it into the tower, before eventually crashing into the sea at Kohimarama Beach on the Auckland waterfront.
Police afterwards said the aircraft was too small to have seriously threatened the tower and would not have brought it down but could have knocked off the top part.
Sky Tower worker Leigh Robinson has seen her fair share of visitors to the tower, having worked at the building since it opened. She said she would not want to work anywhere else.
After joining in July 1997, Ms Robinson told NZPA she spent three weeks training before becoming a ticketer, then a tower host, before settling into her role now in the gift shop.
"I think I've been up the tower quite a few thousand times, but that is not as much as some people."
There were now just five of the original workers left who started when the tower opened, she said.
While the views from the tower were outstanding people can get "freaked-out" by the heights, especially with the glass floor on the observation deck, she said.
"It's not as scary at night."
Despite admitting to some initial nerves herself over the heights when she first started, the tower was "an icon", she said.
The Warriors were to help celebrate the tower's birthday with the cutting of a cake this evening, followed by fireworks and other events planned over the weekend.
SKY TOWER FACTS
Auckland, Aug 3 NZPA - Sky Tower facts:
* At 328 metres, the Sky Tower is the tallest tower in the Southern Hemisphere. The Eiffel Tower in Paris is 320m high and Sydney's Centre Point is 304m high.
* The Sky Tower weighs 20,000 tonnes and used 15,000 cubic metres of concrete, 2000 tonnes of reinforcing steel and 170 tonnes of steel in the mast.
* The Sky Tower shaft measures 12 metres in diameter with the base supported by eight reinforced concrete legs, each two metres in diameter. They sit on the foundation which is a 2.5 metre deep concrete pad supported by 16 1.8 metre diameter piles which penetrate 13.5 metres into the sandstone base.
* It took two years and nine months to build Sky Tower and during part of the tower construction, rose at four metres a week.
* There are 1267 steps from the base of the tower to the Sky Deck.
* It was designed to emerge undamaged from an earthquake measuring seven on the Richter Scale. An eight magnitude earthquake would leave it still standing and able to be reused.
* On a clear day visibility from the observation decks is about 82km.
- NZPA