Photo Gallery Scrubbing Down Brussels' Atomium
Dark stains left by kerosene from aircraft flying overhead must be polished away by hand from the Atomium, a stainless steel monument in Brussels. A team of five specialists was hired this fall to complete the task.
The cleaning takes several weeks, with the team taking about three days to clean each of the nine spheres. Each of the spheres, representing atoms in the molecule, has a surface area of 1,000 square meters (10,760 square feet).
The cleaning process costs around 72,000 ($93,513).
"My mother is pretty worried about it sometimes," said Olivier Delecosse, a member of the cleaning crew shown here on the left, about his work. "But now she's proud of me, because the Atomium is so famous."
Contructed for the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels, the Atomium was only supposed to last six months, the duration of the event. Today, the Atomium has joined the Manneken Pis as a famous Brussels landmark and, according to some, is "the most Belgian of all buildings."
In 2008, two years after the completion of a multimillion dollar renovation, Belgium celebrated the Atomium's 50th anniversary. The monument attracts around 600,000 visitors each year.
The Atomium's design reflects an iron crystal molecule enlarged 165 billion times. The structure is 102 meters (335 feet) tall and each of the nine interconnected steelclad spheres has a diameter of 18 meters.
