{"id":77754,"date":"2025-10-14T12:09:18","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T12:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/77754\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T12:09:18","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T12:09:18","slug":"building-attractions-high-rise-thrills-architectural-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/77754\/","title":{"rendered":"Building Attractions: High-Rise Thrills | Architectural Record"},"content":{"rendered":"

The famous observation decks of 20th-century buildings\u2014the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, the World Trade Center\u2014were low-tech but thrilling open-air platforms ringed by coin-operated telescopes and spiky iron fences. The formula was simple: wind in your hair, city at your feet. Vertigo addicts still chase stratospheric heights, but, in 2025, standing flat-footed at 1,000 feet doesn\u2019t cut it. The thrill isn\u2019t gone, it\u2019s just higher-maintenance.<\/p>\n

The next generation of sky-high, high-tech jungle gyms packs an adrenaline punch, sporting Ferris wheels, roller coasters, and glass elevators. Urban playgrounds like New York and Shanghai can absorb spectacles; skyscraper architects have always chased the show-stopper. But when designs integrate figure eight Ferris wheels, maybe the thrill has gone too far. Nobody asked for a Six Flags Skyline Park. At least, not yet.<\/p>\n

It started innocently enough. From Berlin to Bangkok, revolving restaurants crowned towers and luxury hotels. Giant turntables in the sky revolutionized urban immersion, cocktails included. Developer-architect John Portman set the tone in 1967 with his blue-domed Hyatt Regency in Atlanta (1967). The East China Architectural Design & Research Institute rocketed the motif into retro-Jetsons parody with the Radisson Blu Hotel Shanghai New World (2003).<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, casino maverick Bob Stupak punctuated the Las Vegas Strip with the 1,149-foot Stratosphere, then the country\u2019s tallest observation tower. A revolving restaurant was just the appetizer; the real show was carnival rides bolted to the crown: step right up for Big Shot, a catapult blasting riders skyward; X-Scream, a seesaw hanging them over the neon abyss; and Insanity, a whirling arm flinging them face-down at the Strip. Even a rooftop roller coaster, the High Roller, had a brief, shaky run. SkyJump, a bungee-style leap off the tower\u2019s flank, is the Stratosphere\u2019s sole remaining hook for high rollers.<\/p>\n

\"X-Scream<\/p>\n

X-Scream dangled riders over the Strip in Las Vegas. Image Joao Carlos Medau, Wikimedia Commons, click to enlarge.<\/p>\n

Learning from Las Vegas, developers took the skyscraper circus global. Guangzhou\u2019s Canton Tower (2009), nearly 2,000 feet high, crowned itself with a necklace of orange \u201cbubble cabs\u201d creeping around the roof. Buildings in Dubai, Macau, and Melbourne joined the party, integrating drop rides and sliding glass cubes.<\/p>\n

Observatories on the black SOM giants bookending the Chicago skyline\u2014the John Hancock Center on Michigan Avenue and the Willis (formerly known as Sears) Tower in the Loop\u2014also got facelifts. Willis\u2019s Skydeck added The Ledge, four glass boxes jutting from the 103rd floor. Hancock countered with Tilt, a steel-and-glass bay hydraulically tipping eight riders 30 degrees out over the city from the 94th floor. Small protrusions barely visible from the sidewalk, but bolted onto classics of Modernism, they mark an increasingly cavalier attitude toward architectural integrity.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the race to hook thrill-hungry Manhattan tourists kicked into high gear. Two Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) towers show how spectacle seeps into design\u2014and how architects\u2019 resistance yields mixed results. First came 30 Hudson Yards, the tallest tower in the $25 billion megaproject. From the 100th floor juts Edge, a triangular beak cantilevered off the southeast corner. James von Klemperer, KPF president and design principal, concedes the beak wasn\u2019t in the original design. \u201cWe took it as a design challenge, rather than an obstacle,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s a geometric and structural integrity to harmonizing with the language of the building.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gimmicky or not, Edge has found a pulse with sunrise yoga and sunset raves\u2014more life than the development\u2019s sterile street level can muster. The tower\u2019s pyramidal roof offered a more integrated opportunity: for $185 and a harness, visitors can scale a steel stairway to the building\u2019s 1,200-foot peak.<\/p>\n

\"One<\/p>\n

Artist Kenzo Digital added a mirrored installation to the two-story observation deck at One Vanderbilt. Photo \u00a9 SL Green<\/p>\n

KPF tried with Summit, the \u201cview that changes you\u201d at One Vanderbilt, which opened in 2021. One attraction tacks twin glass elevators onto the crown. Artist Kenzo Digital turned floors 91 through 93 into a mirrored fun house. \u201cAt first I wondered if those elevators would be a scar on the building,\u201d von Klemperer says. \u201cA pristine envelope doesn\u2019t appreciate lots of extra bits.\u201d He insists the lifts barely interrupt the form but concedes the fight was lost over the ultra-low-iron glass on the observation levels. The result: a multi-story mirrored scar, visible as far away as the Brooklyn Bridge. \u201cWe objected strenuously to the interruption of this clean form, but the owner felt very strongly the views must have maximum transparency,\u201d he says. \u201cOver time, I\u2019ve come to appreciate it, like a piece of a machine uncovered.\u201d<\/p>\n

The intrusions are more disruptive still in Macau and in Batumi, Georgia\u2014two cities bound by a thrill that debuted at Chicago\u2019s 1893 World\u2019s Fair: the Ferris wheel. Batumi Tower, a 660-foot building designed by Metal Yapi in 2012, holds eight golden cabs pinned 330 feet up, cutting into the facade in the world\u2019s first attempt to jam a Ferris wheel into a skyscraper. The wheel has never worked, and the tower has changed hands multiple times. In Macau, developers doubled down with Studio City Hotel\u2019s Golden Reel, a gondola ride sporting 17 steampunk-themed cabins circulating a figure eight cutout through the building. The number eight may promise luck in Chinese culture, but the design inspiration was Hollywood hokum: \u201cTwo flaming asteroids crashed through the building facade in tandem,\u201d according to developers. The result is a summer popcorn blockbuster transformed into architecture, where form follows fantasy and function follows fear.<\/p>\n

Even landmarked towers aren\u2019t safe. At 30 Rock, a once-serene terrace is now crowded with multiple moving attractions, including Skylift, a glass pod rising above the roofline and The Beam, an elevating steel girder offering \u201clunch atop a skyscraper,\u201d Depression-era cosplay. What\u2019s next\u2014a drop ride through the Empire State\u2019s mooring mast? Not quite. Enter the Torch, a 1,067-foot-tall hotel\/thrill ride mash-up, designed by ODA Architecture, rising west of Times Square. The clickbait concept marries a standard-issue glass box to a 240-foot structural stem, crowned by a multilevel observation platform wrapped in folded glass with canted crown.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Torch is in construction in Times Square. Image courtesy ODA<\/p>\n

Plans call for a drop-ride plunging thrill seekers down the stem, cocooned by glass walls as the dizzying ambience of the Theater District accelerates toward them. Whether it survives the final build is anyone\u2019s guess. ODA\u2019s Eran Chen declined to comment; an Extell spokeswoman said it was \u201ctoo early\u201d to discuss (under-construction) building specifics. Delirious as it sounds, you can almost imagine Times Square\u2019s sensory overload swallowing the spectacle\u2014just a glass tube of screaming tourists sandwiched between 3D billboards, candy-stripe spires, and the intensifying electronic cacophony of the Great White Way-too-much.<\/p>\n

In fact, modern high-rise thrills can serve up inspired pop architecture: KPF proved it with Shanghai World Financial Center, still the high bar. The 120-foot-long glass and steel skybridge suspended from the crown\u2019s trapezoidal cutout is an enthralling fusion of form and heart-stopping function. Still, the unquenched desire to loop the ultimate loop persists, as well as the question: are we edging closer to that Six Flags Skyline Park?<\/p>\n

\u201cMaking the city into a World\u2019s Fair playground is kind of a natural development, where the structural potential is there,\u201d von Klemperer says. \u201cNew York can withstand it.\u201d With KPF firmly established among Earth\u2019s collection of skyline thrillers, he\u2019s bullish on their latest Shanghai project, a \u201ccathedral in the air\u201d atop a 1,574-foot sculptural high-rise. The silvery mixed-use tower, with a curved roofline of setbacks alluding to a magnolia\u2014the city flower\u2014will be Shanghai\u2019s first all-electric supertall. \u201cI think it will be the world\u2019s most exciting experience,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Any roller coasters, drop rides, glass elevators? \u201cNo,\u201d he admits, \u201cbut there is a helipad you can go out on. There\u2019s still that element of \u2018Can you top this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The famous observation decks of 20th-century buildings\u2014the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, the World Trade Center\u2014were low-tech but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77755,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[60440,442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-77754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-architectural-record","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}