Tools: Alex Honnold Completes Taipei 101 Skyscraper Climb Without Ropes Or...
• Bold attempt: American rock climber Alex Honnold summited the Taipei 101 skyscraper — with no ropes or safety net — in an event broadcast live. CNN is on the scene, and we’ll bring you the latest.
• New heights: The 1,667-foot Taipei 101 is one of the tallest skyscrapers in the world. Honnold told CNN that the challenges in climbing a building are different from scaling rock faces, and that he’d been wanting to scale a skyscraper for about a decade.
• Gripping scenes: Honnold is best known for climbing the 3,000-foot El Capitan without safety gear in 2017.
When you look at photos of the Taiwanese capital, an iconic skyscraper stands out on its skyline: Taipei 101.
At 1,667 feet tall (508 meters) with 101 floors, it was the world’s tallest building for several years until it was usurped by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Several more skyscrapers have since surpassed the record, but it remains a spectacle in Taipei as it is the tallest building in the city.
It’s composed of eight stacked segments that evoke the image of bamboo, and is built to withstand the strong earthquakes and typhoons that often strike the island. It’s constructed with reinforced concrete — combining concrete’s compressive strength with steel’s tensile strength makes the building flexible enough to sway, yet rigid enough to resist high winds.
High within the tower is another technological innovation — a huge orb-like device known as a tuned mass damper, which acts like a pendulum that counteracts (or “dampens”) swaying motions.
Today the skyscraper has various uses: as retail and office space, and as a tourist attraction with an observation deck on the upper floors.
Alex Honnold said in a news conference that he hopes people will draw inspiration from his climb of Taipei 101 to chase their own goals.
“One of the things that I learned from the film ‘Free Solo’ over the years is that people often take the message that they need from it,” he said, referring to the 2018 documentary of his record-breaking free solo of El Capitan in Yosemite.
Source: HackerNews
