Twentieth-century New York showed the world that skyscrapers can be more than just tall buildings. Now Manhattan’s dazzling crowns are inspiring a "worldwide surge of signature tops,” says Carol Willis, the director of Manhattan’s Skyscraper Museum and an expert on buildings of 100 stories or more. Indeed, with more than a dozen such “supertalls” rising in Asia and the Middle East, the sky is getting quite a few new baubles.
Will any of them be as exciting as the pinnacles of the Chrysler and Empire State Building? The intriguing exhibition Ten Tops, at the Skyscraper Museum (through August), includes all manner of skyscraper pinnacles meant to dazzle, both from a distance and up close, where tourists crowd their atriums and observation decks. C.Y. Lee and Partners, designers of Taipei 101, which had a seven-year reign as the world’s tallest building, turned the tower’s “tuned mass damper,” a giant weight used to keep it from swaying uncomfortably in heavy winds, into an attraction. This damper is a 660-ton, gold-painted sphere hung from eight steel cables. It can move as much as five feet in high winds. Visitors find the ball transfixing.
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