My palms are sweating as I write this post, because even the thought of someone free soloing a skyscraper makes me clammy. (Free solo means climbing with no ropes.) But that's what climber Alex Honnold is scheduled to do live, on Netflix, on January 23, 2026, at 8 PM ET.
He will be climbing Taipei 101, which is over 500 meters tall, one of the tallest buildings in the world, and formerly the world's tallest. Dubai's Burj Khalifa stole this superlative in 2009 when it was completed.
My palms continue to sweat, but Alex is of the opinion that, as far as enormous towers go, this one is relatively safe for free soloing:
Honnold said the shape of the building makes it safer to climb because there are balconies every eight floors. “You could actually fall in tons of places and not actually die, which makes it safer than a lot of rock climbing objectives,” he said.
I can see the logic.
The architecture of Taipei 101 consists of inverted trapezoids that are stacked on top of each other. Each is 8 storeys tall and they angle outward as you move up, creating a roof condition or terrace on top of each module.
Eight is an important number in Chinese culture because of a homophone in Mandarin; the number sounds like "to prosper" or "to make a fortune." So that's why the modules are the height that they are.
It is now also dawning on me that the nested modules of One Delisle are 8 storeys tall. That's good! This was never talked about during the design phase, but now that I'm aware of it, I'm going to pretend it was deliberate.
I guess this also means that One Delisle would be a relatively safe building to free solo climb. Please, nobody try this.
Good luck, Alex.
Yikes. To be completely honest, I was not expecting this post and this post to blow up in the way that they did. But hey, here we are and here's the blogTO article: "Developer shames City of Toronto into issuing permit for bold new skyscraper." What all of this suggests is that most people are shocked by how long it takes and how difficult it is to build a building. I mean, what I wrote about is just one sliver among the countless other things that need to come together for it to happen. But to my mind, these are productive discussions to be having. Because the more everyone is aware, the more likely we are to improve things.
Brian Potter, of Construction Physics, recently tried to determine which cities build skyscrapers the fastest.
Here's how he went about that:
He started by looking up the 50 largest cities in the world on Wikipedia
He then pulled data from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat to get a list of every skyscraper completed between 2000-2020 that was over 100 meters, had a start and completion date, and had a gross floor area
The result was a list of 986 skyscrapers completed in 39 cities, most of which (~740) were completed in the US, China, Japan, and Canada
Finally, he calculated completed square feet per year and made some charts
Here are the results:
And here's one thing he had to say about them:
Interestingly enough, the huge outlier in slow construction isn't the US, but Canada, with an average skyscraper construction speed of half that of the US’s.
For a lot more information on this topic, click here.