The fascinating history of the century-old sport of ‘buildering’ 

Last Saturday, more than six million people held their breath as Alex Honnold took his first step up Taipei 101. The Free Solo climber, who went on to ascend Taiwan’s tallest building without the safety of a rope and harness, drew crowds all around the building, as well as on Netflix, where the ascent was live-streamed as part of a show called Skyscraper Live.

Some of these people had likely already watched Honnold scale the 3,000-foot rock wall of Yosemite’s El Capitan. But for many, the climber’s ascent up a man-made structure was likely an introduction to an altogether different kind of climbing: not on the face of a cliff, but the side of a building.

This type of sport is called “buildering” (from bouldering, to climb boulders) and it has been happening for more than a century.

From rock to concrete

For decades, the ultimate challenge for climbers was nature itself. Modern rock climbing took shape in the late 19th century, when alpinists ventured beyond traditional mountaineering and onto steeper, more technical cliffs. By the mid-20th century, climbers embraced “free climbing,” meaning they relied on their hands and feet to move upward while using ropes only as a safety backup in case of a fall. Then, in the ’70s and ’80s, free-soloists like John Bachar pushed the sport to its extreme, stripping away the rope entirely and turning every move into a high-stakes commitment.

Now, “buildings are the next challenge,” says 70-year-old American climber Dan Goodwin, who has climbed a dozen buildings, including the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, and Millenium Tower in San Francisco.

Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and the majority of climbers train in gyms. “They get out of the gym and what are they looking at? High rises,” says Goodwin. But climbing a building isn’t the same as climbing the face of a mountain. With rock climbing, every move is different, but climbing a building calls for repetition, which Goodwin says “attacks the muscle.” Hips cramp, shoulders start to burn: “It gets real quick, and I want to start educating people about how dangerous it is.”

A brief history of “buildering”

The thought of scaling the face of a building may send the average person into a tizzy, but people have been climbing buildings for almost as long as there have been buildings to climb.

The earliest documented example dates back to 1901, when British alpinist Geoffrey Winthrop-Young anonymously published The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity College, mapping the architecture of the campus as a series of climbing routes. Some decades later, “human flies” like George Polley and Harry Gardiner scaled buildings in cities like New York City and Boston.

By the 1980s and ’90s, buildering had entered mainstream with televised (not live) ascents by “SpiderDan” Goodwin, and French climber Alain Robert, who went on to scale the Empire State Building, with no rope, and the Burj Khalifa with a safety rope and harness. (While Roberts was the first to ascend Taipei 101, Honnold was the first to do it rope-free.)

Over the course of those years, buildings have changed drastically. According to Young’s original guide, buildings with good holds featured recessed window frames, narrow chimneys, and continuous parapets—architectural quirks that made climbing easier.

With the advent of steel and concrete construction, many of these features disappeared in favor of sleek glass curtain walls, and climbing buildings became so much harder that some climbers have resorted to aids like suction cups and sky hooks—small devices that help climbers hang off tiny edges—to scale smooth facades.

Goodwin was one of those climbers. In 1981, he climbed Chicago’s Sears Tower (now known as the Willis Tower) using suction cups and sky hooks. “As climbers, we would prefer relying on our physical strength than on a suction cup,” he told me. “I almost died because of my suction cups.”

But “architecture dictates everything,” as Goodwin put it, and the tower had no suitable hand or foot holds. Plus, the climber had recently been issued a challenge he had to rise to.

In 1980, a fire engulfed the MGM Grand fire in Las Vegas and killed 85 people after smoke spread rapidly through the building. Goodwin was deeply affected by the fire, and as he watched firefighters struggle to reach people trapped on upper floors, he argued that climbers could be trained to scale skyscrapers during emergencies. When a local fire marshal dismissed the idea and challenged him to climb a building himself, Goodwin took it literally—and went on to climb the Sears Tower, then the tallest building in the world. “That conversation changed my life,” he says.

Goodwin, whose memoir, Untethered, is set to come out in the spring, went on to climb over a dozen buildings around the world, including the CN Tower in Toronto, which he climbed in 1986—twice in the same day—using only his hands and feet. The hardest climbs, he said, were those with slick glass that called for suction cups. The easiest were buildings with clearly defined features.

Taipei 101, with its stacked, bamboo-like segments and decorative dragon heads, fits into the latter category. “So many beautiful handhold features,” he says.

The next era of “buildering”

Perhaps these complications are the reason why, after more than 100 years of existence, the sport today remains dominated by just a few big names—from legacy figures like Robert and Goodwin, to younger climbers like the 26-year-old George King, who famously climbed The Shard in 2019 before base jumping off the top, and Honnold, whose career focused on rock climbing before he took on Taipei 101.

Today, the buildering community remains small. In fact, according to Andy Day, a climber and photographer who wrote a paper on buildering in 2017, to call it a “community” would be generous. “It’s a more niche, sub-cultural level of interest,” he says, noting interest has largely ebbed and flowed over the years.

“The discipline required to do what someone like Alain Roberts or Alex Honnold do is just so unique that it’s not going to happen very often,” he told me, adding, with a laugh, that there are enough well-equipped gyms serving hot coffee to keep climbers satisfied.

But “SpiderDan” believes Honnold’s live-streamed climb might usher in a new era for urban climbers. “I know every climber is going to be walking through cities now and looking at what buildings they could climb,” he says.

Honnold—who kicked off his ascent with a casual nod to the camera and ended it 91 minutes later with a low-key “sick!”—made his climb look like a walk in the park. But Goodwin knows urban climbers need the same regulations as rock climbers, so he is now working on a separate book in the hopes of making urban climbing safer.

“We need to come up with standards, and ethics, and rules that govern future generations,” he says, “because you think you’re the only ones right now, but I know other people climbing buildings, and in the next year or two, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see fifty to 100 ascents.”

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