Much of the romance of a big city, for me, lies in the skyscrapers. I love how you can spot the most prominent buildings in a skyline from countless places in the city. Here in Taipei, the one such building is undoubtedly the Taipei 101. I spy it crossing a bridge on a bus back into the city from the east; I climb a nearby mountain and it dominates the skyline; I walk to work and am pleasantly surprised to see the spire peeking over the tops of the trees at Da’an Park.
The Taipei 101 is designed in tiers meant to resemble bamboo. Evoking a sense of sturdiness, it stands like a sentinel over the city, a looming, constant presence.
Skyscrapers are designed to be icons that symbolize a place—if this is simply good advertising, I’ve fallen for it. The Duomo in Florence, the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the lesser known 85 Sky Tower in the city that raised me. These silhouettes paste themselves into my memories and surface in my dreams.
Here in Taipei, the 101 seems to represent the best of what this society is capable of. Some of the fastest elevators in the world speed you to the top. There, if you look inside the building, you can see the mass damper, a giant metal ball hanging inside the 90th floor designed to stabilize the building against earthquakes.
And while we’re speaking of the impressive, spotting the exterior of the building often makes me think of Alex Honnold, the legendary free climber who scaled the entire building without ropes or harnesses in January. He made it from the ground to the top spire in 92 minutes.
(The memes in the Taiwanese and Taiwanese-adjacent algorithms proliferated after that. Influencers posing as the stereotypical East Asian tiger moms scold imaginary children: Why isn’t your homework done?? While you were procrastinating on the couch, Alex Honnold already climbed Taipei 101… )
I do think I possess the instinct to be more cautious than excited about these grand displays of human achievement. Some of this stems from my faith—man’s very first attempt at a skyscraper, after all, was personally thwarted by God and its perpetrators scattered. But I also feel some of this is universal. Much of the fever-pitched conversation on the Internet preceding Honnold’s climb centered on how the attempt came across as presumptuous. A human versus a skyscraper—who does he think he is?
No one wants to say it, but if his climb hadn’t gone as smoothly as it did, I think almost everyone would have at least partly chalked it up to poetic justice.
But the dreamer in me pushes back a little. Sure, ginormous buildings can be erected or scaled in pride-driven rebellion, but in their most basic form, do they not also literally point us heavenward?
Honnold said in interviews that one of his favorite things before and after the climb was the view of the city rippling outward, the fact that it kept bustling underneath him like nothing had changed. And similarly, I love the views from high places. One of my favorite feelings is the exhilaration of looking down, trying to parse out people and buildings, balconies and cars. It’s an attempt to comprehend this sprawling organism called a city—a task that I’m afraid will always be beyond me, but I keep trying.
If the cautious part of me worries about the hubris of humans accomplishing impressive things, the dreamer in me also acknowledges just how little, how insignificant these things can make me feel. Maybe in the most primitive of ways (big building > small me) a building like Taipei 101 does point me upwards to the divine. I know God’s glory is beyond comprehension, but in a world where we are so frequently drawn into our own heads, surely experiences where I am awed by something tangibly great cannot hurt. At the very least, these moments help stretch my imagination in the right direction.
So who knows? I’ll keep looking out for the 101 spire as I’m riding the city buses, adventuring up mountains, and biking to work. I love that you can spot it from everywhere—a constant, grand presence, and, perhaps, a very distant echo of something Higher.
Grace Hsu graduated from Calvin in 2025 with a major in speech pathology and a minor in English. A phonetics nerd outwardly but a poet at heart, Grace currently resides in Taipei, Taiwan, where she teaches English at a language school. Apart from writing, you can find her reading, running, and eating inordinate amounts of Thai coconut curry.
