Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano should have designed a slippier skyscraper. Piano's 52-story New York Times Building.

The New York Times Building by Renzo Piano has:

• 52-stories
• 1.5-million square feet
• a 378-seat auditorium
• a glass-walled garden with 50-foot birch trees
• a "Moveable Type" text collage with 560 ever-changing digital-display screens

Energy-efficient features at the New York Times Building include:

• a dimmable lighting system
• floor-to-ceiling ultra-clear glass that maximizes light
• horizontal ceramic rods on the exterior of the building that act as a sunshade

However, it was no challenge for French stuntman Alain Robert, aka Spiderman. Robert, who has also scaled the Sydney Opera House in Australia and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, easily climbed the horizontal ceramic rods that envelope the New York Times Building. Then he was summarily arrested.

Hours later, a second man, Brooklynite Renaldo Clarke, also scrambled up the ladder-like rods, and he got arrested, too.

Silly me. I thought those rods were for climate control.

links: Man Scales the Times Building     Second Climber at Times Building in Custody