Gran Torre Santiago

This guide to Gran Torre Santiago traces the thirty-nine-meter lattice crown architect Cesar Pelli designed atop the tower, a lit beacon with no rooms behind the glass, built as his answer to the Andes rising behind the building. It follows the 2009 global financial crisis that froze construction for nearly a year, and one foreman who had just moved his family from Concepción to Santiago and enrolled his daughters in school when the halt was announced. Look up from the plaza and follow the glass ridges toward that lit crown.