
Federation Tower
Twin glass skyscrapers rising from a shared podium, once Europe's tallest towers.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Federation Tower in Moscow opens with a 2012 fire that broke out sixty-five floors up the still-unfinished skyscraper, with helicopters dumping water because no ladder on earth reached that high, and the question it left critics asking about a glass giant built fast on hope and borrowed money. It goes back to 2005, when construction began, and to November 2008, when global markets collapsed and the money ran out, leaving the half-built skeleton frozen for nearly three years.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Московский международный деловой центр «Москва-Сити» (ММДЦ «Москва-Сити»)
Skyscraper cluster of glass towers along a river, built to rival global financial hubs.
Moscow State University
Soaring Stalinist skyscraper crowned by a star-topped spire, built by thousands of Gulag laborers on a hilltop campus.
Ostankino Television Tower
Concrete tower shaped like an inverted lily, once the tallest freestanding structure on earth.
Bolshoi Theatre
Grand nineteenth-century opera and ballet house rebuilt after a devastating fire, crowned by a bronze quadriga of Apollo.
Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve
Grand imperial estate of red-brick Gothic palaces, abandoned unfinished for two centuries before its recent restoration.