Ponte City Apartments

This guide to Ponte City Apartments in Johannesburg opens with 1990s city officials seriously discussing turning Africa's tallest apartment tower into a prison, and traces how the fifty-five-story cylinder, built in 1975 as whites-only luxury housing, got its most famous feature: a hollow core running straight through its center. You'll hear why local building codes forced that design, and how the tower changed after apartheid ended and its garbage began piling up in that same shaft. A listening tip: look straight up through the open core from the courtyard below.