As white-shoe law firms shrink and expanding tech companies in L.A. increasingly move into restored warehouses or historic buildings, commercial skyscrapers around the country are struggling to find tenants. [...]

That leaves the owners of aging all-office high-rises like the U.S. Bank Tower looking for ways to produce new revenue [...]

OUE is not the first company to see a possible revenue stream in the desire of adults to pay money to act like children in downtown settings. — latimes.com

Never has an attraction promised so much yet delivered so little. It was the roller coaster without a ride, the helter skelter without a slide, a £20m mountain of steel leering above London’s lean Olympic stadium as a mocking monument to the vanity of the city’s former mayor, Boris Johnson, and its funder, the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal [...]

As Guy de Maupassant said of the Eiffel Tower, being inside the Orbit is the best place to be – because it’s the only place you don’t have to look at it — the Guardian

Höller wanted to show that you don’t necessarily get to know a sculpture better by literally travelling through it; that once inside it begins to look like something else entirely... The Slide, a permanent fixture at London’s Olympic Park, will give people a full 40 seconds to experience this and decide for themselves as they make their way down the 178m chute at an estimated 15mph. — wallpaper.com

Bank Tower owners OUE Limited announced today a new addition to the Skyspace observation deck tourist attraction that's guaranteed to give it that "thrill factor": a 36-foot long glass slide that will allow brave souls to slide from the 70th floor to the 69th along the outside of the building.

Called the Skyslide, the chute will be made of clear glass four inches thick [and] sit about 1,000 feet above the ground — la.curbed.com

This week, the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London announced that “the world’s longest and tallest tunnel slide” will wrap around Anish Kapoor’s “ArcelorMittal Orbit.” When the sculpture went up in 2009 after winning a design challenge, it proceeded to receive mostly scathing reviews — and a spot on the shortlist of the 2012 Carbuncle Cup [...]. Today, Kapoor revealed that the slide is actually a work of art, designed by none other than Carsten Höller at Kapoor’s own invitation. — hyperallergic.com

The Skyhouse, which occupies four stories of an early skyscraper in Lower Manhattan, shows architect David Hotson manipulating the available space to include features such as a climbing column and tubular metal slide with which inhabitants can move between levels. The living space rises through all four stories and can be accessed with the climbing pole — safety ropes included — while the huge German-constructed slide takes you down from the attic right to the entrance. — theverge.com

If all goes as planned, the New Museum’s five-year-old building on the Bowery will become something of an amusement park beginning Oct. 26, with visitors hurtling through a giant plastic tube from the fourth floor to the second — New York Times