Ostankino Tower

Moscow, 1967, about 540 meters. Ostankino was the first freestanding structure to pass 500 meters, and it stayed the tallest freestanding structure in the world until Toronto's CN Tower. Engineer Nikolai Nikitin pointed to Stuttgart's concrete tower as proof the method worked, then scaled it up with 149 steel cables pulled tight inside the shaft to hold the concrete together. In August 2000 a fire that started in the feeder cables high up the tower knocked most Moscow television off the air for days and damaged many of those tensioning cables. The evening sun in this 2021 photo picks out the rings and platforms stacked along the shaft below the antenna.