The Vertical Tourist.(building climber Alain Robert)(Interview)

February 17, 2009, 1:10 P.M. As the thousands of bankers, consultants, and accountants who work in the Cheung Kong Center, a sixty-two-story office tower in Hong Kong's central business district, returned from their lunch breaks, a slight Frenchman named Alain Robert was being questioned in a windowless room on the tower's first floor. Robert sat in a plastic chair, surrounded by men in uniform. Three of them were members of the city's police force. Three others were private security guards for the building. Standing behind a desk, one of the guards videotaped the session. Another asked for Robert's passport.

"What is the reason you chose our building?" the guard said.

"It is a very beautiful building," Robert replied. "On the outside is amazing. Rarely is there that kind of surface." He was wearing skintight orange pants and a black T-shirt, upon which mites of grip chalk had settled, like dandruff. He went on, "Well, maybe, for the people all buildings are the same, but for me it's not like that." As he talked, he gesticulated, releasing puffs of chalk into the air.

Robert, who is forty-six, had just ascended the eastern face of the Cheung Kong, which is nine hundred and twenty-eight feet high, using nothing but his feet and his hands. He was thirsty, so the guards gave him a can of apple soda. "At the beginning, my rhythm was a bit too fast," he said. A phone rang. Robert continued, "The side I chose, it's the windy side. The front side is slightly more protected, and maybe nicer, but I didn't want to be above the main entrance. Then, they will be coming with the safety mattress. They think that if there is a mattress you can fall from the top of the sky and no one will get hurt. Which is bullshit."

The conversation stalled as the guards waited for a verdict from on high. Unofficially, they seemed to view Robert more as a curiosity than as a menace, or a boon, to society. ("Yeah, yeah, O.K.," the head guard replied, as Robert tried to explain that the climb had been motivated by a desire to draw attention to global warming.) In the way that baseball fans visit stadium after stadium, or that a pilgrim seeks the cathedral in every city, Robert, as a vertical tourist, has traversed the planet on a dogged, gutsy tour of the world's high-rises and, then, its jail cells and holding pens. Of the world's ten tallest buildings, he has climbed five. Most of the remaining half are in China, which he has been banned from entering since 2007, when he climbed the Jin Mao Tower (thirteen hundred and eighty-one feet), in Shanghai.

In Moscow, where Robert climbed the Federation Tower (seven hundred and ninety-five feet), he drank vodka with the police commissioner. In New York, a scrum of inmates once hoisted him on their shoulders after seeing a clip of him climbing 101 Park Avenue (six hundred and twenty-nine feet) on the jailhouse TV. When, in London, Robert was arrested at One Canada Square (seven hundred and seventy-one feet), in Canary Wharf, a bobby treated him to a fry-up of sausage, eggs, and beans. His trespasses are crapshoots, and the response to them varies according to the jurisdiction, and the caprice of whoever is presiding over it on a given day. Boosting himself over the parapet of the Shinjuku Center (seven hundred and thirty-one feet), in Tokyo, Robert says, he was greeted with a punch in the face. After climbing partway up the Petronas Twin Towers, in Kuala Lumpur--"my Everest," Robert wrote in an autobiography, "With Bare Hands"--he spent two days in jail before being equipped with a driver and a Mercedes, and presented to the king.

It's hard to picture Robert at a state dinner--he showed up for his audience with the Malaysian royals bare-chested, except for a lizard-skin vest. At five feet four inches, he is no skyscraper, but if he were a building he might be Santiago Calatrava's Turning Torso: sinewy; awry (he has broken his nose four times); tending immediately to enchant or to repel. Robert weighs a hundred and fourteen pounds. He wears his hair below his shoulders. (His chief sponsor is Norgil, the hair-augmentation company.) Ever since a fortune-teller in Bangkok suggested that he was a Native American in a past life, he has favored a Wild Western look. The first time I met him, he was wearing a pair of high-waisted leather pants. A feather-shaped earring dangled from his left ear, and around his neck a chunk of turquoise hung on a black cord. His thighs are the width of handrails. His posture is atavistic, with powerful shoulders and a tiny waist, as though his body were composed of the adverse parts of a matchup toy.