The Most Striking Skyscrapers in Europe

5 places in 4 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Torre Glòries

   Spain · 2.1 km from Barcelona41.403° N 2.190° E

   

   The skin is the real engineering story. Roughly four and a half thousand aluminium panels, finished in around forty different colours, sit under a second, independent layer of glass louvres that can tilt open or closed. The louvres aren't decorative shading — they're a working bioclimatic system, adjusting to cut solar heat gain on the building's sunniest faces while letting the panels underneath catch and scatter light differently depending on the angle you're viewing from, which is why the tower reads as a different colour gradient depending on the time of day and where you're standing.

   Did you know? More than 4,500 independently controlled LED fixtures on the facade can produce around 16 million colours, in a lighting scheme designed by Yann Kersalé.

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2. 02 30 St Mary Axe

   United Kingdom · 3 km from London51.514° N 0.080° W

   

   The tower stands on a site with a painful history. The Baltic Exchange, the old shipping market, occupied it until an IRA bomb in St Mary Axe badly damaged the building in April 1992. Its salvaged hall and facade were eventually sold and taken to Tallinn, and an earlier plan for a 386-metre Millennium Tower on the site was abandoned as out of scale. The glass dome at the very top of the new building, called the Lens, deliberately recalls the glass dome of the old Exchange hall, much of which is now shown at the National Maritime Museum.

   Did you know? Because the dome left no room for lift machinery on the roof, the main lifts stop at the 34th floor and a separate lift pushed from below continues higher.

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3. 03 The Shard

   United Kingdom · 2.2 km from London51.504° N 0.087° W

   

   The building is clad in some 11,000 panes of glass, about 56,000 m² in all, angled so that the surface picks up the colour of the sky and changes with the weather and the time of day. Construction began in March 2009 using top-down methods, digging foundations while the core was already rising, a first in Britain. In 2011 workers found a fox living near the top of the unfinished tower; he was nicknamed Romeo and rehomed. The 500-tonne steel spire was winched into place on 30 March 2012, and the tower was inaugurated that July, in time for the London Olympics. It is largely owned by the State of Qatar.

   Did you know? The 66 m steel spire was test-assembled on an airfield in North Yorkshire, then dismantled and taken to London for installation.

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4. 04 Turning Torso

   Sweden · 3.3 km from Malmö55.613° N 12.976° E

   

   The tower was built by the housing cooperative HSB, which still owns it: the lowest two segments hold offices and the upper seven some 147 apartments, so this is a lived-in building rather than a corporate trophy. Construction began in 2001, and it rose in the Western Harbour, Malmö's former shipyard district, just as the city's old industrial symbol, the giant Kockums crane, was dismantled. The new silhouette took its place on the skyline almost literally, and the district around it was rebuilt as a quarter of housing, parks and waterside promenades.

   Did you know? In August 2006 the Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner parachuted onto the Turning Torso and then BASE-jumped off it.

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5. 05 Bosco Verticale

   Italy · 1.8 km from Milan45.486° N 9.190° E

   

   What makes the towers beautiful rather than merely clever is that they change with the year. The planting was worked out over two years with the agronomist and landscape architect Laura Gatti and the botanist Emanuela Borio, and species were placed by exposure: evergreens on the south-west side, deciduous trees on the north-east, each matched in eventual size to its balcony. So the two sides of each tower behave differently through the seasons — one stays green, the other flushes, colours and thins out as the months turn. Behind the foliage the walls are clad in stoneware the colour of tree bark, with white accents along balconies and sills, a quiet backdrop that lets the leaves do the work.

   Did you know? Before construction the design was tested in a wind tunnel to make sure the trees would not topple in strong gusts.

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