Safe sex in the Museum Hotel?

The INDY has been its new offices for a week, and the space has lived up to, exceeded, even, expectations. The people watching is rivaled only by sitting in the front windows of Joule in Raleigh. For example, I’ve seen a man who looks like a black Jesus—not to say that Jesus wasn’t black—an Indian woman in a lovely red head scarf.

Today I’ve become fixated by these condom-like structures jutting from two windows in the SunTrust building, soon (?) to be christened the Museum Hotel.

I tried asking the construction workers about the function of this apparatus, but my Spanish failed me. Como se dice in Spanish, Those look like condoms. What are they really and what do they do?