The Shanghai Tower, the building that turns as it rises
Its shape is an engineering result rather than a flourish. Rotating the facade 120 degrees from base to top cut the wind load by about a quarter and paid for itself in steel the tower never needed.
The numbers
The Shanghai Tower is 632 m (2073 ft) tall with 128floors above ground and five below. It topped out in 2014 and opened in2015. Gensler designed it, with Jun Xia leading the design team, and it holds offices, a hotel, an exhibition center, shops and observation floors in one stack.
It is the second tallest completed building in the world and the tallest in China. Only the Burj Khalifa is higher, by 196 m. Measured by highest occupied floor the order flips, because Dubai spends its top 240 m on a spire and Shanghai spends far less.
The 120-degree twist
The plan is a rounded triangle, and that triangle rotates a third of a full turn on the way up. The outer glass follows the rotation while the core stays square to the ground, so the two surfaces pull apart as the building climbs.
Wind-tunnel models put a number on what the rotation buys: a wind load about 24 percent lower than an untwisted tower of the same height. The rounded corners release the vortices that shake a flat face, and the turn spreads that shedding over different heights, so the building never gets pushed in step. The saving came back as steel. A lighter frame and a smaller foundation meant roughly 58 million dollars of material the project never bought.
The double skin and the nine atria
There are two buildings here, one inside the other. An inner cylinder holds the floors, and an outer curtain of glass wraps around it in a twisting sleeve. Between them is a gap that widens and narrows as the two shapes rotate out of alignment, and that gap is divided into nine atria stacked one above the other, each about fourteen floors tall with gardens, cafes and seating in it.
The gap is a thermal buffer. Air in the cavity sits between the Shanghai weather and the occupied floors, so humid summers and cold damp winters hit the outer glass first and the inner wall faces a milder temperature. That is why the tower needs no reflective coating and looks clear rather than mirrored from the street.
The 1,000-tonne sculpture on floor 126
Near the top hangs a tuned mass damper of about 1,000 tonnes, the largest fitted to a building when it went in. A damper is a weight hung so that it lags behind the building's movement: when the floor goes one way the mass is still going the other, and the opposing pull drains the sway. The page on how much skyscrapers sway has the mechanics.
This damper is also on show. It is built as a rotating artwork called the Eye of Shanghai, with a ring that turns above the hanging mass, so visitors on the damper floor watch the thing that keeps the building still. Weights in most towers sit in a locked machine room.
The elevators and the deck
Mitsubishi Electric supplied 149 elevators, three of them shuttles running at 20.5 m per second, about 74 km/h. They were the fastest in the world at opening and are still among the fastest in service. At that rate the cab needs pressure control, or a rider climbing half a kilometer in under a minute feels it in the ears. The elevator page covers how those speeds are reached.
The main observation deck is on floor 118 at 546 m, with a second on 119 at 552 m. A third opened on floor 121 in 2020, at 562 m, which took the title of highest observation deck in the world from the Burj Khalifa's 555 m.
Pudong mud, 980 piles and one pour
Lujiazui was farmland and marsh until the 1990s, and the ground under it is soft alluvial clay with no rock in reach. The load goes down 980 bored piles instead, carried mostly by friction along their length.
On top of the piles sits a concrete raft 6 m thick, spreading the core's load across the whole footprint. It went in as one continuous pour of about 60 hours and roughly 61,000 tonnes. A raft that thick cannot be interrupted, because a joint between two pours is a plane of weakness and the heat of curing has to even out across the whole mass.
LEED Platinum, turbines and rainwater
The tower holds LEED Platinum and China's Three Star rating. Around 270 vertical-axis wind turbines sit in the parapet near the top, where the wind is steady, and cover the external lighting and part of the public space. Rainwater off the roof and terraces is collected and gray water recycled, for cooling and for the atrium planting.
Three towers on one block
The Shanghai Tower stands beside the Jin Mao Tower of 1999 and the Shanghai World Financial Center of 2008, three supertalls on adjacent plots in Lujiazui. The cluster was planned that way in the early 1990s, with the third and tallest plot held back for decades. All three were called half empty in their first years, and all three filled.
The slow lease-up in 2015 and 2016 is where the "is it a failure" question comes from. A building this size takes years to occupy. The offices let, the hotel opened on floor 120 in 2021, and the deck is one of the most visited in Asia. For the wider pattern, see skyscrapers in China and what counts as supertall.