Taipei 101, the building whose damper is the attraction

How long it was the tallest

Taipei 101 took the world record from the Petronas Twin Towers and held it from 2004 until the Burj Khalifa opened in 2010, so it is not the tallest building now, nor the tallest in Asia. Its own first was narrower and will not be repeated: it was the first building to pass half a kilometer. The Burj Khalifa then beat it by 320 m, the largest single jump in the record's history, and the Dubai tower measures 828 m to Taipei 101's 508. The whole sequence of title holders sits onthe tallest building by year page.

Eight sections of eight floors

Above the base, the shaft splits into eight stacked sections of eight floors each, every one flaring outward toward its top instead of tapering. Read one way the sections are bamboo segments, with the joints where the flare breaks. Read another they repeat the ruyi, the curved Chinese scepter that appears again as a metal ornament on the corners of the podium and the shaft. Eight is a lucky number in Chinese, which is why the count came out that way instead of whatever packed the space most efficiently. The green-tinted double glazing blocks about half the heat that would otherwise come through.

The 660-tonne ball you can go and see

Hanging in the shaft between the 88th and 92nd floors is a sphere of welded steel plate, 5.5 m across and 660 tonnes, held on cables and braked by hydraulic pistons. It is a tuned mass damper: the ball swings late against the building's own sway, and the pistons turn that mismatch into heat. The engineers put its effect at up to 40 percent of the tower's movement.

Dampers are normal in supertall buildings. What Taipei 101 did differently was make the largest and heaviest one in the world visible to the public: an atrium beside the observatory looks straight at it, and the gift shop sells Damper Baby, the mascot Sanrio drew from it in five colors. The sphere is now a reason people buy the ticket.How much skyscrapers sway explains what it is correcting.

An active fault and a typhoon season

Taipei 101 sits roughly 200 m from an active fault, in a city that takes several typhoons a year. The frame is designed for winds of 60 m/s and for the strongest earthquake expected in a 2,500-year cycle, and the foundation rests on 380 piles driven about 80 m down to bedrock, each 1.5 m across. The piles keep the tower from moving when the ground does; the damper keeps the upper floors comfortable when the wind does.

One claim runs the other way. In 2008 the geologist Cheng Horng Lin of National Taiwan Normal University published in Geophysical Research Letters the idea that the building's mass presses on the fault hard enough to add stress to it, after two small quakes under the site. It is a hypothesis from one researcher and it is disputed: Taiwan's weather bureau said the record was far too short to read that way, and Lin himself said it was as hard to disprove as to prove. For what these buildings are built to survive in general, seeare skyscrapers safe.

37 seconds to the 89th floor

Two Toshiba cabs run at 16.8 m/s, which is about 60 km/h, and they held the world speed record from 2004 until buildings in China and Japan beat it. The ride from the fifth-floor ticket hall to the indoor observatory on the 89th floor takes about 37 seconds. At that rate the air pressure outside the cab drops faster than an ear adjusts, so the cabs are sealed and the pressure inside is driven on a curve passengers tolerate. The building has 61 elevators in all, andthe elevator page covers why speed stopped being the hard problem.

The 89th floor is indoors; the 91st is an outdoor deck at 391.8 m, and since 2019 the 101st floor has been open as a skyline platform at 449.2 m.

Fireworks, and the greenest tall building

On New Year's Eve the tower itself is the firework, with charges fired off the facade up its full height at midnight. The display started in 2005, the first New Year after opening, and it is the image Taipei exports.

In 2011 Taipei 101 earned LEED Platinum, which at the time made it the world's tallest green building. The retrofit that won it covered the glazing, the energy and waste systems, and water recycling that supplies 20 to 30 percent of what the building uses. A tower finished in 2004 was not designed to that standard; it was brought up to it afterward.

Where it fits

Taipei 101 is one of thesupertall buildings, the class above 300 m, and the one most people have been inside, because the observatory, the mall and the damper are all open. The official height comes from the Council on Vertical Urbanism, which counts spires and ignores antennas, so the 508 m includes the spire Lee drew as part of the building. For the towers it sits beside, seefamous skyscrapers.