The Most Beautiful Modern Buildings in Asia
11 places in 5 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful modern buildings in Asia are Taipei 101 (Taiwan), Petronas Towers (Malaysia) and National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing (People's Republic of China). The list covers 11 modern buildings in 5 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 6. Last updated 14 October 2026.
In the last decades of the twentieth century the centre of gravity of tall building moved to Asia. Fast-growing economies wanted skylines that announced their arrival, and the race for the world's tallest building passed from Chicago and New York to Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Shanghai and Dubai. Many of these towers borrow from local tradition, translating pagodas, Islamic geometry or bamboo into steel and glass, while others were commissioned from international architects to make a deliberate break with the past.
Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers, completed in 1998, are built on the plan of an eight-pointed star and joined by a two-storey skybridge. Taipei 101 rises in segments that recall a pagoda and holds a huge tuned mass damper to steady it in typhoons. The Shanghai Tower twists as it climbs to 632 metres, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 828 metres, is the tallest building in the world.
Other buildings here impress by shape. Paul Andreu's National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, nicknamed the Egg, is a dome of titanium and glass surrounded by water, and the CCTV Headquarters by OMA bends into a giant three-dimensional loop. I. M. Pei's Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong is built from a framework of triangles, Guangzhou's Canton Tower narrows to a twisted waist, and Tokyo pairs the lattice of Tokyo Tower with the much taller Skytree.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Taipei 101 | Skyscraper | Taiwan | |
| 2 | Petronas Towers | Skyscraper | Malaysia | |
| 3 | National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing | Opera house | People's Republic of China | |
| 4 | Shanghai Tower | Skyscraper | People's Republic of China | |
| 5 | Burj Khalifa | Skyscraper | United Arab Emirates | |
| 6 | Jin Mao Tower | Skyscraper | People's Republic of China | |
| 7 | Tokyo Skytree | Observation tower | Japan | |
| 8 | Canton Tower | Observation tower | People's Republic of China | |
| 9 | CCTV Headquarters, Beijing | Skyscraper | People's Republic of China | |
| 10 | Tokyo Tower | Observation tower | Japan | |
| 11 | Bank of China Tower | Skyscraper | People's Republic of China |
01 Taipei 101
Taiwan · 0.4 km from Taipei25.034° N 121.565° E
Image by george17168 from Pixabay The tower's shape isn't just aesthetic bamboo-inspired styling — it's structurally load-bearing symbolism. The building rises in eight repeating segments, each one flaring slightly outward as it climbs before tapering back in, echoing the swelling joints of a bamboo stalk. Eight is a number associated with prosperity in Chinese numerology, and the choice to build the tower from eight visually distinct stacked modules rather than one smooth extrusion was as deliberate as the engineering underneath it, meant to read as auspicious to the building's occupants and to Taipei's skyline alike.
Did you know? When it opened, its Toshiba elevators were the fastest in the world, climbing from the 5th to the 89th floor in 37 seconds at about 60 km/h.
02 Petronas Towers
Malaysia · 3.2 km from Kuala Lumpur3.158° N 101.712° E
Image by Pexels from Pixabay The engineering was as ambitious as the silhouette. Test borings showed that half the original site sat on decayed limestone, so the whole footprint was shifted about 60 metres to rest on firmer rock. The towers stand on piles bored up to 114 metres deep beneath thick concrete rafts. Imported steel was expensive, so the structure is mostly high-strength reinforced concrete. That material damps sway well but doubles the load on the foundations. To meet the government's deadline, each tower was given to a different contractor. A Japanese consortium led by Hazama built the west tower and a South Korean one led by Samsung the east, which topped out first.
Did you know? The main lifts are double-deckers: the lower car serves only even-numbered floors and the upper car only odd-numbered ones, with 38 lifts in each tower.
03 National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing
People's Republic of China · 0.9 km from Beijing39.903° N 116.384° E
Aurelio Asiain from HIrakata-shi, Osaka, Japan · CC BY-SA 2.0 The numbers explain the effect. The dome is about 212 metres long, 144 metres wide and 46 metres high, clad in more than 18,000 titanium plates, with a seam of over a thousand panels of ultra-clear glass running down the middle like a curtain being drawn apart. It sits in an artificial lake of more than 34,000 square metres, whose water is kept from freezing in winter by circulating groundwater, so that the reflection completes the curve into an unbroken oval. Beijingers quickly nicknamed it "the boiled egg". By day the metal takes on the colour of the sky; after dark the glass slit glows and the whole shell seems lit from within.
Did you know? Much of the building is hidden: it descends ten storeys below ground, reaching a depth of 32.5 metres.
More about National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing →
04 Shanghai Tower
People's Republic of China · 6.6 km from Shanghai31.235° N 121.501° E
Ermell · CC0 The design is by the American firm Gensler, with a team led by the Shanghai-born architect Jun Xia. The building is really two towers in one: an inner stack of nine cylindrical buildings, 128 floors in all, wrapped in a separate outer glass skin that twists through 120 degrees as it rises. The twist cuts wind loads on the tower by about a quarter, which saved a quarter of the structural steel a conventional design would have needed. Between the two skins, nine tall atriums form public sky lobbies with gardens, shops and cafés. A tuned mass damper, the largest in the world when it was installed, limits the sway at the top.
Did you know? The damper on the 126th floor is presented as an art installation called the Shanghai Eye.
05 Burj Khalifa
United Arab Emirates · 2.3 km from Dubai25.197° N 55.274° E
Image by JESHOOTS-com from Pixabay The design came from the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Adrian Smith as chief architect and Bill Baker as structural engineer. The plan is a three-lobed Y around a buttressed central core, a shape chosen to make the most of apartment and hotel space while the wings brace the tower. As it climbs, the building steps back 27 times in a spiral, so that the wind never meets the same profile twice and the vortices that would make it sway are broken up. Smith has said the three-wing plan owes something to Lake Point Tower in Chicago, and the motif is often read as a desert flower; the park at its base was designed around the same idea, the Hymenocallis lily.
Did you know? The air at the top of the tower is thought to be about 6 °C cooler than at its base.
06 Jin Mao Tower
People's Republic of China · 6.7 km from Shanghai31.237° N 121.501° E
Ermell · CC BY-SA 4.0 The result reads as a modern pagoda. Instead of a sheer glass prism the tower steps back in rhythmic tiers that quicken as it climbs, so the silhouette narrows in an almost organic taper towards the spire. The curtain wall of glass, stainless steel, aluminium and granite is overlaid with a lattice of aluminium tubes that gives the surface a fine, shifting texture as the light changes. Beneath it all are 1,062 steel piles driven more than 80 metres into Shanghai's soft ground, at the time the longest steel piles used for a building on land.
07 Tokyo Skytree
Japan · 6.1 km from Tokyo35.710° N 139.811° E
Image by cegoh from Pixabay The form changes as it rises: a three-legged base gives way to a cylinder from about 350 m upwards. Its colour, officially Skytree White, is based on aijiro, a traditional pale indigo-white, and at night LED lighting alternates between Iki, a pale sky blue, and Miyabi, a deep purple. In a city that expects earthquakes, the tower is built around a central shaft of reinforced concrete that is tied to the steel frame only for the first 125 m; above that, oil dampers connect the two, and a tuned mass damper moves out of step with the structure to keep its centre of gravity steady. The designers say the system can absorb half the energy of a quake.
Did you know? The tower was originally planned at 610 metres; in October 2009 the design height was raised to the present 634 metres.
08 Canton Tower
People's Republic of China · 6.1 km from Guangzhou23.109° N 113.319° E
Image by AndyLeungHK from Pixabay It is the second-tallest tower in China and one of the tallest free-standing structures in the world. The main body is 450 m high and the antenna adds another 150; inside are TV and radio facilities, restaurants including a two-storey revolving one, gardens, cinemas and exhibition spaces. At night the whole tower glows: every node of the lattice carries its own LED light, individually controlled, so that colours and animations can run up and down its height, while using only a fraction of the energy normally allowed for facade lighting.
Did you know? The Bubble Tram on its roof, with 16 cabins circling between about 450 and 462 metres, has been recognised as the highest Ferris wheel in the world.
09 CCTV Headquarters, Beijing
People's Republic of China · 5.6 km from Beijing39.915° N 116.457° E
HoweyYuan · CC BY-SA 4.0 The design came from Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, who won an international competition — with a jury that included Arata Isozaki and Charles Jencks — and signed the contract on 1 January 2002. Cecil Balmond of Arup led the engineering, a formidable task in an earthquake zone. Construction began on 1 June 2004. The two towers were built separately and joined into one structure on 30 May 2007; the final connection was made in the early morning, when the steel of both towers had cooled to the same temperature, so that no thermal stresses were locked in. The façade was completed in January 2008, and the building was finished in 2012.
Did you know? With about 473,000 square metres of floor space, it is the largest project ever built by Rem Koolhaas's office OMA and its first major building in China.
10 Tokyo Tower
Japan · 3.2 km from Tokyo35.659° N 139.746° E
Image by LittleMouse from Pixabay Its colours are set by aviation rules: bands of white and international orange, renewed roughly every seven years with some 28,000 litres of paint in a job that takes a year. It remained Japan's tallest structure until Tokyo Skytree was completed in 2012 and took over television broadcasting, though FM radio stations still transmit from the tower. It has become one of the most recognisable sights of the city, appearing again and again in films and television set in Tokyo.
Did you know? Hundreds of tobi, traditional Japanese steeplejacks skilled at working at height, helped build it, with at least 400 workers on site each day.
11 Bank of China Tower
People's Republic of China · 3.8 km from Hong Kong22.279° N 114.161° E
LN9267 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The building is a square in plan, divided diagonally into four triangular shafts. As the tower climbs, the shafts end one after another at different heights, so that each face changes profile and only a single triangular prism reaches the top. The result is a silhouette that shifts as you walk around it, from a slender blade to a stepped cluster of glass planes. The great X-braces of the structure are shown openly on the glass facade as a pattern of diamonds; with the engineer Leslie E. Robertson, Pei built it as the first high-rise with a composite space frame, a structure that is itself the architecture.
Did you know? The bank hoped to finish the tower on 8 August 1988, a date packed with lucky eights, but delays pushed completion to 1990.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful modern buildings in Asia?
- On our list, Taipei 101 (Taiwan) ranks first, followed by Petronas Towers (Malaysia) and National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing (People's Republic of China).
- Which country has the most modern buildings in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from the People's Republic of China (6), Japan (2) and Malaysia (1).
- Why does Taipei 101 have a giant ball inside?
- The steel sphere suspended near the top is a tuned mass damper. It sways against the building's movement to reduce motion caused by strong winds and typhoons.
- Who designed the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong?
- The tower was designed by I. M. Pei and completed in 1990. Its structure of triangular frames gives the facade its distinctive diagonal pattern.
- Who designed the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing?
- The headquarters was designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, led by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren. Its two leaning towers are joined at top and bottom to form a continuous loop.
- How many modern buildings are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 11 modern buildings in 5 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 6.