The Most Striking Modern Skyscrapers in Asia
7 places in 4 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most striking modern skyscrapers in Asia are Taipei 101 (Taiwan), Petronas Towers (Malaysia) and Shanghai Tower (People's Republic of China). The list covers 7 modern skyscrapers in 4 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Asia became the home of the record-breaking skyscraper at the end of the twentieth century. Fast-growing cities, scarce land and governments eager for a national symbol met new engineering for typhoons and earthquakes, and the result was a run of towers that draw on local tradition as often as on Western modernism.
The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur were the tallest buildings in the world when they were completed, their floor plan based on an eight-pointed star from Islamic geometry and their two shafts linked by a skybridge. Taipei 101 took the title in 2004; its form recalls stacked bamboo segments, and a huge steel pendulum hangs inside its upper floors to steady it in wind and earthquakes. In Hong Kong, I. M. Pei's Bank of China Tower rises as a cluster of triangular prisms, its diagonal bracing visible across the harbour.
The newer giants push further. The Shanghai Tower twists as it climbs above Lujiazui, wrapped in a second glass skin that saves energy and softens the wind. The CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, designed by Rem Koolhaas and OMA, abandons the vertical idea altogether and bends into a single leaning loop. And the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 828 metres, stands higher than any other completed building.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Taipei 101 | Skyscraper | Taiwan | |
| 2 | Petronas Towers | Skyscraper | Malaysia | |
| 3 | Shanghai Tower | Skyscraper | People's Republic of China | |
| 4 | Burj Khalifa | Skyscraper | United Arab Emirates | |
| 5 | Jin Mao Tower | Skyscraper | People's Republic of China | |
| 6 | CCTV Headquarters, Beijing | Skyscraper | People's Republic of China | |
| 7 | 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 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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 striking modern skyscrapers in Asia?
- On our list, Taipei 101 (Taiwan) ranks first, followed by Petronas Towers (Malaysia) and Shanghai Tower (People's Republic of China).
- Which country has the most modern skyscrapers in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from the People's Republic of China (4), Malaysia (1) and Taiwan (1).
- Why does Taipei 101 have a giant ball inside?
- The steel sphere is a tuned mass damper, a pendulum that sways against the building's movement. It reduces swaying during typhoons and earthquakes and can be seen from the observation floors.
- Which is taller, Taipei 101 or the Petronas Towers?
- Taipei 101, at 508 metres, is taller than the Petronas Towers, which reach 452 metres. Taipei 101 took the title of world's tallest building from them in 2004.
- How many modern skyscrapers are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 7 modern skyscrapers in 4 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 4.