The Most Striking Skyscrapers in Asia
9 places in 5 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most striking skyscrapers in Asia are Taipei 101 (Taiwan), Petronas Towers (Malaysia) and Burj Al Arab (United Arab Emirates). The list covers 9 skyscrapers in 5 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Since the 1990s the race for the tallest building has been run almost entirely in Asia. Fast-growing economies used towers to announce their arrival, and engineers had to solve new problems to build them: typhoons and earthquakes in Taiwan and Hong Kong, desert heat and wind in the Gulf, soft ground in Shanghai. The best of these buildings turned those constraints into form, borrowing motifs from pagodas, Islamic geometry and desert flowers.
Taipei 101 rises in stacked segments that recall a pagoda and holds a giant steel pendulum near its top to steady it against wind and earthquakes. The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004, rest on a floor plan based on an eight-pointed Islamic star and are joined by a skybridge. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building on Earth since 2010, steps back in a spiral around a Y-shaped plan, and the Shanghai Tower twists as it climbs to become the tallest building in China.
The rest of the list values shape over height. The Burj Al Arab stands on its own artificial island off Dubai in the form of a billowing sail. In Beijing, the CCTV Headquarters loops two leaning towers into a single angular ring joined by a cantilever high above the ground. I. M. Pei's Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong is built from a framework of triangles that gives it great stiffness against typhoon winds, and the Main Building of Moscow State University, one of the Seven Sisters raised under Stalin, crowns its tiered mass with a spire and star.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Taipei 101 | Skyscraper | Taiwan | |
| 2 | Petronas Towers | Skyscraper | Malaysia | |
| 3 | Burj Al Arab | Skyscraper | United Arab Emirates | |
| 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 | CCTV Headquarters, Beijing | Skyscraper | People's Republic of China | |
| 8 | Main Building of Moscow State University | Skyscraper | Russia | |
| 9 | 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 Burj Al Arab
United Arab Emirates · 13.1 km from Dubai25.141° N 55.185° E
Image by keerthichn from Pixabay The drama is structural as well as graphic. The hotel stands on an artificial island about 280 metres offshore from Jumeirah Beach, joined to land by a private bridge. Because the island is made of reclaimed sand, the tower is held up by 230 concrete piles, each 40 metres long. The "sail" itself is a translucent membrane of fibreglass fabric stretched between the two arms of the frame; by day it shields the interior from the desert sun, and after dark it becomes a screen for coloured light. The whole structure rises 321 metres from its island, on 56 floors.
Did you know? Building the island took about three years, longer than the less than three years needed to raise the tower on top of it.
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 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.
08 Main Building of Moscow State University
Russia · 7.7 km from Moscow55.703° N 37.531° E
Dmitry A. Mottl · CC BY-SA 3.0 The commission first went in 1947 to Boris Iofan, but his design placed the tower on the very edge of the Sparrow Hills escarpment, where the ground was prone to landslides, and the job was handed to Lev Rudnev. Rudnev, already known for the Frunze Military Academy, moved the building about 800 m back from the cliff; the engineering team was led by Vsevolod Nasonov. The frame consumed more than 40,000 tonnes of steel and some 130,000 cubic metres of concrete, and the building was inaugurated on 1 September 1953, the start of the academic year. Rudnev received a Stalin Prize for the design in 1949, while it was still under construction.
Did you know? The side wings carry a giant thermometer and barometer that match the clock on the central tower.
09 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 skyscrapers in Asia?
- On our list, Taipei 101 (Taiwan) ranks first, followed by Petronas Towers (Malaysia) and Burj Al Arab (United Arab Emirates).
- Which country has the most skyscrapers in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from the People's Republic of China (4), the United Arab Emirates (2) and Malaysia (1).
- What is the giant ball inside Taipei 101?
- It is a tuned mass damper, a steel sphere weighing about 660 tonnes suspended between the 87th and 92nd floors. It sways against the motion of the building, reducing movement caused by strong winds and earthquakes.
- How tall is the Burj Khalifa?
- The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is 828 metres tall and has been the tallest building in the world since it opened in 2010. Its Y-shaped plan was inspired by the desert flower Hymenocallis.
- What are the Seven Sisters of Moscow?
- They are seven tiered skyscrapers built in Moscow in the late 1940s and 1950s in the Stalinist style. The Main Building of Moscow State University is the tallest of them, at about 240 metres.
- How many skyscrapers are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 9 skyscrapers in 5 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 4.