Shanghai Tower — skyscraper
Ermell · CC0

Shanghai Tower

  • 2 min read
  • 31.235° N 121.501° E

Interesting facts

  • Its tuned mass damper is a pendulum of about 1,000 tonnes that uses eddy currents, generated by magnets moving over copper plates, to resist the sway.
  • The damper on the 126th floor is presented as an art installation called the Shanghai Eye.
  • The tower cost about 15.9 billion yuan, roughly US$2.4 billion, and stands on a plot that was once a golf driving range.
  • The J Hotel, which opened on its 120th floor in 2021, was billed as the highest hotel in the world.
  • In 2022 Guinness World Records recognised its 120th-floor restaurant, at about 556 metres, as the highest restaurant in a building.
  • One of its shuttle elevators travels about 578.5 metres in a single run, beating the previous record held by the Burj Khalifa.
  • It became the tallest and largest building in the world to earn LEED Platinum certification for sustainable design.
  • Vertical-axis wind turbines near the top generate supplementary power, while rainwater is collected and wastewater recycled for flushing and irrigation.
  • The double glass skin acts as a thermal buffer around the inner tower, reducing the energy needed for air conditioning.

Why it is worth it

The Shanghai Tower is the tallest building in China and one of the tallest in the world, a 632-metre spiral of glass that completes the trio of supertall towers in Lujiazui, the financial district on the eastern bank of the Huangpu river in Pudong. Its neighbours, the Jin Mao Tower of 1999 and the Shanghai World Financial Center of 2008, were planned together with it as early as 1993, and the three form the world's first cluster of adjacent supertall buildings. Construction started in November 2008, the tower topped out in August 2013 and opened in stages from 2015.

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.

For visitors, the tower is about the view. The observation decks on the 118th and 119th floors, at 546 and 552 metres, have been fully open since 2017, and a further deck on the 121st floor, at 562 metres, ranks among the highest observation decks in the world. The express elevators that take you there, supplied by Mitsubishi, ran at 20.5 metres per second when they were installed and were for a time the fastest in the world. From the top, even the neighbouring supertalls of Lujiazui lie below you.

Getting there

The tower stands in the Lujiazui district of Pudong, near the eastern bank of the Huangpu. Lujiazui station, on Lines 2 and 14 of the Shanghai Metro, is nearby; Line 2 continues east to Shanghai Pudong International Airport. Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport (SHA) is about 16 km away.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in the People's Republic of China 105The Most Beautiful Modern Buildings in the People's Republic of China 6The Most Beautiful Buildings in the People's Republic of China 11The Most Striking Modern Skyscrapers 13The Most Striking Skyscrapers 20The Most Beautiful Modern Buildings 50The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

The Shanghai Tower is a 128-story, 632-meter-tall (2,073-foot) megatall skyscraper located in Lujiazui, Pudong, Shanghai. It is currently the tallest building in China, the world's third-tallest building by height to architectural top, and the world's second-tallest building by height to highest occupied floor. It was the tallest and largest LEED-CS Platinum-certified building in the world from 2016 to 2025. It was also the second tallest-building by height to tip in the world from 2015 to 2021, until the completion of Merdeka 118 in Malaysia. The Shanghai Tower also had the world's fastest elevators at a top speed of 20.5 meters per second until 2017, when it was surpassed by the Guangzhou CTF Finance Center, with its top speed of 21 meters per second.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

31.23550, 121.50100per Wikidata