Shanghai Tower China

Legendary

Its observation deck is an amazing 562 meters above the ground.

Photo by Andy Miccone

The Shanghai Tower twists. As it rises, the glass skin turns a full 120 degrees, so the top of the building faces a different direction than the bottom.

That isn't for show. Shanghai gets typhoons, and a straight-sided tower this tall would catch the wind like a sail.

Engineers tested the twisted shape in wind tunnels and found it cut the wind's push by about 24 percent. That saved roughly $58 million in steel.

The tower stands in the Lujiazui financial district of Shanghai, China. At 632 meters, it's the tallest building in China and the third tallest in the world, behind only the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur.

The land it sits on used to be a golf driving range. Construction started in November 2008 and took about seven years, with the tower opening in 2015.

It has 128 floors above ground and five below. Inside are offices, shops, a hotel on floors 84 to 110, and nine sky gardens where trees grow indoors hundreds of meters up.

The building has two layers of glass, like a giant thermos. The gap between them traps air and keeps the inside cool in summer and warm in winter, which cuts energy use by nearly a third.

The elevators are among the fastest in the world. They climb at 20.5 meters per second, about 74 kilometers per hour, and reach the observation deck in under a minute.

The main observation deck is on the 118th floor, 546 meters up. A second one on the 121st floor sits at 562 meters, tied for the highest observation deck inside any building on Earth.

The tower shares the skyline with two older giants: the Jin Mao Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Center, nicknamed the Bottle Opener for the hole in its top. From the deck, you look down on both.

Ride the elevator to the 118th floor and watch the screen count the meters as you rise. Look down through the glass floor panels at the streets far below. Then find the giant tuned mass damper on the 125th floor, a 1,000-ton weight that swings to keep the building steady in the wind.