Shanghai World Financial Center

KPF crowns an ever-expanding skyline with the Shangai World Financial Center

By Aric Chen

Any plan to build the world’s tallest building requires dodging a minefield of technical, economic, and political issues. But throw in a regional financial crisis, a global race skyward, and major, midconstruction design revisions—complicated by a symbolic motif that flared simmering national tensions—and the task seems that much harder. Upon its completion last year, the Shanghai World Financial Center, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), became the world’s tallest building—sort of. Though it currently claims the world’s topmost roof, at 1,614 feet, and highest occupied floor, it was surpassed in total height by the 1,680-foot-high spire of Taipei 101 during construction and will be dwarfed by the 2,680-foot-tall Burj Dubai when that structure is finished later this year. But at 101 stories, the Shanghai World Financial Center still cuts through the skyline of China’s financial capital like a glittering knife, a spectacular, supertall achievement that beat the odds nonetheless.

Hemmed in by the broad thoroughfares of Shanghai’s ultra-modern Pudong district, across the Huangpu River from the old city center, the building rises high above its glitzy neighbors, which include the landmark Oriental Pearl television tower (1994) and the 88-story Jin Mao skyscraper (1999). The latter, a Postmodern, SOM-designed take on the pagoda, “offers one interpretation relating to Chinese culture,” says KPF design principal William Pedersen, FAIA. “But we took a different point of view. Our objective was to create the simplest form that would have the strongest presence possible.”

The result is a soaring, silvery square prism, sliced at opposite corners by gently curving arcs that nearly converge at the top—an abstract confluence of the ancient Chinese representations of heaven (a circle) and earth (a square). Crowning the building, a large, trapezoidal opening has become its signature feature, while the numbers are equally striking: The project’s 91 elevators serve 4.1 million square feet, including 2.4 million of office space from the seventh to 77th floor, and from the 79th to 93rd floor, a 174-room Park Hyatt hotel, designed by Tony Chi & Associates. Five retail levels and a conference center occupy the base, while visitors are shuttled toward the dramatic 97th- and 100th-level observatories at an ear-clogging 26 feet per second.

Toward its base, the tower’s tapering form provides larger floor plates for the banking and finance tenants that the Japanese developer, the Mori Building Company, sought to attract; toward the top, the narrower, more rectangular plans are ideally suited for the hotel. But from the start, Pedersen and his team saw the Shanghai World Financial Center as serving a civic role, as well. “We wanted to make it part of the civic fabric of the city,” says KPF managing principal Paul Katz, FAIA, explaining why particular emphasis was placed on the building’s public functions.

Clustered around the rough, granite-clad base, separate pavilions and entrances for the main office tower, lobby, hotel, observation decks, and retail and conference complex are meant to “create an experience like a small village gathered at the base of a cathedral,” says Pedersen. In truth, the effect is more like an assemblage of standard-issue, corporate gestures gathered at the base of a 101-story skyscraper. But KPF’s compositions of intersecting, curving, and angled planes of glass, steel, limestone, green granite, and bronze do a decent job of breaking up, and thus orienting, the podium’s otherwise monolithic, square geometry.

The building, which is essentially a stack of 12-story modules divided by refuge floors—temporary places of safety during a building evacuation—presented a number of daunting structural challenges. For one, the site’s soft soil required 2,200 piles to be driven up to 250 feet into the ground. To offset swaying, two 150-ton mass dampers were installed at the 90th floor. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Indeed, plagued by fits and starts, the Shanghai World Financial Center was in many ways an exercise in creative adaptation. When Mori, for which KPF previously designed Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills complex, first contracted the firm to design the building in 1992, it was set to be 1,500 feet tall. But with increasing demand for IT amenities such as data centers and raised access floors, the building’s footprint was enlarged and its height increased by 100 feet. These changes were requested, however, after the foundation had already been laid—and after the Asian financial crisis of 1997 had put a halt to construction (see sidebar).

By the time KPF resumed work in February 2001, the building’s structural engineer, Leslie E. Robertson Associates, had devised a system of diagonal braces to help make the tower not only bigger and higher, but lighter as well. But later that year, September 11 brought renewed attention to safety in supertall buildings. So the designers added a third fire stair, and reconfigured the observatory elevators to service the tower’s refuge floors in case of emergency evacuation.

And yet the biggest curve ball came from something seemingly innocuous: the aperture cut out from the building’s summit. Serving as the project’s iconic centerpiece, it was originally a circle intended to evoke a traditional Chinese moon gate and would have doubled as a gondola ride—an inside-out Ferris wheel a hundred stories in the sky. But aware of the project’s Japanese developer, many Chinese saw in it Japan’s rising sun, an interpretation that proved intolerable given the countries’ deep, historic strains. “It was presented by me as a moon gate with complete confidence,” recalls Pedersen, unaware of the controversy he was about to ignite.

With KPF sent back to the drawing board once more, the circle became a trapezoid, making the building look something like a slick bottle opener (a fact not lost on the gift shop’s merchandisers). The architects recast the vast space housing the gondola ride and the planned spiraling ramp leading up to it as a new three-story restaurant and bar complex for the Park Hyatt, alongside an exhibition and event space. And they redesigned two new observation decks that, if not quite as showy as the gondola ride, exhibit all the bravado. At the bottom of the trapezoid, one deck features an operable glass roof; at the top, the second has become known for the hair-raising experience of walking on glass floors a third of a mile from the ground. “It’s really about lifting people up, not just making the world’s tallest record,” KPF senior designer David Malott says of the building.

Which is probably a healthy attitude. After all, currently rising next door is the Gensler-designed Shanghai Tower. And if all goes as planned, it will dwarf the Shanghai World Financial Center by 400 feet when it is completed in 2014.

Formal name of project: Shanghai World Financial Center

Location: Shanghai, China

Gross square footage: 4,107,508 gsq.ft.

Total construction cost: $1.25 billion

Completion Date: August 2008

Owner:
Mori Building Company

Architect:
Design Architect:
Kohn Pedersen Fox
111 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
Tel: 212-977-6500
Fax: 212-956-2526

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