The Shanghai World Financial Center is a supertall skyscraper located in the Pudong district of Shanghai in China. It was designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox and developed by the Mori Building Company, with Leslie E. Robertson Associates as its structural engineer and China State Construction Engineering Corp and Shanghai Construction (Group) General Co. as its main contractor. It is a mixed-use skyscraper, consisting of offices, hotels, conference rooms, observation decks, and ground-floor shopping malls. Park Hyatt Shanghai is the tower’s hotel component, comprising 174 rooms and suites. Occupying the 79th to the 93rd floors, surpassing the Grand Hyatt Shanghai on the 53rd to 87th floors of the neighboring Jin Mao Tower. It is the second-highest hotel in the world after The Ritz-Carlton in Hong Kong, which occupies floors 102 to 118 of the International Commerce Centre. The building has a floor area of about 380,000 m² (4,107,500 sq ft). The construction costs reached USD $ 1.20 billion.
On 14 September 2007, the skyscraper was topped out at 492.0 meters (1,614.2 ft), making it, at the time, the second-tallest building in the world and the tallest structure in Mainland China. It also had the highest occupied floor and the highest height to roof, two categories used to determine the title of “world’s tallest building”. The Shanghai World Financial Center opened on 28 August 2008, with its observation deck opening on 30 August. This observation deck, the world’s tallest at the time of its completion, offers views from 474 m (1,555 ft) above ground level.
The most distinctive feature of the SWFC’s design is the trapezoid aperture at the peak. The original design specified a circular aperture, 46 m (151 ft) in diameter, to reduce the stresses of wind pressure and to reference the Chinese mythological depiction of the sky as a circle. It also resembled a Chinese moon gate due to its circular form in Chinese architecture. However, this initial design began facing protests from some Chinese, including the mayor of Shanghai, Chen Liangyu, who considered it too similar to the rising sun design of the Japanese flag. Pedersen then suggested that a bridge be placed at the bottom of the aperture to make it less circular. On 18 October 2005, KPF submitted an alternative design to Mori Building and a trapezoidal hole replaced the circle at the top of the tower, which in addition to changing the controversial design, would also be cheaper and easier to implement, according to the architects Foreigners and Chinese alike informally refer to the building as the bottle opener, as some also find the Kingdom Centre in Riyadh. In fact, metal replicas of the building that function as actual bottle openers are sold in the observation deck gift shop.
Shanghai World Financial Center was named by architects as the best skyscraper completed in 2008, receiving both the Best Tall Building Overall and Asia & Australasia awards from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). CTBUH’s Carol Willis, head of New York’s Skyscraper Museum, stated: “The simplicity of its form as well as its size dramatizes the idea of the skyscraper.” Architect Tim Johnson noted its innovative structural design: “Steel trusses guard against the forces of wind and earthquake and made the building lighter, made it use less steel, and contributed to its sustainability.” Johnson described the Shanghai World Financial Center‘s structure as “nothing short of genius.”
