Taipei 101 is rising to number one in height

By Tiffany Wu, Reuters, 9/30/2003

TAIPEI -- Some time over the next few weeks, a spire rising atop a skyscraper in Taipei will inch past Malaysia's Petronas Towers, making Taipei 101 the world's tallest building.

It took more than good luck for the building to reach such an exalted height -- and its owners plan for it to stay around long after its world record is broken by other developers.

As soon as C.Y. Lee and Partners architects finished a draft design for the 1,667-foot-tall Taipei 101, which is meant to resemble the sturdy bamboo stalk, developer Harace Lin sent for a feng-shui master.

"We wanted to avoid making any mistakes," said Lin, president of Taipei Financial Center Corp., a consortium of the island's leading banks and insurance companies that helped bankroll the $1.7 billion tower that will house a shopping mall, offices for 12,000 people, and the Taiwan Stock Exchange.

Although Taipei 101 will not be entirely finished until November of next year, the 101-story tower is already four times as tall as its nearest neighbors and dominates Taipei's skyline of mostly low-rise gray concrete blocks.

A 197-foot spire to be added in mid-October will make Taipei 101 taller than Malaysia's 1,483-foot Petronas Towers.

The Taipei skyscraper also boasts the world's fastest elevators -- 34 double-decker shuttles that can zoom at 37 miles per hour and take passengers to the 90th floor in less than 39 seconds.

Divided into eight canted sections -- a lucky number to the Chinese -- the tower is sheathed by a wall of tinted glass that reflects the sky and is embellished with traditional Chinese "ruyi" symbols, spoon-like figures of fulfillment and contentment.

It also faces the South, an auspicious direction.

"We designed this building based on the philosophy of integrating with nature," said C.P. Wang, architect and project captain. "It's like a plant growing to reach the sky. This is very different from the Western idea of conquering nature."

The only feng-shui problem, Wang said, was a perpendicular road that ran straight into the building's site, which could bring sickness or bad business to occupants. That was easily fixed by adding a fountain to block off the road.

"Feng shui is part of our culture, so we built these symbols to help people feel lucky," he said in an interview.

A big challenge was to make Taipei 101 strong enough to withstand the typhoons and earthquakes that plague Taiwan.

"The environment we're facing is probably the toughest in the world for very tall buildings," Wang said.

The result is a "megaframe" for the first 62 floors consisting of giant steel columns filled with high-strength concrete. The rest is light, made mostly of steel and glass.

Lin said the tower is designed to endure the strongest earthquake in a 2,500-year cycle -- the industry standard is 400 years -- or tremors measuring above 7 on the Richter scale.

Taipei 101 can also resist the biggest typhoon in a 100-year cycle, or gale force of more than 180 feet a second, he said.

And if a plane plows into the tower, like in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, Taipei 101 "will stay up much longer for people to escape," Wang said.