Shanghai World Financial Center

A 492 m tower nicknamed "the bottle opener" for the trapezoid opening at its top.

It was topped out at 492 metres on 14 September 2007, which made it the second-tallest building in the world on completion, after Taipei 101, and the tallest in mainland China. It opened to the public on 28 August 2008. Together with the Shanghai Tower and the Jin Mao Tower it forms the world's first adjacent grouping of three supertall skyscrapers.

A circle that became a trapezoid

The first design had a circular opening 46 metres wide, meant to reduce wind pressure and to echo the Chinese idea of the sky as a circle. Some people, including the mayor of Shanghai at the time, felt it looked too much like the rising sun on the Japanese flag, which was a sensitive matter because of history. On 18 October 2005 the architects offered a trapezoid-shaped hole instead, which was also cheaper and easier to build. Metal bottle opener copies of the tower are sold in its gift shop.

Stops and starts

The foundation stone was laid on 27 August 1997. The Asian financial crisis halted the project after the foundations were done. In February 2003 the owners raised the height from a planned 460 metres and 94 stories to 492 metres and 101 stories, using the original foundations, and work resumed in November 2003. A fire broke out in the unfinished tower on 14 August 2007 but was put out within about an hour and nobody was hurt.

Hotel and deck

The Park Hyatt Shanghai has 174 rooms on floors 79 to 93 and was the highest hotel in the world when it was completed. It is now third highest. The observation deck, 474 metres up, opened on 30 August 2008, but after the Shanghai Tower was finished in 2016 fewer people came, and in 2023 the deck closed permanently.

On the globe

The model shows the slender tower with the trapezoid opening at its top; look for the skyscraper with a hole near the crown.