Shanghai World Financial Center

This skyscraper stands in Shanghai, a huge city in China.

It has 101 floors. People work in it, sleep in its hotel, and look out from the top!

The Shanghai World Financial Center stands in Pudong, a district of Shanghai, China. It is 492 meters tall and has 101 floors above the ground.

The skyscraper database of the Council on Vertical Urbanism describes it as a vertical city: it holds 62 floors of offices, meeting rooms, shops and restaurants, a hotel near the top and an observatory above that.

The Council on Vertical Urbanism's database (the CTBUH Skyscraper Center) lists the tower at 492 m architectural height, 494.3 m to its tip and 474 m to its highest occupied floor, the observatory, with 101 floors above ground. It ranks the building 12th tallest in the world and 2nd tallest in Shanghai.

It describes a 'vertical city': 62 office floors, conference facilities, retail and dining, a 174-room hotel on floors 79 to 93, and a visitors' square and observatory on floors 94 to 100.

The big hole near the top is called a portal. It is about 50 meters wide.

Visitors can ride fast elevators up to look out over the city.

The tower's boldest feature is a portal, a huge opening 164 feet (about 50 meters) wide cut through its upper floors. The skyscraper database says it relieves the enormous wind pressures on the building.

The tower's shape changes as it rises, from wide office floors at the bottom to narrower floors at the top for hotel rooms. Its fastest elevators travel 10 meters every second.

Its boldest feature, the database says, is the 164-foot-wide portal carved through the upper levels, which relieves the enormous wind pressures on the building. The tower is shaped by two sweeping arcs meeting a square prism; the tapering form gives large office floor plates at the base and rectilinear floors near the top for hotel rooms.

At street level, separate entrance blocks for the hotel, offices and shops rise from a stone-clad base. The top elevator speed is 10 m/s, and the tower's gross floor area is 381,600 m².

This photo was taken from an even taller building, the Shanghai Tower!

You can see the big hole at the top. Far below are glass walls and busy streets.

The photo was taken on 26 March 2017 from the 118th floor of the Shanghai Tower, so we look down on the top of the Shanghai World Financial Center. You can see the portal and a structure crossing it, the glass walls with their many lines, other towers and roads far below, and a river at the top left.

The photograph (26 March 2017, by GG001213, CC0; its Commons description says it was taken from the 118th-floor observation hall of the Shanghai Tower) looks down on the tower's top: the trapezoid-shaped portal with a glass-roofed structure crossing it, the tapering glass facade lined with horizontal bands, neighboring towers, wide road junctions and a river at the upper left.