Shanghai Tower - Second Tallest Building in the World

Since Conco is assisting on the construction of the Wilshire Grand Center in downtown Los Angeles, which will become the tallest building in the U.S. west of the Mississippi, we started wondering about other super tall skyscrapers.  This is our second blog post in a series of ten regarding the tallest buildings in the world. 

The second tallest building in the world will be the Shanghai Tower that is currently under construction in Shanghai, China.  It is scheduled for completion in late 2014 and opened to the public in 2015.  As one of three towers that include the adjacent Jin Mao Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Center, it will become the centerpiece of the Lujiazui commercial district.

The Shanghai Tower stands at 2073 ft. tall and has 121 floors above ground level.  The building’s highest occupied floor will be 1841 ft. where there will also be an observatory outlook.  The building contains 106 elevators and 4,090,000 sq. ft. of space.  The Tower is designed as nine cylindrical buildings stacked on top of one another with a double-skin facade.  According to the ArchDaily, “The inner layer of the double-skin façade encloses the stacked buildings, while the exterior façade creates the building envelope, which rotates 120 degrees as it rises and gives the Shanghai Tower its distinctive, curving appearance.”

The architect on the project is the American firm, Gensler, and the design team is led by a U.S. educated Chinese architect, Jun Xia.  In a Gensler Design Update, they reported that because of clay soil conditions, the tower required the support of 1,079 concrete-and-steel bore piles driven deep into the ground.  Additionally the enormous mat foundation pour took 63 hours of continuous concrete pumping and utilized a fleet of trucks.  The building has been awarded LEEDS Gold certification.

To give you an idea of how extremely high these skyscrapers are, two Russian skywalkers recently scaled the unfinished structure with head-cameras strapped on.  The subsequent video shows panoramic views of the city far below as they climb through the clouds to reach the top!

Conco is a leading supplier of concrete services for the Western United States and is once again involved in doing concrete work for a major landmark project. The new Wilshire Grand Center will reshape the Los Angeles skyline as the tallest building west of the Mississippi.  As a part of the project, Conco successfully poured the largest continuous mat foundation ever done in the U.S. on February 15, 2014.