With the fastest elevators in the world and an
overt display of its tuned mass damper, a
660-ton ball, Taipei 101 has a number of unique
features that will prove intriguing to architecture
aficionados for some time to come.
For the past three years, few people going about their daily business in Taipei paid attention to the building inching its way skyward. Now, at 508 meters and claiming the title of the world's tallest building, Taipei 101 is hard to miss. What they may not appreciate about the gleaming new high-rise, however, is the mix of high technology and traditional Chinese design that make Taipei 101 unique.
Architect C.P. Wang says he wanted to create a tower that would not only be a landmark but also a place people would like. "It's so tall we knew it was going to be a landmark," he says. "But how to do something that represents the culture of the people that the people will like is a very challenging task."
Wang and his partner, C.Y. Lee, already had experience designing high-rise buildings. In Kaohsiung, they designed the Grand 50 and the Tuntex Sky Tower. In 1997, the Tuntex Sky Tower overtook Taipei's Shin-Kong Life Tower as Taiwan's tallest building.
Wang said his team explored a number of designs before settling on the idea of dividing the building into eight sections of eight floors each. Eight, he says, was most suitable for a building such as this one, which will focus on finance. In Cantonese, eight sounds like the word for prosperity (fa), and its significance has gradually spread throughout China. As a result, many businessmen are particularly fond of having eight in their telephone number, on their car's licence plate or in their address. It is no coincidence that the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, the fifth tallest building in the world, has 88 floors.
To distinguish the sections, Wang borrowed from a relatively modern creation: airports. Each section is wider at the top than the bottom, an idea Wang said he got from the control towers at airports. "In a very tall building, if you look straight out, you can see only the clouds," he says. "But if you want to see the city more you need that little angle. We came up with something that I haven't seen anybody else do."
Wang says the result was especially pleasing because the tower resembles a stick of bamboo, a symbol of youth and longevity, growing from the ground. But the architects did not stop there. They wanted to add all the trappings of a traditional Chinese building, plus a few other lucky symbols.
At the intersection of the 27th floor pedestal and the bottom of the first section, for example, one can see a circular structure with a square in the middle, the shape of ancient Chinese coins. Coins, unsurprisingly, are a symbol of wealth and abundance, and ancient coins are believed to have the power to attract more money. Because they have a square hole in the middle, some people tie them together and put them in their wallets.
Also auspicious are ruyi, which literally means "as you wish" and convey a sense of well-being. The ruyi is an ornamental form of the bamboo backscratcher and can be made from expensive materials such as jade or gold. As wealthy people in the Ching Dynasty (1644-1911) began collecting more elaborate backscratchers, they used them less, but they evolved into a symbol of contentment and satisfaction. The shape also changed, with the handle becoming the shape of clouds and the shaft becoming a flattened S-shape. The roof of the mall at the base of Taipei 101 is the shape of a ruyi, and the cloud-like handles are represented on each section of the tower.
Finally, no Chinese building would be complete without protection from unseen dangers. Dragons play a major role in Chinese mythology as the supreme spiritual power. Many emperors regarded themselves as dragons, hence they slept in "dragon beds" and wore "dragon robes." The dragons protect buildings from evil spirits and can be found on the corners of such things as temples and the National Theater at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. In many ways, they do the job of gargoyles on churches in the West. On Taipei 101, stylized dragons protect the four corners of the building at the top of each of the eight sections.
Traditional Outside, Modern Inside
While the outside is couched in tradition, the inside is thoroughly modern, with advanced communications equipment, air conditioners, and special glass to keep the working environment comfortable, as well as numerous elevators and escalators to move people around the building as quickly as possible.
The NT$58 billion (US$1.7 billion) tower, designed to house up to 10,000 workers, is wired throughout with broadband access to the Internet and microwave and satellite transmission equipment. There are also a number of back-up systems to ensure uninterrupted communications with the outside world.
The glass includes a sealed airspace, which conducts the heat poorly, and is coated to reflect the sun's rays, thereby keeping the occupants comfortable while still allowing them to see outside.
To help people get the last few hundred meters from the bottom of the building to their offices, Taipei 101 has 61 elevators, including the fastest in the world that will whisk people at 60 kilometers per hour from the ground floor to the 89th-floor observation deck in 39 seconds. There are also 34 double-decker elevators that can carry 62 people at a time. Wang says that no one will have to wait more than 30 seconds for an elevator, although those working on the upper floors will have to change elevators twice to get there.
In addition to the 77 floors of office space, the building will have two floors of health and fitness facilities, three floors of restaurants, and observation floors on levels 89, 91, and 101. The basement will have parking spaces for 1,839 cars and 2,990 scooters and motorcycles. Already open is the five-story mall at the base of the tower, where up to 200,000 shoppers a day can browse 161 stores and eat at one of the 12 restaurants.
Tall Titles
When the office space opens at the end of the year, Taipei 101 will hold a number of tall-building titles: highest structurally, highest roof, and highest occupied floor. The other main category, that of overall height, will still be held by the Sears Tower in Chicago, which has a structure on the roof not included in other categories.
By contrast, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, before they were destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, were 405 meters high.
The CN Tower in Toronto, at 553 meters, is the tallest self-supporting structure, but is not included in most tall-building categories because it is primarily an observation and communications tower and cannot be occupied.
The tower and the mall are operated by Taipei Financial Center Corp., a conglomerate of 14 Taiwanese companies that won the 70-year build-operate-transfer contract with the Taipei City Government, which owns the land and will take over management of the buildings when the contract ends.
The shareholders include future tenants, such as the Taiwan Stock Exchange, Chinatrust, and Chunghwa Telecom. The biggest shareholders are China United Trust and Investment Corp. (21.78 percent) and China Development and Industrial Bank (19.55 percent). The rest of the investors are mainly life insurance companies and banks.
Lin Hong-ming, president of Taipei Financial Center Corp. says he is proud that Taipei 101 was both financed and designed by Taiwanese, but acknowledges that it required the experience and cooperation of many companies worldwide. "Our architects are from Taiwan, and the other teams are mostly joint ventures, where foreign experts work with a local company," Lin says.
New York-based Thornton-Tomasetti, for example, worked with Taiwan's Evergreen on the structural design. Toshiba from Japan and its Taiwanese partner, GFC, provided the elevators and escalators, and the steel structure was the result of cooperation between Taiwan's state-owned China Steel and Japan's Nippon Steel.
"To coordinate many consultants and contractors from different countries takes lots of time," Lin says. "Because every country has its own culture and customs, we have to spend time coordinating the parties, especially when there are several different opinions between two consultants from different countries."
Despite the problems, these local-foreign partnerships allowed for greater creativity, as diners will notice when they sit down to eat in the restaurant on the 88th floor. There they will see a 660-ton gold ball, swaying slightly from side to side, which is actually helping keep their plates and cups on the table and stopping them from getting motion sickness.
This tuned mass damper, as the device is called, reduces the amount the building sways because of the wind. Usually these devices, which come in many forms, are hidden in the structure of the building. But for Taipei 101, the architects had the idea of making a show of the ball, painting it gold and surrounding it in glass so visitors to the upper levels of the building could see it in action.
Jamieson Robinson, senior project manager at Canada-based Motioneering Inc., which built the wind damper, said that exposing the damper had a profound effect on the way the project was carried out. "I think that it's incredible that the tuned mass damper has been so intimately integrated into the Taipei 101 architectural theme," Robinson says. "It's an awesome opportunity for us to help demonstrate that unique technology and architecture can complement each other."
Robinson says the building's height and shape and the severe wind in Taipei presented a number of technical challenges. "Taipei is in a typhoon region, and is also on the Pacific 'Ring of Fire,'" he says, referring to the zone of frequent earthquakes in which Taiwan is located. "These harsh physical environmental conditions have dictated that the damper's design and construction be precisely executed, so that the damper will safely endure some extreme conditions."
Wang acknowleges that typhoons, and particularly earthquakes, were a major consideration when designing the tower. "It's probably the toughest place to have a very tall building because of the harsh environment," he says. "Look at our neighbor Japan. The Japanese are very careful and go very slowly."
Despite the concerns--fanned by a 6.8-magnitude earthquake in March 2002 that knocked two cranes off the top of the partly constructed tower, killing five people--Wang says the tower itself will still be standing long after all the buildings around it have fallen down, no matter what nature throws at it. "We have a very strong building there," he says, adding that with proper management, Taipei 101 could last for several hundred years.
Art and Feng Shui
As well as utilizing technology from around the world, the building's architects also wanted international art to decorate the entrance of the building. Eight art installations by artists from Europe, the Americas, and Asia are being installed on the first floor, including two fountains, a brass plate built into the floor and a sculpture--called "Partners"--on which will be inscribed the names of everyone who worked on the building, from the president of Taipei Financial Center Corp. to the Thai construction workers who helped build the tower.
Not all the artwork is just for show, however. One of the fountains is also protecting the building from destructive chi entering via an alley that points straight at the tower. In terms of feng shui, chi is most useful when meandering at a moderate speed. Too slow, and the chi stagnates. Too fast, and it becomes a destabilizing factor in the design of a building. Chi flows particularly quickly along straight roads, hence the need for a fountain to slow it down as it enters the building.
Wang said he was pragmatic about the role of feng shui in the building's design. "We usually take a logical approach to the design first," he says. "After it's laid out to a certain point, then we ask the feng shui master if there are any major problems."
Wang says the feng shui master hired by the building's owners found no major problems apart from the alley. But he acknowledges that feng shui is an art open to interpretation. "It's like architecture. If you have five architects on the same job there are bound to be arguments," he says. "I heard several feng shui masters comment on it and mostly on the positive side. Only one guy I heard said it's too tall. That's why we suggested that only one feng shui master be consulted."
Inevitably, Taipei 101 will not be the tallest building forever. There are several projects already underway that, if completed, will be taller. That does not bother Wang. "Of course, for any architect, that is always something you'd like to do, to build the tallest building. But we knew there would be a taller building, that's why we focused on the character," he says. "Will the building represent the people's wishes? It seems that most people like it."
Graham Norris is a journalist based in Taipei.
Copyright (c) 2004 by Graham Norris.