Gensler completes Shanghai Tower to claim title of world's 2nd-tallest building

Dive Brief:

China's 2,073-foot-tall, 121-story Shanghai Tower, located in the Lujiazui financial district of Shanghai, is now complete, making it the tallest building in China and the second-tallest building in the world, Dezeen Magazine reported.
The skyscraper, designed by architecture giant Gensler, is 102 feet taller than the former titleholder of number two on the list — the Makkah Royal Clock Tower in Mecca, Saudi Arabia — but still 644 feet shy of the 2,717-foot-tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world.
The Shanghai Tower is divided into nine vertical zones, and Gensler designed it with a "curved and twisted form generated through a series of wind tunnel tests," resulting in a 24% reduction in wind load, which is especially important during typhoon season. The bottom zones of the tower house shops with offices in the center of the building. The upper zones are home to hotels, cultural facilities and observation decks.

Dive Insight:

Construction was officially completed at the very end of 2015, allowing the tower to make the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat's Top 10 tallest buildings list.

There appears to be a fight for the sky being waged by the world’s architects and developers. Rankings of "tallest" are fleeting, as it seems the current rankings are always in danger of a major shift due to a rapidly expanding pool of challengers.

Earlier this month, Dezeen featured a look at the nine tallest skyscrapers scheduled for completion in 2016, and the 1,965-foot-tall Ping An Finance Center in Shenzhen, China, will be the tallest office building in the world when complete. This same building made news last year when Russian-Ukrainian daredevil Vitaliy Raskalov and his friend Vadim Makhorov climbed to the top.

Even though the project is still in the preliminary stages, Iraq’s Bride of the Gulf is planned to reach the height of 3,780 feet, dwarfing the Burj Khalifa by more than 1,000 feet. Saudi Arabia also announced its plans to challenge the Dubai tower for the title of world’s tallest building by constructing the $1.23 billion, 3,280-foot-tall Jeddah Tower, part of the larger $2.2 billion Jeddah City, topping the Burj Khalifa by 564 feet.