The tallest building in Taipei is Taipei 101, at 508 metres and 101 floors above ground, completed in 2004. It was the tallest building in the world for just under six years, until the Burj Khalifa overtook it in January 2010, and it remains the tallest building in Taiwan by a very wide margin. It also sits 200 metres from an active fault line in a city that gets typhoons every year, which is why the most interesting thing inside it is a 660-tonne steel ball.
Built on the Worst Possible Site
Taipei sits in a basin of soft alluvial soil, in one of the most seismically active regions on earth, and directly in the path of the western Pacific typhoon belt. The Xinyi district site chosen for the tower is close to a fault, and the 921 earthquake of September 1999, magnitude 7.7, struck while the foundations were being built.
The foundation went down to bedrock: 380 piles, each 1.5 metres across, driven 80 metres into the ground with 30 metres embedded in rock, each capable of carrying 1,000 to 1,320 tonnes. The structural frame combines a braced steel core with 16 columns, eight of which are megacolumns filled with high-strength concrete up to the 62nd floor.
The building is designed to withstand wind speeds of around 60 metres per second and the strongest earthquake statistically expected in 2,500 years. Both design cases have been tested in practice — Taipei 101 has ridden out multiple typhoons and the magnitude 7.4 Hualien earthquake of April 2024 without structural damage.
The Damper
Between the 87th and 92nd floors hangs a sphere of welded steel plates, 5.5 metres across and weighing 660 tonnes, suspended on eight cables and connected to hydraulic dampers. It is a tuned mass damper, and it works by swinging out of phase with the building's movement, absorbing energy that would otherwise be felt as sway.
It reduces movement by around 40%. During Typhoon Soudelor in 2015 it swung a metre — the largest displacement recorded — and video of it moving during the 2024 earthquake circulated widely.
Most tuned mass dampers are hidden in plant rooms. Taipei 101's is visible from the observatory, painted gold, given a cartoon mascot called Damper Baby, and turned into a tourist attraction in its own right. It is the largest and heaviest damper sphere in the world, and it made the engineering legible in a way almost no other skyscraper has managed.
Eight Sections of Eight
C.Y. Lee and Partners designed the tower around the number eight, which is associated with prosperity in Chinese numerology. The shaft above the 26th floor is divided into eight sloping modules of eight floors each, and the outward flare of each module is intended to recall a bamboo stalk, a pagoda, or a sycee ingot depending on which reading you prefer.
The ruyi, a traditional ceremonial sceptre symbolising good fortune, appears as a repeated motif on the facade, and ancient coin symbols are set into the base of each module. The glass is double-glazed and blue-green, and the whole building is lit at night in a colour that cycles with the day of the week.
The design has always divided opinion. It was voted one of the world's ugliest buildings in some polls in the 2000s and has appeared in lists of the best-engineered ones ever since, which is not an unusual combination.
The Elevators
Toshiba supplied two express elevators that run from the fifth floor to the 89th-floor observatory at 16.8 metres per second, or 60.6 kilometres per hour. When they entered service they were the fastest in the world, a record they held until the Shanghai Tower's lifts in 2016.
The trip takes 37 seconds. The cars are pressure-controlled to manage the ear discomfort that speed would otherwise cause, and they use aerodynamic shrouds and active control systems to reduce noise and vibration.
Coming down is slower, at 10 metres per second, because deceleration at the higher speed would be uncomfortable. The engineering constraint on lift speed in supertall buildings is almost always the human body rather than the machinery.
Six Years at Number One
Taipei 101 opened on 31 December 2004 and was formally recognised as the world's tallest building, taking the title from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. It was the first building to pass 500 metres and held records for the highest occupied floor, the highest roof and the greatest overall height simultaneously.
The Burj Khalifa overtook it structurally in July 2007, while still under construction, and formally on opening in January 2010 at 828 metres — a jump of 320 metres, the largest single increase in the record's history.
Taipei 101 has since fallen well down the global list as Chinese and Gulf towers have gone up, and now sits outside the top ten. It remains the tallest green building in the world by some measures, having been awarded LEED Platinum certification in 2011 after a retrofit programme.
The New Year Fireworks
Since 2005 the building has been the centrepiece of Taipei's New Year's Eve display, with pyrotechnics fired from the facade along its full height. The show typically runs for several minutes and is broadcast internationally, and it is the single most recognisable image of the city.
The tower also hosts an annual vertical run up the 2,046 steps to the 91st floor, the Taipei 101 Run Up, part of the international Towerrunning circuit. The record is under eleven minutes.
The 91st-floor outdoor observatory is the highest point normally accessible to visitors, though it closes in high winds. The Skyline 460 experience, opened in 2019, takes small groups onto the roof at 460 metres.
The Building That Slowed the Earth
In 2005 a geologist at National Taiwan University, Cheng Horng Lin, published a paper suggesting the tower's mass — around 700,000 tonnes concentrated on a small footprint — might be increasing stress on the fault beneath it, and pointed to an apparent rise in small earthquakes in the area after construction.
The claim received considerable coverage and remains disputed. Other seismologists argued the load is trivial compared with the forces involved in fault mechanics and that the earthquake record showed no significant change once background variation was accounted for.
No consensus emerged, and no comparable claim has been made about any other supertall building. It is nevertheless one of the very few cases in which a skyscraper has been seriously proposed as a geological actor rather than a geological problem.
What the Numbers Mean
The 508-metre figure is the architectural height, measured to the top of the spire, which is counted because it is an integral part of the design rather than a mast bolted on afterwards. The roof is at 449.2 metres and the highest occupied floor at 438 metres.
Those three numbers are the standard measures used by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the body that adjudicates the world's tallest building title, and they can rank the same set of buildings in three different orders. One World Trade Center wins on architectural height in New York and loses on roof height to Central Park Tower for exactly this reason.
Taipei 101 also carries 101 floors above ground plus five below, and the number was chosen deliberately: it reads as one better than a hundred, and in binary it is the number five. The building's original working name was the Taipei World Financial Center, and almost nobody used it.
What Else Is in Taipei
The gap between first and second place is enormous. Taipei's second tallest building is Farglory Financial Center at 208 metres, followed by Taipei Nan Shan Plaza at 272 metres, completed in 2018 and standing directly beside Taipei 101.
Nan Shan Plaza is the only other building in the city over 250 metres. Most of Taipei is low-rise, partly because of seismic risk and partly because the city's development pattern favoured dense mid-rise blocks over towers.
Taipei Sky Tower, under construction in Xinyi, is designed to reach 280 metres and will become the city's second tallest when it completes. Nothing planned in Taiwan comes close to challenging Taipei 101.
The District It Created
Xinyi was largely a military and industrial area into the 1980s, holding barracks and a tobacco factory. The city designated it as a new financial centre in the 1980s, and Taipei City Hall moved there in 1994.
Taipei 101 was the anchor. The area now holds the city's main department stores, the Taipei World Trade Center, the Nan Shan Plaza, and a cluster of towers that did not exist thirty years ago, connected by elevated pedestrian walkways.
The financial case for the building itself was weaker than the urban one. Occupancy was slow in the first years after opening, the original developer went through restructuring, and the observatory revenue has often mattered more than the office rent.
Visiting
The Taipei 101/World Trade Center station on the Taipei Metro Tamsui-Xinyi line opens directly into the building's shopping mall. The observatory entrance is on the fifth floor, above the mall.
The 88th floor holds the damper and a viewing area, the 89th is the indoor observatory, and the 91st is outdoors when weather allows. Tickets are cheaper booked in advance and the queues are shortest in the early evening on weekdays.
Elephant Mountain, a twenty-minute climb from Xiangshan station one stop away, gives the standard photograph of the tower and is free. For the region's other record holders, see the tallest building in Seoul and the count of countries in Asia.
