Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 34
Shanghai World Financial Center - we decided to finally (after 10 months) go up into the tower that is across the street from our apartment, and the one that we eat in all the time. The Shanghai World Financial Center was was designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox and developed by Mori Building. It is a mixed-use skyscraper, consisting of offices, hotels, conference rooms, observation decks, and ground-floor shopping malls. It was finished on 17 July 2008 and opened a little over a month later on July 28th, 2008. It tops out at 492.0 meters (1,614.2 ft) making it the second-tallest building in the world and the tallest structure in the People's Republic of China at the time. The observation deck, currently the world's tallest according to the Guinness World Records, offers views from 474 m (1,555 ft) above ground level (it was named "highest observatory" in 2009).
Interestingly enough, it was completed in two different times. The foundation stone was laid on 27 August 1997 but due to the Asian financial crisis, contruction was stopped after the foundations were completed.Construction resumed on 16 November, 2003. The building resembles a giant bottle opener and in fact, metal replicas of the building that function as actual bottle openers are sold in the observation deck gift shop.
There are three observation decks: 94th floor (423 m or 1,388 ft), 97th floor Observatory Bridge (439 m or 1,440 ft), and the 100th floor (474 m or 1,555 ft).
For most of these, I won't necessarily put commentary about it, since alot are just views of Pudong from the different levels. However, for some, I'll try to put some information.
The first step was purchasing the tickets, and it was a bit slow because they only had one of their 5 ticket counters open. You can get different tickets based on how high you want to go. The 94th floor ticket was a bit cheaper than the one that included the 97th and 100th floor observation decks. Of course, we went all the way to the top!
They then had information that compared Tokyo, New York City, and Shanghai. Here they show the Pudong area in 1977, which as you can see, has almost nothing.
Then fast forward to 2006, and you can see the Pearl Tower (the one with the 2 pink balls) and the JinMao Tower (the other really tall one). But the Shanghai World Financial Center wasn't really even seen yet.
They next had a scale model of Pudong along with a bit of the Puxi side of the HuangPu River. They must update it quite often, since in the 2nd picutre, you can see the construction on the Shanghai Tower with the cranes on top and everything.
Then we got in line for the elevator to the 94th floor. On the ceiling was a big set of numbers that counted what floor the elevators were on ... kinda cool.
Then from the 94th to the 97th floors, you took this really LONG escalator ... Tom was taking the lead.
Now really starts the pictures ... you can see a few things from these. One is just how hazy it was (we assume pollution) and this was a "clear day". You can see lots of tall bulidings and then buildings with colored roofs. There are ones with blue, red, and orange roofs. These are around 5 or 6 story apartment buildings for the Shanghai residents. Someone told us the roof color says how old the roof is (based on what year it was built or re-roofed I guess).
Again, LOTS of pollution. If you look around the middle of the picture, you can see a half-circle white roof ... middle and on the right I guess. That is the Shanghai Science and Technology museum.
Again, LOTS of low apartment bulidings with the blue roofs.
This is one of the "walkways" that goes across the building and gives you the views of the city.
And up we go to the TOP!
This is the park that is across the street from the JinMao tower that Tom and I have gone to a few times and walked around. Supposedly the shape of the park (maybe the shape of the path around it) is the shape of Pudong.
JinMao Tower
Oriental Pearl Tower with the HuangPu River behind it.
Tom with the Oriental Pearl Tower in the background.
From the top, you could see that alot of the buildings had their own helicopter pad on the top.
A little hard to see, but if you look right at the side of the building on the left side, you can see the red construction cranes of the Shanghai Tower construction site.
This is one of the stadiums in Pudong, the Yuanshen Sports Center. It is one of the 3 large-scale and full-fledged sports centers in Shanghai, covering 160,000 square meters.
These next few are Yanlord Gardens, which is right across the street from our apartment and we can see this from our balcony. It is one of the places we looked at when we were looking for an apartment. In the second picture, if you looki middle-right, you see the one white high-rise with the gold circles on top. That is our actual apartment building. In the 3rd picture, you can see the 2 gold circles (our building) again at the very bottom and can get a view of how close we are to the river.
These are unique shapes for buildings .. the one on the left is the Marriott.
The Aurora building is always nice to look at, being all golden colored.
