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The 'Jin Mao Building' or 'Jin Mao Tower' () is an 88-story landmark skyscraper in the Lujiazui area of the Pudong district of Shanghai, People's Republic of China. It contains offices and the Shanghai Grand Hyatt hotel. As of 2005, it is the tallest building in the PRC, the fifth tallest in the world by roof height and the seventh tallest by pinnacle height. Along with the Oriental Pearl Tower, it is a centerpiece of the Pudong skyline. It will be surpassed in 2008 by the Shanghai World Financial Center.

Contents

Structure

Occupants

Shanghai Grand Hyatt

Events

See also

Notes and references

External links

Structure

The building is located on a 24 000 m² plot of land near the Lujiazui metro station.
It was designed by the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Its postmodern form, whose complexity rises as it ascends, draws on traditional Chinese architecture such as the tiered pagoda, gently stepping back to create a rhythmic pattern as it rises. Like the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, the building's proportions revolve around the number 8, associated with prosperity in Chinese culture. The 88 floors (93 if the spire floors are counted) are divided into 16 segments, each of which is 1/8th shorter than the 16-story base. The tower is built around an octagon-shaped concrete shear wall core surrounded by 8 exterior composite supercolumns and 8 exterior steel columns. Three sets of 8 two-story high outrigger trusses connect the columns to the core at six of the floors to provide additional support.
The foundations rest on 1,062 high-capacity steel piles driven 83.5 m deep in the ground to compensate for poor upper-strata soil conditions. At the time those were the longest steel piles ever used in a land-based building. The piles are capped by a 4 m-thick concrete raft 19.6 m underground. The basement's surrounding slurry wall is 1 m thick, 36 m high and 568 m long, and composed of 20,500 m³ of reinforced concrete.
The building employs an advanced structural engineering system which fortifies it against typhoon winds of up to 200 km/h (with the top swaying by a maximum of 75 cm) and earthquakes of up to 7 on the Richter scale. The steel shafts have shear joints that act as shock absorbers to cushion the lateral forces imposed by winds and quakes, and the swimming pool on the 57th floor is said to act as a passive damper.
The exterior curtain wall is made of glass, stainless steel, aluminium, and granite, and is criss-crossed by complex latticework cladding made of aluminum alloy pipes.
Official dedication was August 28 1998, a date also chosen with the number 8 in mind. The building was fully operational in 1999.
Jin Mao Building is owned by the China Jin Mao Group Co. Ltd (formerly China Shanghai Foreign Trade Centre Co. Ltd). It reportedly has a daily maintenance cost of 1 million RMB (US$121,000).^[1]

Occupants

The building has 3 main entrances to the lobby, two for the office portion and one for the hotel. Additionally, a 6-story podium at the tower base houses the Hyatt's conference and banquet facilities (first two floors) as well as a shopping mall, restaurants and nightclubs such as the hotel's "Pu-J's" on the third floor.
The 3-story basement has a food court, express elevators to the observation deck, and 600 vehicle and 7,500 bicycle parking spaces below. Above, 61 elevators (supplied by Mitsubishi) and 19 escalators carry visitors throughout the building.
The lower 50 floors (in the first 4 segments of the tower) are made up of 123,000 m² of Grade A offices, divided into 5 elevator zones (3-6, 7-17, 18-29, 30-40, and 41-50). Office spaces are open-plan (column-free) with a floor-to-floor gross height of 4.0m, net height 2.7m. Levels 51 and 52 are mechanical floors, accessible only by service elevators.

Shanghai Grand Hyatt

The building's anchor tenant is the five-star, 555-room Shanghai Grand Hyatt hotel which occupies floors 53 to 87. It is the highest hotel in the world in terms of distance from the ground, however the tallest building to be used exclusively as a hotel is the Burj Al Arab in Dubai (excluding the taller Ryugyong Hotel which was never in use). Additionally, the world's longest laundry chute runs down the full length of the tower to the basement, and incorporates buffers to slow down the laundry during its descent.
The Hyatt's famous barrel-vaulted atrium starts at the 56th floor and extends upwards to the 87th. Lined with 28 annular corridors and staircases arrayed in a spiral, it is 27m in diameter with a clear height of approximately 115m.^[2] It is one of the tallest atriums in the world, the tallest being Burj Al Arab's.

The hotel floors also feature:

★ 53/F: The Piano Bar, a jazz club.

★ 54/F: The hotel lobby and Grand café, served by an express elevator from the tower's ground floor.

★ 55/F: Canton, a high-end Cantonese restaurant that takes up the entire floor.

★ 56/F: On Fifty-Six, a collection of restaurants including The Grill, the Italian Cucina, the Japanese Kobachi, and the Pati which is inside the atrium base.

★ 57/F: Club Oasis, a fitness club featuring the world's highest swimming pool.

★ 85/F: Highest rooms; this is also a transfer level for the elevators going to the two floors above.

★ 86/F: Club Jin Mao, a Shanghainese restaurant.

★ 87/F: Cloud 9, the world's highest bar (although higher restaurants exist), with a split-level mezzanine called the Sky Lounge. It is chosen by some visitors as a comfortable alternative to the observation deck above, since the lowest-priced drinks are the same price as the admission to the deck. Possibly in response to this, the hotel sets a RMB 120 (+15% service) minimum charge.

The 88th floor (not part of the hotel) houses the Skywalk, a 1,520m² indoor observation deck with a capacity of 1,000+ people. In addition to the panoramic views of Shanghai, it offers a topside view of the hotel atrium below. It also includes a small post office. Access is through two express elevators from the basement that travel at 9.1m/s and take 45 seconds to reach the top. As of 2007 admission costs RMB 70 (approx. US$9), half for children.
Levels 89-93, which occupy the building's spire, are mechanical floors not accessible to the public. They are illuminated in bright white at night.

Events

★ On February 18, 2001 Han Qizhi, a 31-year old shoe salesman from Anhui province "struck by a rash impulse", climbed the building barehanded. This occurred a mere week after well-known urban climber Alain "Spiderman" Robert had given up trying to convince Chinese authorities to let him climb the structure. Referring to the tower's scaffold-like cladding, Robert commented that his six-year-old son could climb the building and that he himself could do it using only one arm.^[3]

★ On October 5, 2003 during Chinese National Day Holiday, a multi-national group of BASE jumpers (invited by the Shanghai Sports Bureau) leaped from the top of the tower. 34-year old Australian jumper Roland "Slim" Simpson had a parachute malfunction and crashed on an adjacent building. He fell into a coma, and died following repatriation on October 22.^[4][5]

★ The tower and the hotel inside, including the famous atrium, were featured in the futuristic film ''Code 46'' (2003).

★ The tower and the hotel inside, including the famous atrium, are also featured in the latest installment of the video game Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Double Agent. In this level Sam Fisher lands by helicopter on the roof of the tower and then makes his way down the side of the structure and into the Grand Hyatt hotel. This happens during Chinese New Year and fireworks can be seen exploding over the Shanghai skyline.

★ France's Alain Robert, renowned for climbing the world's tallest buildings, wasn't going to let 15 days in a Chinese jail deter him from an attempt at scaling China's tallest building.^[6] He finally scaled the building in 2007, 6 years after the first free-climbing of the Jin Mao building.

See also

★ List of skyscrapers

★ List of the world's tallest structures

Notes and references

1. ''Shanghai Star''
2. Commonly quoted atrium height of 152m is due to a faulty assumption of 38 floors of 4m each; it is actually 32 floors of 3.5m each, the last few being taller.
3. ''Climbing News'', ''Independent Online''
4. ''CRI Online''
5. ''Blog of Death''
6. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070531/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_china_climber;_ylt=As3g6Bm7yfEzMIukj.1w0zbMWM0F

External links

★ Shanghai

★ China Jin Mao Group Co. Ltd.

★ Grand Hyatt Shanghai

★ Emporis datasheet

★ SkyscraperPage datasheet

★ CTBUH datasheet

★ The Jin Mao Building on ''SH.com''

★ Jin Mao Building on ''China Guides''

★ Buildable scale paper model

★ View on Google Maps - includes a short video of the buliding

★ Alain Robert scales Jin Mao Building