Shanghai World Financial Center
Trapezoid-topped supertall skyscraper whose glass floor lets visitors look straight down through its famous open gap.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Shanghai World Financial Center follows a design dispute that broke out mid-construction, when the tower's Japanese developer had planned a round opening near the top as a nod to Chinese moon gates, and Shanghai's mayor and others read something else into that same circle. It traces the late redesign the architects were forced into in 2005, with the top floors still unbuilt, and the unplanned nickname that followed. Along the way it revisits the building's earlier brush with disaster, when its 1997 foundation pour was followed by six years of the Asian financial crisis freezing the whole project. Listen for how the shape people call it today has nothing to do with what it was first meant to symbolize.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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