Shum Yip Upperhills Tower 1

This guide to Shum Yip Upperhills Tower One in Shenzhen opens with an odd fact: engineers won a top structural prize in 2018 for a supertall skyscraper that wasn't even finished. It explains why the glass curtain wall overhead looks so unusual, with no column breaking the surface, and introduces Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's alternative to the conventional supertall skeleton, a Ladder Core System tying the mega-columns to the core at every floor instead of only at scattered levels. Look up at the clear span between columns on each face as you listen.