How tall is Taipei 101?

How tall is Taipei 101?

Taipei 101 rises 508 m (1,667 ft) to the top of its spire, the height used on this site and the official architectural height listed by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). The tower has 101 floors above ground and five below, and its highest occupied floor is at 438 m (1,437 ft). When it opened on 31 December 2004, it took the title of world's tallest building from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, and it held that title until the Burj Khalifa opened in January 2010. CTBUH now ranks it as the eleventh-tallest building in the world, and it is still the tallest in Taiwan.

Why some figures say 448 m and others 508 m

Different sources give slightly different heights for Taipei 101, and almost all the differences come down to where you start and stop measuring. The building's owners give the roof as 448 m and the top floor as 438 m, measured from the top of a 1.2 m platform at the base. CTBUH's rules measure from the lowest significant pedestrian entrance, which here means including that platform, so some CTBUH-based figures for the roof come out at about 449.2 m.

The spire is the larger question. CTBUH counts spires as architecture but excludes antennas, flagpoles and other equipment. Taipei 101's pinnacle, which supplies roughly the top 59 m above the 449.2 m roof, is a designed, permanent element of the tower, so it counts, and the architectural height and tip are the same, 508 m. That is the figure most people know, and it was enough to put the tower about 56 m above the Petronas Towers' 451.9 m when it opened. Its records for roof height and highest occupied floor briefly passed to the Shanghai World Financial Center in 2008, before the Burj Khalifa overtook every category.

Eight segments of eight floors

The architect C. Y. Lee, working with C. P. Wang, gave Taipei 101 a form rich in symbolism. Above a tapering base, the main tower is made of eight segments of eight floors each, flaring slightly outward like the tiers of a pagoda or the joints of a bamboo stalk. In Chinese-speaking cultures, the number eight is associated with abundance and good fortune. The segments also recall stacks of ancient Chinese ingots or money boxes, a symbol of prosperity, and four large discs at the base of the tower represent coins. The adjoining shopping mall carries the world's largest ruyi, a traditional auspicious symbol, as an exterior feature.

The blue-green, double-glazed curtain wall reinforces the bamboo image, and it does real work: it blocks about half of the external heat. The stepped, double-chamfered corners were chosen after wind tunnel tests at RWDI in Canada showed that they greatly reduce the vortex-driven sideways oscillations that a square tower would suffer.

Built for typhoons and earthquakes

Few skyscrapers face the combination of hazards Taipei 101 does. The tower stands about 200 m (660 ft) from a major fault line in a region exposed to typhoons and Pacific Ring of Fire earthquakes. The structural engineers, Evergreen Consulting Engineering with Thornton Tomasetti, designed it to withstand winds of 60 m/s (216 km/h) and the strongest earthquakes expected in a 2,500-year cycle. Huge "mega-columns" in the core and at the perimeter are tied together by outrigger trusses at every eighth floor, so the building behaves as one stiff unit.

The tower was tested during construction. On 31 March 2002, a major earthquake shook Taipei and two cranes fell from the 56th floor onto the streets below, killing five people, including two crane operators. The building itself was found to be undamaged, and after safety checks work resumed in stages that summer. The roof was completed on 1 July 2003, and the construction consortium, led by Kumagai Gumi with Samsung C&T, finished the tower in time for its opening at the end of 2004. The total cost was about NT$58 billion (US$1.9 billion).

The 660-tonne damper visitors can see

Taipei 101's most famous feature is inside. To keep the tower from swaying uncomfortably in high winds, engineers hung a 660-tonne steel pendulum between the 92nd and 88th floors. It is a tuned mass damper: as the building sways one way, the pendulum's inertia pulls the other way, cutting movement by up to 40 percent. Its ball is about 5.5 m (18 ft) across and built from 41 circular steel plates, each 125 mm thick, welded together. It cost about US$4 million. Two smaller dampers, each weighing about 6 tonnes, are fitted at the tip of the spire.

Unusually, the damper is on public display, and visitors to the observatory can walk around it from the 88th floor upward. On 8 August 2015, winds from Typhoon Soudelor swung the ball by about 1 m, the largest movement ever recorded. The damper became so popular that the city commissioned Sanrio to create a mascot, the Damper Baby, which now appears on souvenirs throughout the building.

From a 66-story plan to 101 floors

Taipei 101 was not always meant to be a record-breaker. Planning began in July 1997, when merchants and city officials discussed a 66-story tower to anchor a new business district in Xinyi. The idea of building far higher came later, and it was only in the summer of 2000 that the city licensed a 101-story tower. The main dates in the tower's rise:

Taipei 101 at human scale

At 508 m, the tower is about 290 times the height of a 175 cm (5′9″) adult. The damper ball alone, at 5.5 m across, is more than three times a person's height, and the 37-second elevator ride from the 5th to the 89th floor covers well over 300 m of vertical distance, close to ten meters every second. The eight eight-floor segments each rise more than 30 m, about the height of a ten-story apartment block, stacked one on top of another above the base. Seen from the street in Xinyi, the spire is so high that on cloudy days the top segments disappear into low cloud while the lower floors remain clear.

Taipei 101 compared with other skyscrapers

Since 2010, Taipei 101 has been passed by a wave of taller towers, but it still stands above many famous names. Heights below come from this site's landmark data.

When it opened, Taipei 101 was the first building in the world to pass half a kilometer in height. It is still taller than the Petronas Towers and Willis Tower that preceded it as record holders, while the Burj Khalifa is about 1.6 times its height. You can line up any of these in the 3D height comparison tool.

Records, green credentials and New Year fireworks

Beyond its height, Taipei 101 collected a string of records. Its Toshiba express elevators climb from the 5th floor to the 89th in about 37 seconds at roughly 60.6 km/h (1,010 m/min), and they held the title of the world's fastest for years. In July 2011 the tower received LEED Platinum certification for existing buildings, becoming the tallest and largest green building in the world at the time; the upgrade cost about NT$60 million and was expected to save some 14.4 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year.

The tower is also a stage. Its New Year's Eve fireworks, launched from the tower itself, are among Asia's most watched countdown displays. In December 2007, Felix Baumgartner made an unauthorized BASE jump from the 91st floor. On 25 January 2026, Alex Honnold climbed the outside of the tower without ropes in an authorized free solo ascent lasting 1 hour, 31 minutes and 43 seconds, broadcast live by Netflix as Skyscraper Live, the tallest urban free solo climb on record.

Visiting the Taipei 101 Observatory

The official observatory site lists three observation levels: the 89th floor indoor observatory, the 91st floor and the 101st floor. Tickets are sold online and at the observatory counter on the 5th floor of the office tower, and the observatory is open daily from 10:00 to 21:00. The trip up on the express elevator, with its display of speed and altitude, is part of the attraction, and from the 88th floor upward visitors can see the damper swinging gently in its frame. CTBUH lists the main observatory at 391.8 m above ground.

The building's position in the Xinyi district means it dominates views from nearby Elephant Mountain, a popular spot for photographing the full 508 m height at sunset. For converting the figures above into feet and inches, the height converter does the work, and the landmarks hub ranks Taipei 101 against every structure on this site.

A tower that set the half-kilometer mark

Taipei 101 is no longer the world's tallest building, and it will keep sliding down the rankings as new supertall towers open. Its 508 m still represents several firsts: the first building to break half a kilometer, a record-setting elevator and a damper engineered so well that it became a tourist attraction. It achieved that height on a site exposed to typhoons and earthquakes, with a design that wraps modern engineering in traditional symbols of prosperity. For Taipei, it remains the defining landmark, and for engineers, a benchmark in building tall where the ground itself moves.