China's NEW Skyscraper Is So Massive It Created A TERRIFYING Internal Storm!

[00:00:00]Nine invisible weather systems are stacked one on top of another inside a single Chinese skyscraper. Each floor breathing its own microclimate while the city outside has no idea. In one of these towers, air near the top runs 6° colder than the lobby with zero heating running to cause it.

[00:00:21]At this scale, buildings stop being buildings. They start becoming weather systems in their own right.

[00:00:28]Today, we're counting down the 13 skyscrapers on Earth so massive, so extreme that engineers had to bend the laws of wind, water, and physics just to keep them standing. From a tower with a literal hole cut through its body to survive a typhoon to a building sinking 18 in into the ground while it's still fully occupied. Stay until the end.

[00:00:51]Number one is the building engineers were reportedly afraid to sign off on because nothing like it had ever been attempted at this scale.

[00:00:59]Join us and let's discover the skyscrapers built to break the laws of physics. Let's go. Number 13, Shanghai World Financial Center. A trapezoidal hole 40 m wide cut straight through this building 474 m above the ground. Locals call it the bottle opener. Engineers call it something else. A pressure release valve for one of the most dangerous forces in super tall construction. Without that gap, the wind pressure hitting the crown of this tower would build until the structure had to fight it head-on. Instead, the building lets the storm pass through itself.

[00:01:37]Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer behind the design, built the opening specifically to interrupt dominant wind currents before they could turn into a destructive force against the frame. That's not the only climate problem this tower solved. At 492 m tall, the elevator shafts created what engineers call the chimney effect. Air got sucked through the lobby and rocketed upward through the shafts with so much violence that elevator doors failed during testing, buckling under pressure differences engineers hadn't fully anticipated. Otis, the elevator manufacturer, had to build airlock lobbies at every entrance just to seal the tower off from the weather system it was creating inside itself.

[00:02:20]When it opened in 2008, the observation deck on the 100th floor became the highest in the world at that time, drawing crowds willing to wait hours just to stand on a glass floor suspended hundreds of meters above the city.

[00:02:33]A skyscraper engineered with a literal hole punched straight through its body just to survive the wind it was tall enough to create. Number 12, Shanghai Tower.

[00:02:45]Nine separate buildings exist inside this one structure, stacked on top of each other like a vertical city, and almost nobody outside China knows it.

[00:02:55]The tower spirals 120° from base to tip, wrapped in two layers of skin, an inner glass curtain holding the offices, and an outer twisting shell that architects at Gensler call a thermal blanket.

[00:03:10]Between those two skins sits a layer of trapped air acting like a giant thermos, insulating the entire structure the same way a double-paned window keeps cold air from ever touching the glass you actually feel with your hand.

[00:03:24]Engineers at Thornton Tomasetti measured the difference. Air on the upper floors runs up to 6° Fahrenheit colder than air in the lobby purely from the building's shape.

[00:03:35]In Shanghai's winters, when outside temperatures drop to 45°, the trapped air between the skins climbs to 57° on its own with zero heating systems running.

[00:03:46]Inside that outer skin are nine independent vertical zones, each spanning 14 floors, >> [music] >> each functioning like its own self-contained micro city, complete with its own ventilation, its own water heaters, its own electrical transformers, and its own atrium garden stretching multiple stories toward a skylight far overhead.

[00:04:05]Near the top, 270 wind turbines generate electricity from the same gusts the spiral shape was built to deflect.

[00:04:12]This tower doesn't just withstand the climate, it runs on it. And it's not even the most ambitious office tower ever attempted in China.

[00:04:20]>> Only 1% of people know the dark truth behind what we are about to show you next. If you want to be part of the few who actually know what's happening in the world, subscribe and leave a like right now. Done? Look at this. Number 11. Taipei 101.

[00:04:36]A gold sphere weighing 660 tons hangs suspended between the 87th and 92nd floors of this Taiwan skyscraper, and tourists can walk right up and stare at it through glass.

[00:04:50]That sphere is a tuned mass damper, the largest publicly visible one on Earth, and its entire job is to keep the building from snapping in half during a typhoon or earthquake.

[00:05:02]Taipei sits in one of the most seismically volatile, typhoon-battered regions on the planet. And when [music] the tower opened in 2004, it was the tallest building in the world at 508 m, a record it would hold for 6 years before Dubai took it away.

[00:05:19]The damper works on brute physics. When wind or seismic force pushes the building one direction, the sphere swings the opposite way on massive steel cables, canceling out the sway before it can build momentum, essentially acting as a giant pendulum fighting against the building's own motion in real time.

[00:05:36]During a 2015 typhoon, the ball was recorded swinging nearly a meter, absorbing force that would otherwise have hit the structural frame directly, and rattled every floor above the dampers housing.

[00:05:49]Engineers designed the building's exterior with eight segments [music] meant to evoke a bamboo stalk rising towards the sky, chosen specifically because bamboo bends without breaking under extreme pressure, flexing rather than snapping when the wind hits hardest.

[00:06:03]The analogy wasn't just architectural poetry, it was the literal engineering philosophy behind every structural joint in the tower.

[00:06:10]>> Number 10, Petronas Towers.

[00:06:14]A skybridge connects two towers 170 m above the ground in Kuala Lumpur, and it was never bolted rigidly to either building because doing so would have torn it apart. Each tower sways independently in the wind at different rates and different directions. So, engineers at Cesar Pelli's firm mounted the bridge on sliding bearings that let it slip in and out like a drawer as the towers move. Without that mechanism, the twisting forces between two independently swaying 452-m towers would have ripped the connection to pieces within the first major storm to hit the city. The towers themselves, completed in 1998, held the title of world's tallest building until 2004, and their design pulls from Islamic geometric patterns, an eight-pointed star cross-section chosen for structural efficiency and cultural symbolism simultaneously. A shape repeated in nearly every structural element from the floor plan up to the spires. Foundation work required drilling 120 m into the ground, some of the deepest foundations ever poured for a building at the time, because engineers discovered the bedrock beneath one tower sat significantly lower than the other. The final structure needed two different foundation depths just to keep both towers perfectly level with each other, an engineering compromise almost nobody who visits ever notices from the ground, hidden entirely beneath the plaza where tourists gather every evening to photograph the towers lit up against the night sky.

[00:07:44]>> Number nine, One World Trade Center.

[00:07:48]Every drop of concrete used in the base of this building was engineered to stop a truck bomb from bringing it down.

[00:07:55]The first 60 m of the tower sit on a windowless reinforced concrete and steel base nearly a meter thick in places, >> [music] >> built specifically to resist blast, chemical, and biological attack after the September 11th attacks destroyed the original towers on this site.

[00:08:14]Above that fortified base, the building rises to exactly 1,776 ft. A number chosen deliberately to reference the year of American independence, turning a structural blueprint into a piece of national symbolism visible from across the harbor.

[00:08:33]The original design called for a twisting glass spire covering the entire structure, but cost and engineering complexity forced architects to scale that vision back dramatically before construction finished in 2013, a decade after the site had been cleared of the previous towers wreckage.

[00:08:51]A broadcast antenna anchors the tower's peak, and a public fight erupted over whether to encase it in a decorative radome, a battle so contentious that the developer and the building's own architect publicly disagreed on the final look for years.

[00:09:06]The tower's glass curtain wall alone required over 12,000 individual panels, each engineered to withstand hurricane force wind loads unique [music] to lower Manhattan's wind tunnel effect between surrounding buildings, a phenomenon that funnels gusts between skyscrapers and accelerates them well beyond open-air wind speeds. Number eight, Millennium Tower.

[00:09:29]This San Francisco skyscraper has sunk more than 18 in into the ground since it opened in 2009, and it's still tilting.

[00:09:37]Engineers discovered the building's foundation piles never reached bedrock.

[00:09:42]Instead, they were driven only into dense sand and clay roughly 60 to 90 ft below the surface, far short of the bedrock layer that sits over 200 ft down in that part of the city.

[00:09:54]As the tower settled unevenly, the top of the 58-story building began leaning noticeably to one side, visible even to pedestrians on the street below.

[00:10:03]Structural engineers eventually mapped the tilt at multiple inches at street level, which translates to a lean of over a foot at the roofline, enough that residents on the upper floors reported doors swinging open on their own and marbles rolling visibly across level floors.

[00:10:18]A massive multi-year retrofit project began drilling new piles down to actual bedrock around the building's perimeter, threading steel and concrete supports beneath an occupied residential tower without displacing the thousands of people living inside it the entire time.

[00:10:33]Lawsuits between the developer, the city, and neighboring construction projects dragged on for years, each side blaming the other for triggering the sinking in the first place, and the final repair bill climbed past a hundred million dollars.

[00:10:44]Half a world away, another government watched a different supertall go up next to a runway, and this time officials didn't wait for the building to finish before they intervened. Number seven, Lotte World Tower.

[00:10:57]Seoul's tallest building sits less than 2 km from Gimpo Airport's flight path, which meant every meter of its final height had to be cleared against South Korean aviation authorities before construction could finish.

[00:11:10]At 555 m, the tower needed a tuned mass damper weighing 660 tons suspended near the top on cables and hydraulic dampers to counteract wind sway and seismic movement in a region increasingly monitored for earthquake risk following tremors felt across the peninsula in recent years.

[00:11:30]The tower's tapered curved silhouette was wind tunnel tested extensively since a rounder profile disrupts the vortex shedding that plagues taller boxier towers built with flat uninterrupted surfaces.

[00:11:43]During construction in 2016 and 2017, cracks and water leaks in nearby underground areas triggered public panic and a temporary shutdown of the tower's amusement park and aquarium with some residents blaming the tower's massive excavation for destabilizing groundwater levels nearby.

[00:12:00]>> [music] >> Government inspectors ultimately cleared the tower to reopen after months of testing, but the controversy forced the developer to install one of the most extensive structural and groundwater monitoring systems ever built into a South Korean skyscraper with sensors now tracking movement in the surrounding soil around the clock feeding data back to engineers monitoring the site remotely.

[00:12:21]The building finally opened fully in 2017 becoming the fifth tallest skyscraper anywhere in the entire world at that time.

[00:12:28]>> A raised arm frozen in glass and steel towers 679 m over Kuala Lumpur and every diamond-shaped panel on its surface was placed to recreate a single gesture from 1957.

[00:12:43]When Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman declared Malaysian independence at the stadium standing directly beside this tower, he [snorts] raised his open palm to the sky and shouted the word Merdeka seven times once for each state joining the new nation.

[00:12:59]Architects at Fender Katsalidis built the entire silhouette around that image and off-center spire leaning outward like an extended arm the tapered crown reading as an open hand against the skyline.

[00:13:12]The facade itself carries 18,144 diamond-shaped glass panels patterned after traditional Malaysian songket weaving chosen deliberately so the building's skin tells a second story about cultural identity layered directly on top of the first. But, symbolism didn't excuse the tower from physics. At 678.9 m, engineers had to fight tropical wind loads unlike anything faced by towers built in temperate climates, and they answered with a diagrid, a diagonal steel lattice running the tower's full height, spreading stress across the entire skin instead of concentrating it in a few columns. A tuned mass damper sits near the apex, canceling sway before residents on the upper floors ever feel the tower move at all. The spire alone took a decade of redesigns and a national currency crisis to finally reach the sky. A building shaped like a promise that took 60 years to keep. Number five, Burj Khalifa.

[00:14:12]15 million gallons of drinking water pour out of this building every year, and none of it comes from a pipe connected to any reservoir.

[00:14:22]The Burj Khalifa in Dubai stands 828 m over one of the driest cities on Earth, and its air conditioning system generates that entire volume as a byproduct of simply keeping the building cool.

[00:14:36]Dubai's humidity regularly hovers near 90%, >> [music] >> and when the tower's massive cooling system chills incoming air, moisture condenses out of it by the ton, the same way water beads on a cold glass left outside.

[00:14:51]Engineers built a dedicated collection system to capture every drop instead of letting it drain away, funneling the condensate into an on-site irrigation tank that now waters the landscaping surrounding the tower.

[00:15:04]A single giant pump moving water to the 163rd floor would generate dangerous pressure spikes throughout the system.

[00:15:12]So, engineers staggered tanks across seven separate two-story mechanical floors, each one relaying water upward in stages rather than forcing it up in one violent push.

[00:15:23]The building also runs 21 mi of chilled water piping and 132 mi of emergency fire piping. Numbers that only make sense once you remember this structure rises 35 stories taller than the world's second tallest building.

[00:15:38]A skyscraper standing in a scorching desert manufacturing its own private rainfall purely from the air conditioning it needs to survive the punishing heat pressing against its windows every single day of the year.

[00:15:50]Number four, Steinway Tower.

[00:15:53]This New York skyscraper stands 435 m tall on a footprint just 18 m wide, giving it one of the highest height to width ratios of any building ever constructed on Earth.

[00:16:05]That extreme slenderness makes it dangerously vulnerable to wind-induced sway. So, engineers packed a massive tuned mass damper into the upper floors.

[00:16:15]A concrete and steel counterweight built to shift opposite the building's motion and cancel out swaying before residents on the top floors can feel it.

[00:16:23]Located at 111 West 57th Street, the tower rises directly beside Central Park and its needle-thin silhouette became possible only because engineers used a reinforced concrete core far more massive relative to the building's narrow footprint than almost any other supertall in existence. Essentially, building a rigid spine down the center of an otherwise fragile shape.

[00:16:45]Wind tunnel testing revealed that at this slenderness ratio, even moderate gusts could produce perceptible motion inside the upper residences. Motion measured not just in inches of sway, but in acceleration, since human inner ears detect sudden shifts in movement more than the shift itself. Meaning residents could feel sick for motion too subtle for instruments outside the building to register.

[00:17:07]The building's terracotta and bronze facade required custom engineering to flex slightly with the tower's constant movement without cracking or failing. A problem most wider skyscrapers never have to solve at all.

[00:17:18]>> Number three, Wuhan Greenland Center.

[00:17:22]This tower was supposed to become the tallest building in China, and then aviation officials cut it down by 160 m mid-construction.

[00:17:31]Chicago firm Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill originally designed it at 636 m, a striking height that would have made it the second tallest structure on the entire planet, trailing only the Burj Khalifa.

[00:17:45]Construction began in 2010, but Wuhan sits inside the protected airspace zone of Tianhe International Airport, only 25 km away.

[00:17:55]After a major airport expansion finished in 2017, Wuhan's Planning Bureau halted construction at the 96th floor, stating officially that the tower had come dangerously close to violating protected airspace clearance in the area.

[00:18:10]Greenland Group was forced to redesign everything above that floor from scratch, scrapping years of structural engineering work that had already been fully completed on paper.

[00:18:20]The final structure was capped at 476 m.

[00:18:24]What survived the redesign is the part that matters most. The original tapered, three-sided, aerodynamic silhouette, engineered specifically to reduce vortex shedding, remained fully intact in the shortened version.

[00:18:36]A stainless steel beacon now sits atop the dome, visible to aircraft descending toward Tianhe.

[00:18:43]The tower finally received its completion license in 2024, becoming the tallest building in Hubei province and the seventh tallest across all of mainland China, a full 160 m shorter than the sky it was originally built to reach.

[00:18:57]>> Number two, CITIC Tower.

[00:19:00]Three floors of this Beijing skyscraper were reportedly seized by China's national security apparatus, and the reason has never been officially confirmed.

[00:19:10]Beijing enforces a strict 180 m height limit across its central business district, yet CITIC Tower, completed in 2018, rises to 528 m, the only supertall building above 500 m completed anywhere on Earth that year.

[00:19:27]Shaped like an ancient bronze zun, a ceremonial wine vessel that narrows sharply at the middle and flares outward at top and bottom, the tower is split into seven independent zones, each separated by a two-story mechanical floor, each running its own climate system entirely independent of the zones above and below it.

[00:19:46]In April 2018, Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao reported that floors 106 through 108 were being appropriated by China's national security apparatus. From that height, on a clear day, Zhongnanhai, the compound housing the Chinese Communist Party's central leadership, is visible with the naked eye.

[00:20:04]Authorities ordered modifications to the tower, describing the changes only as fire safety adjustments, and CITIC Group was never permitted to publicly disclose the actual reason to the media or to its own tenants.

[00:20:16]To this day, the top three floors of one of the tallest buildings on Earth remain permanently closed to the public, and no one outside a small circle of officials knows exactly what happens inside them or why the secrecy continues.

[00:20:29]Engineers on this project reportedly told colleagues they were terrified to sign off on the final structural calculations because nothing like this had ever been attempted at this scale.

[00:20:39][music] The China Central Television Headquarters in Beijing doesn't rise straight up like a conventional tower.

[00:20:47]It bends into a continuous loop. Two leaning towers connected at the top and bottom by massive cantilevered sections that jut out horizontally in midair, forming an unbroken ring 234 m tall.

[00:21:02]One of those cantilevers extends 75 m outward with no support beneath it, suspended by the tension and compression running through the loops diagonal steel grid.

[00:21:12]Designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren of OMA, the building required a structural team from Arup to develop a diagrid skin, an irregular steel lattice whose density was calculated according to the stress each section of the loop would experience, denser where force is concentrated, sparser where they didn't.

[00:21:32]During a 2009 fireworks accident at a neighboring building in the same complex, [music] flames spread rapidly and destroyed a nearby structure, but the main loop tower itself survived largely intact, a fact engineers later cited as validation of the frame's resilience.

[00:21:48]Chinese state media once nicknamed the building "big underpants" for its unconventional silhouette, but engineers regard it as one of the most audacious buildings ever completed, a loop of steel and glass hanging in the air over Beijing that by conventional logic should never have been able to stand. If you thought this was terrifying, you are not ready for what they found in the video on your screen. Click it right now. The truth is worse than you think.

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