Taipei 101 declared world's tallest building

[emad]

Justin McCurry in Tokyo
Saturday January 1, 2005
The Guardian

It resembles a giant bamboo shoot, can carry people more than a kilometre skyward in less than 40 seconds, and yesterday it was officially declared the world's tallest building.

The 508 metre tall building in Taipei's Hsinyi district is 56 metres taller than the previous record holder, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

The opening of Taipei 101 - a reference to the number of floors - was attended by local dignitaries keen to bask in the glory of one of Asia's most ambitious engineering projects ever. As an opera company entertained the crowd, the world's fastest passenger lifts whisked VIPs 1,010 metres to the 89th floor observation deck in just 39 seconds.

The building, which took six years to complete, is designed to withstand earthquakes of more than magnitude 7 on the Richter scale and storms so fierce they occur, on average, only once every 100 years.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/japan/story/0,7369,1381852,00.html