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These Are the World's 15 Tallest Buildings 15. The Al Hamra Tower's draped curtain styling is intended to block out the Sun where its rays would fall most intensely, thus aiding in the passive cooling of a building that must endure Kuwait's sweltering climate. 14. The Princess Tower is the tallest residential building in the world. 13. This tower, which shares the pagoda styling of Taipei 101, harbors a secret: a 31-story atrium, part of the Grand Hyatt Shanghai hotel, with corridors winding around it in a vertigo-inducing spiral. The Jin Mao Tower is a neighbor to the Shanghai World Financial Center, number 5 on this list. 12. This recent addition to the Windy City's skyline appears to reflect the signature angular styling of the Willis Tower, but the story setbacks—those ledges where the building steps back from its lower heights—were more explicitly designed to align with the heights of nearby structures such as the Wrigley Building and the Marina City Towers. The Trump International Tower and Hotel also stands as the tallest building in the world to use reinforced concrete as its primary structural material. 11. This skyscraper's exoskeleton prominently displays a diagrid structural system, in which steel support beams crisscross diagonally, forming diamond shapes made up of two triangular sections. These sections cut down on the amount of steel needed compared to conventional frames while remaining structurally sound. 10. The Kingkey, or KK100, is the jewel of the Shenzhen, a major manufacturing metropolis just north of Hong Kong. The building's distinctive, transparent, glassed-over top portion hosts a restaurant and mall. 9. Formerly and still better known as the Sears Tower, this hefty, blocky office building's design is unusual, and it will probably stay that way. 8. Zifeng was designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, the firm behind the Burj Khalifa, and the resemblances are easy to spot. Here, the cutaway look is meant to mimic a dragon wrapping around the structure. 7. A two-story skybridge connects these twin towers at the 41st and 42nd floors. It not only gives the structure its iconic look, but it also speaks to the future of tall buildings and urban development. That future will involve connecting tall buildings at height. 6. This big building was a big gamble for its developers, given its relative isolation from the rest of Hong Kong's high-rises, but the International Commerce Center is doing just fine. The mixed-use office and hotel building has a 97 percent occupancy rate and excellent in-building services such as a 24-hour concierge. 5. The Shanghai World Financial Center's passing resemblance to a bottle opener is not lost on its operators, who sell miniature, functional bottle opener replicas of the tower in the observation deck gift shop. 4. Taipei 101 adopts some of the vernacular architecture of the region where it's built. Furthermore, the building has eight segments of eight floors each, a nod to the auspicious nature of the numeral 8 in the Chinese-speaking world. 3. The spire of One WTC attains a height of exactly 1,776 feet—a shout-out to the birth year of the United States. The building proper is only around 1,300 feet tall, but the CTBUH chose to count spire toward the building's official height. That decision saw the new building controversially eclipse the Willis Tower in Chicago as the tallest building in North America. 2. Big Ben done bigger, the Makkah Royal Clock Tower Hotel was built to afford comfortable accommodations to wealthy Muslim pilgrims making the Hajj. A factor that contributes to the building reaching so high: its gigantic footprint—a broader base supports greater height, as we've all learned first-hand playing with blocks as kids. 1. An innovative tripedal design, along with the projecting shapes of its edges to cut through the wind like the front of a boat to reduce turbulence, both affording greater stability, are but a few of the smart ways the Burj Khalifa succeeded in rising to its record-setting height. The building soars more than 700 feet over its nearest competitor. The same designer of the Burj Khalifa, Adrian Smith, has drawn up an even more ambitious project, the Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia. It is slated to open in 2017 and soar to 3,281 feet—a full kilometer. Subsribe on Happy Traveler - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7ViK_fZPd3-3XzIgQKWYg?sub_confirmation=1