Towering 101 floors high and a staggering 492m tall, Shanghai’s World Financial Center is a gleaming symbol of China’s rapid rise to power. It will take almost a decade to complete this record breaking project. The result – a sleek tower of glass, steel and concrete stretching high into the sky.

But this mega skyscraper is not just about appearances. It needed to be strong enough to stand up to the most extreme forces of nature – killer typhoons, powerful earthquakes and a new and even deadlier human threat as the building’s designers and engineers considered the possibility of a 9/11 type disaster.

Construction of the Shanghai World Financial Center has been no easy task. In the late 1990’s the project came to a standstill due to the Asian Financial Crisis. Construction did not resume until 2003. Problems occurred once more when the developers decided, once construction had already begun, to increase the height of the building. Finally, protests from the Chinese public also forced the redesign of the wind hole at the top of the building.