When we took the glossy black lift up to the 124th floor, it felt as though we weren’t moving at all, even though we were rising at ten metres a second.
Our ears popped a few times while seagull music and images played from a dozen little plasma screens scattered around its walls. Then the doors opened and we walked out onto the observation deck. The view seemed very familiar. That confused me. Here I was, up on the tallest building in the world and I felt like I’d seen this sort of thing before. I was looking down past the tops of skyscrapers at snaking road and rail systems. Then I realised that I had indeed seen cities from this viewpoint many times before. From a plane.
How big?
Incredibly, I wasn’t even at the top. It was only half way. The habitable part of the building stretches up to floor 160 and the spire tops out at 828m. That’s 200 floors high. The next two tallest buildings, the Taipei 101 in Taiwan and the Willis Tower in Chicago, are less than 300 metres shorter.
