Shanghai Tower

Stand here and you can see three towers in one line. The Jin Mao Tower on the left, finished in 1999, four hundred and twenty metres. The World Financial Center in the middle, 2008, four hundred and ninety-two metres, the one with the opening at the top. And Shanghai Tower, finished in 2015, six hundred and thirty-two metres, the tallest building in China. Three towers, sixteen years apart, standing on what was farmland within living memory.

站在这里，你能看到三座塔连成一线。左边金茂大厦，1999 年建成，四百二十米。中间上海环球金融中心，2008 年，四百九十二米，顶上开着口的那座。再就是上海中心，2015 年建成，六百三十二米，中国第一高楼。三座塔前后相隔十六年，脚下这块地在还活着的人记忆里曾经是农田。

The first thing everyone asks is why it twists. The answer is wind. At this height the wind is the main enemy, and a spiral¹ shape breaks up the vortices that form along a straight wall. The building turns about one hundred and twenty degrees from bottom to top, and the engineers calculated that this cut the wind load² by roughly a quarter. Cutting the wind load by a quarter meant less steel, and less steel paid for the extra cost of building a curve.

所有人问的第一个问题都是它为什么拧。答案是风。到了这个高度，风是主要的敌人，螺旋的外形能打散沿着平直墙面形成的涡流。这幢楼从底到顶转了约一百二十度，工程师算下来，风荷载因此降了大约四分之一。风荷载少四分之一意味着少用钢，省下的钢材抵掉了做曲面多出来的造价。

Look closely and you will see there are two layers of glass, an inner wall and an outer wall with a gap between them. That gap does the job a coat does. It buffers heat in summer and cold in winter, so the building spends much less on air conditioning. The space between the two walls is not wasted either. It opens out at nine points into atriums³ planted with trees, and each of those sky gardens serves the floors around it. The tower is really nine buildings stacked up, each with its own lobby.

凑近看，你会发现玻璃是两层，一层内墙一层外墙，中间留着空腔。那道空腔起的作用跟一件外套一样，夏天挡热冬天挡冷，空调因此省下很多。两层墙之间的空间也没浪费。它在九个位置张开成种着树的中庭，每一处空中花园服务它周围那几层。这座塔实际上是九幢楼摞起来的，每一幢有自己的大堂。

The lifts⁴ here were the fastest in the world when they opened, about twenty metres a second, which puts you on the observation floor at five hundred and forty-six metres in under a minute. Your ears will pop. Up there, look down at the Bund first, then out towards the Yangtze, and on a clear day you can see where the river meets the sea. If the top is in cloud, the view⁵ is not worth the ticket, and I will tell you honestly before you buy one. We have about two hours.

这里的电梯开通时是世界最快的，每秒约二十米，不到一分钟就把你送到五百四十六米的观光层。耳朵会胀。上去以后，先往下看外滩，再往长江口那个方向望，天气好的时候能看到江海交汇的地方。要是塔顶在云里，这张票就不值，买票之前我会如实告诉你们。这里大约停两小时。

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