Jin Mao Tower: Art Deco Meets Chinese Pagoda in Shanghai’s Iconic Skyscraper

The Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai is one of the most architecturally layered skyscrapers ever built, fusing the stepped silhouette of a traditional Chinese pagoda with the geometric precision of Art Deco modernism. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and completed in 1999, the 88-story, 420.5-meter tower stood as China’s tallest building at the time and remains a defining landmark of the Pudong skyline.

What Makes Jin Mao Tower Architecturally Unique?

At its core, Jin Mao Tower is a study in cultural translation. SOM’s lead designer Adrian D. Smith faced a challenging brief: create a supertall skyscraper in China’s most ambitious new business district while honoring the country’s architectural heritage. The result is a building that reads differently depending on where you stand.

From a distance, the tower’s silhouette echoes the tiered, tapering form of a Chinese pagoda. Up close, the aluminum and steel cladding, the setback rhythm, and the crown detailing carry strong Art Deco references. Neither element overwhelms the other. Instead, they coexist in a postmodern conversation that was genuinely novel in 1999.

The Number 8 as Architectural DNA

Few buildings in history have embedded cultural numerology as deeply into their structure as Jin Mao Tower. In Chinese culture, the number 8 (八, bā) sounds similar to 发 (fā), meaning prosperity or good fortune. SOM didn’t treat this as superficial decoration. The number 8 became an organizational logic that runs through the entire building.

The tower rises 88 floors. The floor plan is based on an octagonal shape. Eight exterior composite supercolumns and eight steel columns ring the central core. The building’s 88 floors are divided into 16 segments, with each segment one-eighth shorter than the one below. Even the official dedication date, August 28, 1998, was selected to include as many eights as possible. This degree of intentional repetition transforms a cultural preference into a coherent architectural system.

The Pagoda Influence: More Than Surface-Level

The pagoda form is not simply mimicked — it is reinterpreted. Classical Chinese pagodas step back at each tier, with slightly flared eaves that catch the eye and slow the visual ascent of the tower. Jin Mao Tower uses the same logic at urban scale. Each of the 11 tiers above the 16-story base flares slightly outward at its top before the next setback begins, creating exactly that pagoda rhythm in a contemporary steel-and-glass skin.

This design decision does several things simultaneously. It breaks the vertical mass into readable segments, which helps human perception at street level. It creates terrace opportunities that were used for mechanical floors and, later, visitor amenities. And it gives the building a silhouette that is instantly recognizable from across the Huangpu River, which was partly the point. Jin Mao Tower was the first of the three Lujiazui supertalls to be completed, and it needed to signal Shanghai’s arrival on the global stage.

Structural Engineering: Innovation Beneath the Symbolism

The Jin Mao Tower’s structural system is as notable as its appearance. SOM’s structural engineers, led by Bill Baker, developed a composite steel-and-concrete frame built around a central octagonal concrete core. Sixteen exterior columns — eight made of steel-reinforced concrete and eight of structural steel — connect to the core via radiating floor beams at each level.

The structure needed to handle two specific threats common in the Pudong area: typhoon-level wind loads and seismic activity. A wind tunnel model at 1:500 scale was tested extensively by the RWDI wind engineering group to calibrate the building’s aerodynamic behavior. The result is a tower that deflects but does not oscillate dangerously in high winds, which is a critical performance criterion for buildings of this height in coastal China.

Below grade, the engineering challenges were equally serious. Pudong is built on soft alluvial soil deposited by the Yangtze River over centuries. A 30-meter-deep slurry wall was constructed around the construction site to prevent groundwater intrusion, and more than 1,000 bearing piles were driven to a depth where the soil stiffens enough to carry the tower’s enormous load.

The Grand Hyatt Atrium: A Skyscraper Interior Unlike Any Other

One of the most spectacular interior spaces in modern architecture sits inside Jin Mao Tower, largely invisible from the outside. The Grand Hyatt Shanghai begins on the 53rd floor and occupies the building up to the 87th floor. At the hotel’s core is a cylindrical atrium that rises 115 meters from the 56th floor to the 87th floor, with a diameter of 27 meters.

From the ground level of the atrium, 28 annular corridors wrap the interior in a spiral, each corridor containing hotel rooms that look inward into this vertiginous void. The effect is deliberately disorienting in the best possible way — guests can look up and see the ceiling 115 meters above, or peer down through the glass rail and count the rings of corridor below. It was, at the time of completion, one of the largest hotel atriums in the world by height.

This interior experience was not just a design flourish. The atrium solved a real planning problem. Because the tower’s floor plate tapers significantly as it rises — each tier being one-eighth smaller than the one below — the upper floors would be too small for efficient office layouts. By switching to a hotel program at the 53rd floor and wrapping the rooms around a central void, SOM extracted maximum value from the floor plates that remained while creating a signature amenity.

How Jin Mao Tower Changed Chinese Skyscraper Design

When Jin Mao Tower opened in 1999, it established a template that shaped supertall design across China for two decades. Its most influential contribution was the mixed-use typology it demonstrated at scale: retail at the base, offices in the middle, hotel above, and public observation at the crown. This stacked program became standard practice in virtually every major Chinese supertall that followed.

The Shanghai World Financial Center, completed next door in 2008, and the Shanghai Tower, completed in 2015, both follow a similar organizational logic — even as their architectural expressions move toward greater abstraction and away from the cultural historicism of Jin Mao. In this sense, Jin Mao’s real influence is structural and programmatic rather than stylistic.

The building also demonstrated that Western firms could work productively within Chinese cultural constraints without producing watered-down architecture. ArchDaily has documented numerous Chinese supertalls that attempted similar cultural-modern fusions; few executed it as coherently as Jin Mao.

Jin Mao Tower Today: LEED Gold and the Skywalk Experience

The Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai has remained operationally relevant well beyond its initial completion. In 2013, it became the tallest and longest-operated building in China to earn LEED-EB: O+M (Existing Buildings: Operations and Maintenance) Gold certification, according to the CTBUH (Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat). This certification recognized the building’s computerized energy management system, which has tracked electricity, water, and natural gas consumption since 1999, and its low carbon footprint relative to buildings of comparable size and age.

In 2016, the observation experience was upgraded significantly with the introduction of the Skywalk, a 60-meter-long, 1.2-meter-wide glass walkway extending from the 88th-floor observatory at 340.6 meters above street level. The walkway has no handrails, relying instead on a tethering system for visitors. It is reported to be the highest handrail-free walkway in the world at the time of its opening.

For visitors planning a trip to the Jin Mao Tower hotel or the observation deck, the building remains one of the most architecturally rewarding stops in Shanghai. The Grand Hyatt’s atrium, in particular, is worth experiencing regardless of whether you are staying as a guest. You can access the hotel lobby bar to look up into the atrium without booking a room. See also our guide to the world’s most iconic supertall towers for a broader comparison with its neighbors across the plaza.