How many metres tall is the Shanghai Tower?

How to get close to this number

Anchor on the record holder. This site's companion question puts the tallest at over eight hundred metres, and this tower sits meaningfully below the leader rather than just behind it — it is no longer even the runner-up. Somewhere in the low six hundreds is the right band, and knowing it is the tallest building in China helps rule out the wilder guesses in either direction.

The twist is the engineering fact worth knowing: the hundred-and-twenty-degree rotation is not decoration but wind management, reducing load by roughly a quarter. At this height wind, not gravity, is the dominant structural force, so the shape of a supertall building is primarily an aerodynamic decision.

The saving quantifies it: around fifty-eight million dollars less structural steel. A form that looks like an aesthetic choice paid for itself several times over in material, which is the clearest illustration available that in very tall buildings the architecture and the engineering are not separable disciplines.