Last week, we learned about the Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea and now we’re going a bit more southwest to Shenzhen, China. This is the home to the fourth tallest building in the world, the Ping An International Finance Centre or Ping An IFC. It consists of 115 stories and reaches a height of 1,966 feet or 599.1 meters.
Construction of this building began in 2009 and went for about three and a half years when it was halted because there was reason to believe that the concrete being used was made with unprocessed sea sand. This would cause the concrete to corrode the steel structure being made. After some sample testing was done, the building was able to continue. In 2015, it was decided to not add a 60-meter antenna that would allow the building to become the tallest building in China, surpassing the Shanghai Tower. The Ping An IFC was finished in 2017.
Aside from being home to Ping An Life Insurance, the building contains office, hotel, and retail spaces. It also has a conference center and a high-end shopping mall. The top two stories are home to an observation deck.
33 of the elevators in the Ping An IFC are double deckers that use destination control technology and can reach speeds up to 10 meters per second.
