The second best of anything rarely gets anywhere near the attention that the best gets, but this may be a noted exception. Standing 2,073 feet high (632 meters), the Shanghai tower is the world’s second tallest building behind the ultra-famous Burj Khalifa. The 128 story building took 7 years to complete, finishing in September of 2015, but it seems as though it has not yet been opened to the public, for undisclosed reasons.
Filmmaker Joe Nafis had the foresight to begin filming the construction of the tower in 2011, when he found an unobstructed view of the city of Lujiazui, which is a peninsula in the city of Shanghai. After being developed as Shanghai’s financial district in the early 1990’s, Lujiazui’s construction activity has exploded and it now hosts more than 30 buildings over 25 stories high and 3 buildings over 1,380 feet tall (420 meters).
Over the next 4 years, Nafis took hundreds of thousands of photos of the tower, totaling about 8 terabytes of memory. Other than the Kardashians taking pictures of themselves, that’s more photos than people would ever take over an entire lifetime. Nafis was then tasked with compiling all of those photos, editing them and turning them into a 2 minutes and 48 second masterpiece, which you can watch below.
As far as the actual construction of the building went, the designers had to be extra careful, since Shanghai is located in the seismic belt and highly susceptible to earthquakes. The building also happened to be located on top of a river basin, so the engineers called for 980 foundation piles that stretched 282 feet deep apiece. To fight off the threat of typhoons, the building is spiraled all the way up to the top, twisting about 1 degree per story of the building.
Enjoy the timelapse video below!
On Tuesday morning, February 23, the Syracuse Fire Department responded to a call about a collapsed crane on a construction site near the university. Thankfully, no injuries were reported.