Ping An Finance Center is a supertall skyscraper (only 1 meter shy of being a megatall) in Shenzhen, China. The skyscraper is the city's tallest building, it has an observation deck on the top, which has become one of the most popular tourist attractions in the city (See details at Tourism section, and the article Visiting Ping An Finance Center Observatory).
Click Here to Book Tickets for Ping An Finance Center Observatory
Below are some facts and information of the building.
Name:
The official name of the building is Ping An Finance Center, and briefly referred to as Ping An IFC, as it was previously called Ping An International Finance Center.
The building is named after Ping An Insurance Company of China, which is one of the world's biggest investment companies.
In Chinese the words Ping An literally means Safe and Well. The building is owned by Ping An Insurance and the group occupies a large amount of space in the building.
Location: 5033 Yitian Road, Futian District, Shenzhen
Ping An Finance Center is built in Futian District, which is one of 3 major districts in Shenzhen that have supertall skyscrapers built, the other two districts are Luohu District and Nanshan District.
The tower can be accessed by taking Metro Line 1 and 2 and getting off at Shopping Park Station.
Uses: Office, Hotel, Observation
Most office floors are used for the offices of Ping An Insurance themselves and their subsidiaries, the building is where the headquarters of the group located at, which occupies the 109 to 112 floors of the building.
Some of the office floors are leased out to tenants.
The hotel will occupy 20 floors right below the floors of Ping An Headquarters and observatory. Hyatt Hotels was signed as the anchor tenant of the building in September 2013.
An observatory occupies the 116th to 118th floors of the tower.
Height: 599 meters (1965 feet), 118 floors
CTBUH claims Ping An Finance Center is 599 meters tall, some Chinese medias reported the tower is 593 meters though.
As standing at 599 meters, the tower can even be seen from some places in Hong Kong like Lantau Island, Shatin, New Territories West Constituency.
Ping An Finance Center is the tallest building in Shenzhen, and the second tallest building in China, and the 4th tallest building in the world.
Design:
The architectural design of Ping An Finance Center was complete by New York based architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, which also designed some other tallest buildings in China, like Shanghai World Financial Center and Chow Tai Fook Center. And the structural engineering for the tower was done by Thornton Tomasetti, which is another firm based in New York City, Thornton Tomasetti has provided structural design for numerous skyscrapers throughout the world, including some tallest buildings in the world like Shanghai Tower, Taipei 101, Petronas Towers, etc.
The gross floor area of the tower is 378,600 square meters. If the space in the tower's 11-story podium is included, the building has a total of 495,520 square meters of floor space.
The tower has a slender shape, it's width-to-height aspect ratio is 1:10.
The building's facades is composed of stainless steel and glass.
There was a 60-meter spire designed to be installed on the top of the tower, but cancelled in 2015.
Development:
On November 6, 2007, Ping An purchased the Number 1 Lot of Central Business Center in Futian District via auction at a price of 1.65 billion RMB, with the intention to build a megatall skyscraper and a shorter building on the site, the design work began in 2008.
After that China Construction First Building Group was contracted to build the tower, the construction work on the megatall began in November 2009.
In March 2013, the construction suspended due the suspected use of the unqualified material on the building, it was said that the concrete used on the building is largely composed of sea sand , which may gradually corrode the building steels, making the building unsafe to use, the authority sent testing teams to check and test the components of the concrete core for a few times, and finally confirmed that there's no problem with the material, the construction work resumed shortly in lately March.
On July 15, 2014, Ping An Finance Center was built to a height of 443 meters, surpassing the 442-meter KK 100 to become the tallest building in Shenzhen.
The concrete core of the building topped out at 555 meters on December 29, 2014.
In the beginning of 2015, the 60-meter spire on the top of the tower was removed from the design, due to the concern of the security of the nearby flight paths.
On April 30, 2015, Chinese medias reported that Ping An Finance Center had fully topped out.
In fact there was still a pyramid structure awaiting constructing, the tower hadn't reached its highest point until August, 2015.
The pyramid structure on the top was structurally complete in August 2015, making the tower fully topped out at 599 meters.
The construction of Ping An Finance Center officially completed on March 28, 2017. It is estimated the construction cost $1.5 billion.
Latest news report that Ping An Insurance still wants to install the 60-meter spire atop the tower, they have already installed the supportive structure inside the crown of the building, the installation work may start as soon as in 2018.
Tourism:
On February 10, 2018, the observation deck on the top floor of Ping An opened to public, named Free Sky, the observation deck is set on the 116th floor of the building at 541 meters high.
The 118th floor at 562 meters will also open to public later, it will surpass Top of Shanghai on Shanghai Tower by 1 meter, to become the highest observation deck in the world. The admission fee is temporarily priced at 180 Chinese Yuan, the tickets can be booked by clicking here.
More details of the observation deck: Visiting Ping An Finance Center Observatory
