The building has 3 main entrances to the lobby:
two for the office portion and one for the hotel. The basement has express
elevators to the observation deck and a parking area for 600 vehicles and 7,500
bicycles. In total, 61 Mitsubishi elevators and 19 escalators carry
visitors throughout the building. Levels 51, 52, and 89–93 are mechanical
floors, accessible only by service elevators.
The building is located on a 24,000 m2 (260,000 sq ft)
plot of land near the Lujiazui metro station. The tower is built
around an octagon-shaped concrete shear wall core surrounded by
8 exterior composite super columns and 8 exterior steel columns. Three
sets of 8 two-story high outrigger trusses connect the columns to the
core at six of the floors to provide additional support.
The foundations rest on 1,062
high-capacity steel piles driven 83.5 m (274 ft) deep in the ground
to compensate for poor upper-strata soil conditions. At the time of
construction, these were the longest steel piles ever used for a land-based
building. The piles are capped by a 4 m-thick concrete raft 19.6 m
(64 ft) underground. The basement's surrounding slurry wall is 1
m thick, 36 m high and 568 m long. It is composed of
20,500 m3 (720,000 cu ft) of reinforced concrete.
The building employs an advanced structural
engineering system of wind and earthquake engineering which
fortify it against typhoon winds of up to 200 km/h (with the
top swaying by a maximum of 75 cm or 30 in) and earthquakes of
up to 7 on the Richter scale. The steel shafts have shear joints
that act as shock absorbers to cushion the lateral forces imposed by
winds and quakes. The swimming pool on the 57th floor is also said to act as a
passive damper. The exterior curtain wall is made of
glass, stainless steel, aluminum, and granite and is
criss-crossed by complex latticework cladding made of aluminum
alloy pipes.
