Taipei 101 revisited

There was a programme on BBC2 this evening about Taipei 101, the counterweighted skyscraper I wrote about a few months ago.  If you can endure Richard Hammond (who, separated from the others, is fairly inoffensive, though I prefer the wild-haired one and have no time at all for Clarkson), it’s worth checking out on the iPlayer.  The show focuses on the various feats of engineering which went into the building’s construction, and I was pleased to discover that the story of the building is just as fascinating as the finished product.

It also has the world’s fastest elevator, which travels at the unlikely speed of 1010 metres per minute.  I’ve had my ears pop in Japan’s fastest elevator, in the Yokohama Landmark Tower, but at a piffling 750 metres a minute it barely compares.  (Though looking it up now I discover that it’s also the world’s second-fastest elevator.)

Anyway, I’ve never been to Taiwan, though I’d like to,  so I don’t have any photos of Taipei 101.  Instead, here’s a photo of the view from the top of the Yokohama Landmark Tower, reflected in a mirror inside the viewing gallery: