Taipei 101, the skyscraper that dominates the city’s skyline, held the record for the world’s tallest building from its completion in 2004 until Dubai’s Burj Khalifa surpassed it in 2010, and remains one of the most earthquake- and typhoon-resistant structures ever built. Its most distinctive engineering feature, a 660-tonne steel pendulum suspended between the 87th and 92nd floors, acts as a tuned mass damper, swinging opposite to the building’s sway during high winds or seismic activity to keep it stable, visible to visitors through a viewing window.
The tower’s design deliberately echoes a bamboo stalk, segmented into eight sections, eight being considered a lucky number in Chinese culture, a building genuinely engineered around cultural symbolism as much as structural necessity.
A City Shaped by Layered History
Taipei’s cityscape reflects distinct historical layers: Qing dynasty-era temples, Japanese colonial architecture from the period of Japanese rule between 1895 and 1945, and rapid post-war modernisation all sit within a few kilometres of each other. The National Palace Museum houses one of the largest collections of Chinese imperial artifacts in the world, brought to Taiwan by Nationalist forces in 1949, a collection whose sheer scale means only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time.
Taipei’s night markets, Shilin among the largest and best known, function as genuine civic institutions rather than tourist novelties, generations of residents gathering nightly for street food, shopping, and socialising in a tradition stretching back decades.
Painting a Tower Built Like Bamboo
Taipei 101’s segmented silhouette against the surrounding mountains gives a watercolourist bold, distinctive geometry to work with. We’ve captured that skyline in our own Taipei Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of Taiwan for a wall at home.
Engineered to sway rather than resist, Taipei 101 remains a rare skyscraper whose greatest strength is knowing exactly when to bend.