Before Alain Robert, the French climber who calls himself “Spider-Man,” climbed to the top of Taipei 101 on Christmas Day in 2004, the skyscraper’s owners contacted Shaw Shieh (謝紹松), its chief engineer, to ask whether it was safe to attach anchors to the building’s facade. This time around, Shieh says, he didn’t get a call.
On Saturday morning, the American climber Alex Honnold will attempt to repeat Spider-Man’s feat, but with no anchors, and no ropes. If he succeeds, Honnold will break the record for the tallest urban free solo in history. If he fails (God forbid), damage to the building’s facade will be the least of our concerns.
Honnold’s climb, which Netflix will broadcast live to Friday night primetime viewers in the U.S., is not the sort of thing that Shieh imagined when he started working on Taipei 101. Shieh’s firm Evergreen Consulting Engineering won the bid in 1997, but at that time, it wasn’t supposed to be the tallest building in the world. The original plans called for three separate buildings, one with 66 floors and the other two with 20.
Nobody wanted to invest in the shorter buildings. So the architects combined all three in one, then subtracted a few floors, because 101 seemed like an “auspicious” number. Shieh says that the developers repeatedly pressured him to figure out how to extend the building. “We just had to take it,” he says. By the time the building was completed in 2004, it stood at 1,667 feet.
Much has been made of the engineering challenges Shieh’s team had to overcome. The bedrock beneath Taipei, which the engineers needed to drill into to establish the strongest foundation, is more than 40 meters down, covered in malleable soil that Shieh compares to douhua (豆花), a Chinese desert even softer than tofu. Taiwan’s typhoons are among the strongest in the world, bringing wind speeds greater than 150 kilometers per hour. And to top it all off, Taipei is surrounded by some of the most active tectonic faults in the world.
To mitigate the swaying effects of wind and earthquakes, Shieh’s team installed the world’s largest turned mass damper, a 660-ton gold-painted steel ball that hangs on a pendulum from the 92nd floor. Shieh says he spent 80% of his time thinking about how to protect the building from earthquakes. At the same time, the political landscape was shifting beneath his feet.
When the planning for Taipei 101 began, Taiwan was just a year removed from its first direct presidential election in 1996. Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), whose Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) had ruled Taiwan since the end of World War II, had won another four years in power. Two years before that, Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) had been elected mayor of Taipei. He was the first member of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to hold the post.
The original idea for the project came from Perng Fai-nan (彭淮南), then the director of the Foreign Exchange Bureau of Taiwan’s central bank. Perng was one of Taiwan’s most famous economists, and he declined to declare a party affiliation throughout his career. He suggested the idea to Liao Cheng-ching (廖正井), a member of the KMT who was secretary general of the Taipei City Government, who passed it along to Chen, soon after he took office as mayor in 1994.
The KMT had lifted martial law in 1987, and opposition political parties were formally legalized in 1989. But according to theories of political science that began to gain popularity after the end of the Cold War, competitive elections alone do not define a democracy. Power must also change hands from the ruling to the opposition party. In 2000, when Taipei 101 was in the middle of construction, Chen won the presidency, becoming Taiwan’s first DPP leader.
By the time Spider-Man climbed the building in December 2004, Chen had been reelected for a second term. The climb was part of a week of media events leading up to the building’s official inauguration on New Year’s Eve. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony that day, Chen stood next to Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), his successor as Taipei mayor, who would later be his successor as president, too.
Taipei 101’s construction wasn’t entirely without incident. On March 31, 2002, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake dislodged two cranes from atop the unfinished building, killing five workers and injuring several others when they crashed into vehicles on the the ground 50 stories below.
“These people’s sacrifices actually changed some labor laws and helped make things safer,” says Ku Yu-ling (顧玉玲), a social activist and assistant professor at Taipei National University of the Arts who has published research critiquing the modern world’s cult of worship around supertall buildings.
But Ku’s skepticism of Taipei 101 makes her an outlier in Taiwan, where the crane incident is mostly forgotten, and the building remains a source of national pride to rival bubble tea and semiconductors. In his 2006 annual address, Chen praised the Taipei 101 as a symbol that “Taiwan is in step with the world.”
Political parties in Taiwan fight about everything, says Shieh. But Taipei 101 is something that people can agree on. “[It’s] like baseball.”
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