The project Oriental Pearl Tower, 463.85 m in height, ranked the first in Asia and the third in the world, has attracted millions´ visitors and been publicly recognized as the most important landmark of Shanghai. The project Menara Jakarta, 558 m in height with total floor area of 320 000 m² is going to be the number one in the world. The pile work of Menara Jakarta has already been completed soon after construction commencement in January 1998. However, the project has to be interrupted due to the intenational financial crisis.
  The success in both Shanghai Oriental Pearl Tower construction and the design competition of Menara Jakarta should be greatly attributed to the design innovation not only in architecture, but also in structure and other disciplines through the whole project from design concept to details. In the project of Shanghai Tower, designers used a string of pearls to symbolize Shanghai, hanging on a mega space frame with a sets of diagonal struts, which breaks out the traditional system of single tube to be commonly used for concrete TV tower.Therefore, a unique architecture was formed for the city landmark. Such kind of structure is also beneficial for wind and seismic resistance. Furthermore, a series of advanced technologies were employed in the tower, such as to use a prestressed concrete shell to support the 50m sphere, to use bi-hanging steel structure for the45m sphere and to design the antenna pole by using climb-up method after integrated on the ground etc. All of these innovations in design ingeniously and rationally solved a lot of problems for such complicated structure, so that the difficult construction work became easy.
  In the project of Menara Jakarta, designers kept and developed all advantages and overcome some shortages in Shanghai Tower. Many new innovations were further made. Therefore the tower becomes simple, straight forward and elegant.In order that the technology innovations were based on solid science, series experimental studies in seismic engineering, wind engineering and static loading had carefully been done for Shanghai Tower, and some studies had been done for Menara Jakarta.