Building height of Shanghai Hotel that was designed by the Shanghai Institute at the beginning of 1980s surpassed that of International Hotel for the first time, breaking through the city’s skyline. Since then, the “Two Institutes” designed many excellent works featuring combination of functions and forms through active creation practice and courageous innovation. Those diversified high-rise buildings boasted functional applicability, advanced equipment, up-to-date structure, various shapes and colorful polymorphism, such as Huating Hotel, East China Power Building, Jin Jiang Tower, Broadcasting and Television Station Building, New Century Shopping Center and Yindu Mansion. In the middle of 1980s, the East China Institute, which was selected as one of the “National Guiding Design Institutes of Tourist Hotels” by Ministry of Construction, was in charge of guiding design of tourist hotels. Meanwhile, buildings were becoming higher and higher, e.g., building height of the 43-storey Jing’an Hilton Hotel was 143.6m, that of the 48-storey Shanghai Center was 164.8m, that of the 43-storey Shanghai World Financial Center was 167.8m and that of the 88-storey Jinmao Tower was 420.5m. These modern buildings of diversified styles were equipped with not only the world’s first-class automatic monitoring equipment in terms of plumbing, ventilation, fire control and security facilities, but also intelligent conditions of office automation, information and modernization. When it came to layouts and shapes, Shanghai International Shopping Center, the new building of Shanghai Library and Shanghai Museum each had distinctive characteristics. The design of the 468-meter-high Oriental Pearl TV Tower made a breakthrough in the traditional single cylinder structure of concrete tower by creating a giant multiple cylinder space frame structure with diagonal braces, which combined load-bearing structure with traffic structure for lifts and looked modern and beautiful.
