China's Tallest Abandoned Skyscraper Sat Exposed for Ten Years. Nobody Checked What That Did To It

For ten years, the tallest abandoned skyscraper on Earth stood in Tianjin with no glass on most of it, no heating, no dehumidification, and no maintenance crew. 597 meters. 117 floors. Topped out in September 2015 — and abandoned three months later when the Chinese stock market crash wiped out its developer. Everyone called it the "ghost tower." Urban explorers climbed the crane. Guinness certified it as the World's Tallest Unoccupied Building. Drone footage racked up millions of views. But almost nobody asked the question that actually matters: what does a decade of rain, freeze-thaw cycles, salt-laden coastal air, and total neglect do to a structure that was never sealed? In this video we walk through what exposure does to a supertall — chloride ingress into concrete, carbonation, corrosion of reinforcement and the exposed steel mega-columns, the fate of embedded MEP systems — and why the engineers who signed off on restarting construction in 2025 had to answer for every one of those years before a single new floor went in. Because the tower is coming back. A new permit was issued in April 2025. State-backed investors took over. The 7.6-tonne diamond crown was hoisted into place. Completion is targeted for 2027. The question isn't whether they can finish it. It's whether the ten-year-old skeleton underneath is still the building they designed. If you want more breakdowns of buildings that went wrong — subscribe. New engineering failures every week. #skyscraper #GoldinFinance117 #engineering #AbandonedPlaces #Construction #Architecture #StructuralEngineering #Misbuild #tianjin