At the time of this writing the Taipei 101 tower in Taipei, Taiwan is the world's tallest building standing at 508 meters or 1,667 feet and containing 101 floors. The elevator servicing this building is ranked as the world's fastest and achieves a speed of 1010 meters/minute or 37.5 miles/hour. Understanding some issues around the operation of the elevator in Taipei 101 will be important to developing an elevator that can service a building almost ten times its height.

There are a number of issues around an elevator that can service 1000 floors. While it is important to recognize all of these issues, this design will deal only with those issues that relate directly to the interface presented to users of the elevator and the corresponding mental model developed by users.

Interface Issues:
1. Difficulty of selecting from 1000 options
2. User fear
3. Notifying a user when his or her floor has been reached
4. Occupying or entertaining users while elevator is traveling
5. Accomodating multiple passengers and optimizing the elevator's schedule

Other Issues:
1. Safety mechanisms
2. Sound level in the building
3. Sound level in elevator cabin
4. Change in elevator cabin pressure

A succesful user interface for an elevator serving 1000 floors will have these characteristics:
1. Allow a user or group of users to easily select a desired floor or floors
2. Provide appropriate feedback to users once the elevator is underway including current floor and indication when the elevator is nearing a selected floor
3. Ease user fear
4. As users will be spending a significant amount of time in the elevator it may be appropriate to provide some entertainment or distraction
5. An ideal solution will optimize the elevator's schedule to efficiently serve all users

The RTT Building towers over the Chicago skyline standing almost 17,000 feet tall and containing exactly one thousand mixed-use floors. Visitors to the topmost floor travel a vertical distance of more than 3.2 miles and the building's elevators serve tens of thousands of tenants and visitors each day.

The tower is so enormous as to have spawned entirely new social models: a majority of the building's workers are residents as well, housed with their families in residential levels immediately above or below the floors where they work. Groups of floors are nearly autonomous and can provide residents with most necessary goods and services. As a result, most traffic in the building is handled by a secondary network of short-run elevators and escalators serving different zones.

This design is focused on the super elevators that serve mostly visitors to the building and building tenants on their infrequent journeys outside the tower. A bank of eight double-decker elevators occupy the center core of the tower and each elevator can complete the entire journey from ground floor to penthouse in two and a half minutes. Descent takes slightly longer at three minutes and fifteen seconds.

1. World's Fastest Elevator in Popular Mechanics
2. Taipei 101 entry in Wikipedia
3. Fast Lifts Rise Into Record Books on BBC News