Chinese mainland has seen a rapid construction speed of super tall buildings in recent years. Due to its huge quantity material and energy assumption, the super tall buildings exert great impact on the environment. An innovative new life cycle model is proposed for assess and optimize the life cycle environmental cost of super tall buildings. The new life cycle model has two features. Firstly the space distribution of the building materials is considered besides the time dimension, and secondly the single life cycle concept is extended to multiple life cycles to investigate the carbon footprint from the perspective of more than one life cycle. A benchmark super tall building is established to illustrate the application of the proposed new life cycle model. According to the case study results, a remarkable difference would be made in carbon emissions if the life cycle environmental cost based structural optimization method could be applied.