Monthly Archive for December, 2009

It would cost 5 bil­lion dol­lars and stand twice as tall as its near­est rival.

Sure, the Burj Dubai tower looks amaz­ingly tall, but it’s final height— cur­rently pro­jected to be 2,300 feet— is less than half that of a new build­ing planned for Saudi Ara­bia. It’s going to be 5,250 feet high. Yup, that’s just 30 feet short of a mile tall: taller than any­thing under con­struc­tion any­where, and mak­ing it eas­ily the world’s tallest build­ing. Think they should stick a TV antenna on the top and go for that extra 30 feet? I sure do.

It’s going to be built in a new city near Jed­dah on the Red Sea and is funded by bil­lion­aire Prince al-Walid bin Talal. He bought London’s Savoy hotel for a cool $2.5 bil­lion in 2005. So you can sus­pect that there’ll be a hotel in the build­ing some­where. By my cal­cu­la­tions, the tower will have some­where between 320 and 350 floors, so per­haps that should be “sev­eral hotels”.

Not much is known about the details yet, other than the fact that it’ll have two sup­port­ing flying-buttress tow­ers to help keep it up (both more than 800 feet high). It will also have advanced damp­ing sys­tems to stop the sway­ing at high floors from mak­ing peo­ple sick, and it’s going to need amaz­ing engi­neer­ing to cope with freez­ing wind at the top and desert heat at the bottom.

It’s so tall that much of the fer­ry­ing of mate­r­ial and con­struc­tion work­ers will have to be by heli­copter. And that’s just cool.

Mile High: 5250-Foot Tower Will Make Burj Dubai Look Like Pencil