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Saudi Arabia Constructing World's Tallest Building
kkleiner writes "1,000 meters, or 3,280 feet. That's two-thirds of a mile. When the Kingdom Tower is built on the outskirts of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia it will not only become the tallest building in the world, it will shatter the old record. The total cost for the tower is approximately $1.2 billion. It features a Four Seasons hotel, Four Seasons serviced apartments, luxury condominiums, top class office space and the world's highest observatory."
I assume they're building it on the site of the old Tower of Babel, as a memorial to those who lost their lives there some 6000 years ago...
That's nearly twice as tall as the Burj Khalifa according to the graphic in TFA 8-(
Nah, only about 500 feet (or 20%) taller.
When the oil dries up it's going to become a playground for the hyper-rich, at least that's their plan.
If that fails, well it'll make an awesome post-apocalyptic wasteland.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Is it just me or do these super high skyscrapers look out of place when the surrounding buildings are so small? It seems they are more concerned about the record than the overall skyline. I also wonder if western tourist would be well received there.
When I first read that my first thought was that they would have telescopes up there. But all they mean is an observation deck. How disappointing.
More seriously, TFA discusses how this is part of the attempt by Saudi Arabia to move away from having an economy run off of oil. So this will have hotels and offices inside. I'm not sure that this is the best thing to do to get off of such things given how many basic problems Saudi Arabia has and how many fairly cheap things could be done to improve the education and general productivity of most of the population.
One thing that will be an obvious issue for such a large building is the exact layout and behavior of the elevator system. Some modern tall buildings have elevators that don't have simple up and down buttons but rather have a keypad where one punches in what floor one wants to go to and then the system optimizes which elevator to send to you rather than simply sending the next available elevator in that direction. This also allows elevators to travel at faster than the amount they can deaccelerate in a single floor. There's some non-trivial math involved in making such systems, and even making them slightly more efficient can have large scale payoffs simply due to the sheer number of people. As real-estate becomes more expensive and scarce throughout the planet, we're going to need to look more and more at how pre-existing very large buildings have handled these sorts of issues. So I'm happy that we have people like the Saudis doing this now long before we really need it.
From TFA:
The final details of Kingdom Tower’s design are yet to be worked out, but construction is to begin immediately.
We all know how well that impacts budgets and schedules for software projects!
Ah I see. Looks like they did their graphic wrong.
I was searching to double-check the height and it was originally planned to be 1 mile tall but they had to scale back, so I guess the graphic was based on the original height.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Look at the graphic again. It clearly lists the Burj Khalifa as 512m.
GameboyRMH's statement is purely accurate. According to the "graphic", it is nearly twice as tall.
Of course, the next next to the graphic lists the Burj Khalifa as 828m, which is the correct value.
The whole article is badly written, IMO.
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TFA says its being built on the outskirts of Jeddah, so depending on how far out they mean by "outskirts", the light pollution may be manageable.
The bigger issue, I think, is that this is basically a giant vanity project that will probably end up like the Burj Khalifa: Deep in debt with rapidly falling rents and tons of empty space. Jeddah is right next to Mecca, so they probably won't have a lot of trouble filling it with rich foreign Muslims during the Hajj, but it seems like it would be a bit of a challenge during other parts of the year. I guess the Saudis have enough money to burn on crap like this, but it seems they could find a more intelligent way to invest in their own country other than building giant luxury hotels.
The most prominent ruin-to-be from the height of the empire, the days of peak oil. Give it 50 years and the few rag-clad scavengers populating the lower levels will wonder what the fuck anyone thought when they built this....
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
isn't the middle of a city a bad place for an observatory with all the light pollution and whatnot?
I think they mean observatory as in "a place to look out and observe". Not an astronomical observatory.
The most prominent ruin-to-be from the height of the empire, the days of peak oil. Give it 50 years and the few rag-clad scavengers populating the lower levels will wonder what the fuck anyone thought when they built this....
Brings to mind the Aztechnology building from Shadowrun. C*O's and filthy rich at the top, and the just plain filthy at the bottom.
"Curiouser and Curiouser...." -Alice
You should check out what they are doing to their own subjects, makes their relationship to the rest of the world look downright friendly.
Protip:
The causes of famine are politics first, logistics second, and lack of actual food last. It's been this way for a long time. If you have warlords refusing NGOs like UNICEF, then the problem isn't spending money on a building a thousand miles away. There is plenty of food to go around. The problem is getting it there.
--
BMO
I don't think they mean an astronomical observatory. I believe it's just a deck where people can view the surrounding land. An astronomical observatory wouldn't be very useful on top of a building even a quarter of that height. Not only do you have to contend with light pollution, and regular pollution, but those buildings sway so much that you couldn't possibly get an exposure of any significant duration.
Yes. It's a closely guarded secret, lest someone else design and construct another tower from scratch, in less time than it takes them to construct, and makes it one foot taller, stealing their thunder. That should eliminate any doubt as to whether this is anything more than a giant architectural penis.
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Take heart - there's a theory about skyscrapers that states that when a society starts building really big ones it's only a dozen or so years away from bankruptcy.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I don't think they mean an astronomical observatory. I believe it's just a deck where people can view the surrounding land.
Wow! Look at all that sand!
The US economy is like someone who goes to work every day, and maxes his credit card with shiny toys, and uses a big chunk of his paycheck to make the minimum interest payment. The Saudi economy is like someone who finds a chest full of gold in their garden and lives by spending it on the most expensive things they can find until it runs out. Neither is particularly healthy, but the former has better long-term prospects.
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I think a lot of what we attribute to our superior economic system, or work ethic, or diversity (or maybe we don't attribute it to anything, and simply take for granted that we are #1 and always will be) is actually very predictable based on the discovery of the world's largest stockpile of undeveloped natural resources in 1492. A new resource is discovered or developed, it is exploited resulting in growth, then it peters out. Look at how population growth within the US has shifted from California to Texas in the last decade. Some say it is mostly superior governance, I say it is mostly cheap land.
I guess that explains Japan's economic success. Or Hong Kong's. Or Switzerland's. Or Taiwan's. Or Korea's. Yep. Land. I'm not sure I am fully able to explain America's economic success. But I think an hypothesis is forming for me about America's economic decline, that it is associated with an intellectual decline exemplified by half-baked economic ideologies indirectly referred to in the above comment.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
And then they'd go back to starving again.
I heard it said once, and it seems true for the most part when describing populations: People don't starve, people are starved.
They are starved by communism (forced farm collectivation), a kleptocracy that keeps everything to the dictator and his supporters, wars that displace people and ruin crops, or they are purposely starved as part of a program by the rulers to suppress a certain demographic.
Donations of food will only temporarily alleviate the problem. A bomb dropped on the dictator's palace might be money better spent.
Yeah, all the jobs created by the construction and then the running of the building and all the tourist monies are of no use to anyone.
And, as a counterpoint, the Rockefeller Center, which was started during the great depression and has been an example for people making large capital investments ever since. If you build during a recession, you get lots of cheap labour and then have a big building that you can rent out when the economy recovers. Looking at the wikipedia example, it seems that it works very well if you cherry pick your examples, but it's just as easy to cherry pick counterexamples (recessions with no skyscrapers, skyscrapers not followed by recessions).
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The contract to construct the building was signed with The Bin Laden Group, a Saudi Arabian construction firm.
hierophanta = _______ : fill in the blank...
America's economic success in the 1800s and early 1900s was very different from Japan's economic success in the mid-to-late 1900s. We did it largely with natural resources, and later science and engineering talent, plus rebuilding Europe after two devastating wars. They did it with science and engineering talent and other intellectual pursuits.
And yes, our decline is largely going to be associated with intellectual decline, along with a giant amount of corruption and bad governance. We still have some resources, but a lot of them have been tapped out for a while now so other places are leaders for mining: China, Zambia, Bolivia, etc. But while we're definitely experiencing an intellectual decline, at least we're doing better than Saudi Arabia: they had to hire us to design their skyscraper for them. In fact, lots of skyscrapers around the world have been designed by American architects, including I believe the Petronas Towers in Malaysia.
The question you should be asking is, why are Americans still so much better off than almost all of the nations you listed when they stomp us on every standardized test imaginable? You listed the surprising example of Japan, which peaked over 20 years ago! They're an intelligent, well-organized nation that seemed to have a miraculous economy for a decade or two until all the other Asian tigers started to catch up with them, because there was nothing about their industry that couldn't be replicated elsewhere. You think the US feels threatened by China, just consider Japan, and their similar-but-far-larger neighbor next door! Look at US exports to China, and what a large - and growing - proportion of that is "crude materials." If we were a resource-poor nation that wedge would be gone. Now look at our huge agricultural exports, and how many of the nations you listed aren't even self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs! Sure, high-tech farming helps, but you still need land and water. Now consider US law and politics, which were founded on egalitarian, agrarian society. This was possible because there was enough land for everybody to be a landowner, in contrast with Europe where everything was already owned by somebody and wealth (and thus political power) had concentrated on land owners over the centuries. At the very least, you must concede that the height of US power - post WWII - was facilitated by not being destroyed in the war while our main economic competitors were, thanks largely to geography.