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The Saudi royal family announced yesterday its plans to build the world's tallest building which will be over a mile high (5,280 feet). It will be located outside of the port city of Jeddah and will create a new city of 80,000 residents.
Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia will be 275-stories tall when it is completed and consist of hotels, offices, luxury apartments and a shopping center. The structure will be twice the height of the world's current tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (which tops out at 2,717 ft). The Kingdom Tower project is so large that it'll cost $30 billion to construct. To get to the top from the ground floor, an elevator ride would take an estimated 12 minutes to ascend.
Workers at the tower's site, in Jeddah, started driving huge foundation piles 330 feet into the sand last year. But it was unclear if the building itself would ever emerge—or if, like Chicago's Spire, it would remain a gaping hole in the middle of the city. Here's what work at the site looked like in 2012:
there are plenty of unanswered questions about Kingdom. Amazingly, no one is quite sure how living at 3,000 feet will affect humans. It's also unclear how elevators inside the building will work, since the current weight of elevator cable makes it impossible to support above roughly 2,000 feet.
Image: CTBUH.
Adrian Gill—one half of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, who designed the tower—had the following to say about the unknowns:
There may be a limit to the rapid change in height the inner ear can stand. At extreme heights, an elevator might need to be designed to go slower than one might want, or to rest at a middle floor. But that's not something condo buyers are likely to favor. Asked if he's ever worried about the discovery of an unforeseen challenge or phenomenon only after a tower has topped out, Gill smiles, pauses, and says simply: "Yeah."
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