Posted on 12/11/2004 9:07:25 PM PST by wagglebee
The construction of what will be the world's tallest building is set to begin in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The building contract was awarded to a consortium led by the South Korean Samsung Corporation on Thursday.
The Burj Dubai tower will stand 800 metres tall - just 5 metres shy of half a mile - once completed in 2008. That will be a full 350 metres taller that the tallest floored in the world today, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.
The new tower’s unique, three-sided design will ascend in a series of stages, around a supportive central core and boast a total of 160 floors, accessible via a series of double-decker elevators. Its shape will be integral to its impressive size. The design is intended to reduce the impact of wind and to reduce the need for a stronger core - allowing for more space - as it ascends.
"It's almost like a series of buildings stuck together," says Mohsen Zikri, a director at UK engineering consultants Arup. "As you go up you need less and less lifts and less core."
Military precision
A key challenge will be the logistics involved in construction, Zikri told New Scientist. "You need things to be delivered with military precision or you will have chaos on the ground."
A spokeswoman for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Chicago-based architects firm behind the design in the US, says the shape should prevent wind vortices building up around the tower and causing it to move in the wind. "Wind is the primary thing at this height," she told New Scientist. "The engineers have focused on shaping the building to minimise this effect."
As wind whirls around a tall building it can build into powerful vortices that in turn generate powerful winds on the ground. But the wide base of the Burj Dubai should also prevent wind from causing these disturbances.
Besides beating the Petronas Towers, which stands at 452 metres tall, Burj Dubai will also be considerably taller than the CN tower in Toronto, Canada which at 553 metres is the tallest structure in the world without a multiple floor structure.
Foundation work was recently completed by Turner Construction International, based in New York, US. Above ground construction will now begin under the control of the Samsung Corporation. The contract was awarded by Emaar Properties in Dubai, after an 11-month bidding process.
The tower will be used for offices, residential apartments, hotels and shops and will be surrounded at its base by a man-made lake.
Let's see. Contributions flow as follows...
1. U.S. - architecture, engineering and foundation construction
2. South Korea - construction & construction management
3. Middle East - petrodollars and demolition
I say knock it down on principle.
Perhaps our scramjet cruise missiles Will come on line when this building is completed. What a test. Knock off an Islamic icon half way around hte world from the continental US.
It looks like a space ship to me.
This guy does travel a lot around the world. :)
Its a beautiful building, but I sure has heck wouldn't work on top of it. Hope the UAE has good relations with the crazies, cause they would get a kick out of knocking something like that down if they got half a chance.
I have heard of Dubai before but I don't really know that much about it. From what I heard, not all Arab countries are backward like they seem to be, and the fact is that there is some hope in Middle East in places like Dubai. So what made Dubai different from all other places?
I'm pretty sure the jihadists hate the UAE almost as much as they hate us.
wonder how deep the foundation will go
Not without some irony here....
Btw, I failed to see where they're painting the red bullseye?
I think I saw that tower in Lord of the Rings
They have PILES of money and unlike Saudi Arabia, they don't have any major Islamic shrines, so I guess the Islamofascists leave them alone.
http://www.emirates.org/
Funny, just this morning I was looking up...
02180 zanab {zaw-nawb'}
from 02179 (in the original sense of flapping); TWOT - 562a; n m
AV - tail 11; 11
1) tail, end, stump
***
cf. Arabic deneb (z to d, as in zahav and dahab)
How does a tail become a 'head' (chief point)?
Alpha Cygnus (Deneb): The name of this star means "tail" and having a magnitude of 1.2, is located 1500 light-years from Earth. Deneb is 10,000 times brighter than the Sun and has a superficial temperature of 11,000 Kelvin degrees. Its color is white-yellow and its diameter is 60 times greater than the Sun.
NGC7000: Located near and towards East from Deneb, this is the famous North America Nebula. It is very big and you would need as little as 10x magnification to see the whole object.
Bahrain, UAE (where Dubai is), and Qatar are all moving ahead of the rest of the region. Capitalism and the rule of law has taken place in the coastal persian gulf states (except for Kuwait). I was stationed in Doha, Qatar for three months back in the spring and it is progressing rapidly. Vistually the entire Nation is "under construction". Qataris claim that they are striving to be the next Dubai, while those in Dubai are striving to leave the rest of the Arab world in the dust. Dubai is now a major tourist attraction for Europeans and even Americans (European celebrities have multi-million dollar villas in Dubai and there's even a massive amusement park, DubaiLand). Dubai also has a booming stock market.
I believe Capitalism and Democracy are inextribably linked. In countries where capitalism exists and democracy has not taken root, democracy is merely around the corner (think of Taiwan and South Korea 20 - 30 years ago).
The Gulf States, along with Iraq, will pull the Arabs out of the 9th Century.
Those in Dubai are "good arabs". We have major military assets in Dubai and our base of operation in the Middle East is in Qatar (long-term).
A moat! Now, that's cool.
bttt
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