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.
It looks beautiful.
To prop up the opinion that Islam is stuck in the 9th Century?
*NOT* stuck in the 9th Century....
(my bad)
It needs to be in NYC!
I think they would do better to get a postal service first.
I'm fairly certain the UAE is Islamic in name only. They will be lucky if the jihadists don't blow it up.
I could live with that.
And plumbing.
I agree!
I would like to see the United States build tall towers once again. I do not think it unreasonable to build skyscrapers a mile high. Let's do it.
The only place you can build a tall building is in the heart of Islam, because they will attack any others.
I say knock it down on priciple.
We can build them, I think a big concern is fire safety.
Well, I would put SAMs all around this thing and on top. Fly within a quarter mile and get shot down.
I'd hate to have to clean the windows on that thing.
Probably not a lot to clean, it's not like it rains there or anything.
Hmmm ... maybe they can cost-justify the current ISS crew to take care of it.
That thing is gonna need a whole lot of rugs.
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