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.
This building will be built with infidel technology. The jihadists may consider it a 'legitimate target'.
The reference I have says it will be 1776 feet tall. Likely in keeping with its name of the Freedom Tower, 1776 being the year of our freedom for all you DU lurkers out there.
Tallest building unveiled in Taiwan
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/world/newsid_3200000/3200542.stm 17 October 2003, 13.05
Taiwan is celebrating the world's tallest building after the top of the 508m Taipei 101 building was added.
The building isn't actually finished yet, but the spire on top makes it the world's tallest anyway.
The Taipei 101 building is 50 metres higher than the old record holder, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
But the record isn't expected to last long, with the Shanghai World Financial Centre planned to overtake it in 2007....
[Snip]
***I'd hate to have to clean the windows on that thing.***
EEEEIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII! SHREIKKKKK! Don't do that to me. I get dizzy just standing up. (And I'm short)
Beneath the tall structure in the foreground is a vertical mine shaft 2,993 meters deep (9,820 feet). This shaft is 3.75 times as deep as the Dubai building is high. It's located at the South Deep workings of Placer Dome mining company near Westonarea, South Africa. http://www.placerdome.com/operations/southdeep/southdeep.html
By my calculations, that puts the Taipei building at 1,646 feet.
Shanghai World Financial Center building
What is quite amazing is that all this is new in the last 6 to 7 years.
The Shanghai World Finacial Center building will have a hotel, making it the world's tallest hotel. The present world's tallest hotel is the Grand Hyatt in the Jin Mao building. It stands 1,380 feet tall and is just down the street from where the Shanghai World Finacial Center building is being constructed.
But all the best pubs are at ground level.
"...military precision or you will have chaos on the ground..."
Aren't they going to end up with massive linguistic chaos anyway?
Put that mine shaft of yours on its side and see if it strethes that far buster!
We can, of course, at least in theory. But the cost is staggering. The cost of providing, say, 2 million net square feet of office space in one 80-story building is something like 30-50% more than providing the same area in two 40-story buildings. And once you get into the realm of super-tall buildings, the marginal cost of adding one more floor becomes breathtaking.
Those additional floors affect the cost of every floor below. Add a floor, and the entire structure must be a bit stiffer (wind load as well as weight-bearing capacity) -- so thicker columns, with more concrete and/or steel. Water lines (for plumbing and sprinklers) must be thicker in order to bear the crushing weight of what is, in effect, a column of water a thousand feet, or two thousand feet, or whatever tall. And of course, pumping becomes a more difficult issue as the building gets taller. Stairwells must be pressurized and air-locked, both for fire safety and so they can be opened against wind presure. And the list goes on and on.
But the biggie is elevators. Inevitably, no matter how fast and sophisticated your elevator system, the higher you go, the more elevators you will need. One additional elevator for each two floors added is a reasonable guess (even though all the elevators won't go all the way to the top. Let's say increasing your 159-story building to 160 stories requires one additional elevator going all the way to the top. Let's say that the 160th floor has a net rentable area of 10,000 square feet (given that the building tapers to relatively small floorplates near the top). That one additional elevator uses up about 100 square feet of what would otherwise be rentable area on all 160 floors. So you gain 10,000 rentable square feet, and lose 16,000. Add the cost of constructing that 160th floor itself, plus the additional costs applicable to the structure of the entire building, and you see the problem.
This is not to disparage super-tall buildings, of course. I'm fascinated by them, too. And even if they don't justify their costs to the corporation and/or government building them, their marketing value must be considered. But their comes a point where the marginal cost of one more floor becomes absurd. Whether that point is 80 floors, 100, or more, depends on the goals and capacities of the builders. But 160 floors rarified atmosphere, figuratively if not literally.
I believe that's the helopad, upper left, and the restaurant, upper right.
The Burj al Arab’s fountain in the lobby.
Here's a link to a blog by someone who visited the Burj al-Arab.
***I'd hate to have to clean the windows on that thing.***
Ahh, but you forget the spire at the top. Those are good for a few floors in height at relatively little cost.
A word of advice for them....watch out for low flying planes. That building will make a prime target for Islamofacist.
Does the shape of that building remind you of the swords the arabs carry?
After you mentioned it, yes it does. But, I believe it is supposed to represent a ship's sail, "The Sail Hotel."
The sword was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw it. I can see where it would be a sail. But I don't associate arabs with sails...I associate them with swords.
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