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.
They will be "frosted" from the sand in a few months anyway so no need to clean them.
As deep as they can pound sand...
< / willing to help them with that task >
I hate when that happens! I just read this in an architectural review of the Burj al Arab.
...a target close to home for terrorists....
as long as ther is no
ww.texston.com
I'd be worried about people being able to breath unassisted at that height. I hope they put signs everywhere that say, "Please don't drop pennies out of the windows".
"My wife and me bawt a Jeep, then weeze went to tha movies..."
I doubt that Hannity graduated from the eighth grade. Correction, third grade.
BTW, did you know he has a new book out?
Sixty plus years ago, we built the largest building in the World in eighteen months in a swamp. Want to know the answer?
Your turn to respond.
I'd have the top ten floors military ops.
I know, I know!
I'd have the top ten floors military ops. With some laser toys and EMF devices.
They were at that tower on The Amazing Race last year...
You are talking about a tower FIVE times taller than the WT Centers. If you have your engineering specifications, our company will bid on the trillion dollar project.
Seems you need to do another doobie.
That bottom pic looks like those chambers in the alien spacecraft where the guy was put in that goo in the movie "Fire in the Sky." :-)
Now that is funny. I doubt Sam will get it. He'll come back and figger that we should build three towers 142 miles high so we don't need satellites anymore. And have a conveyor belt to the space shuttle for food and other supplies.
Taiwan currently holds tallest building title. I forget the height.
This design looks a LOT like Frank Lloyd Wright's design for MILE HIGH building for Chicago--of all places!
If I recall correctly,
the Red Sea is a major rift/fault/quake area.
Frank Lloyd Wright designed one a long time ago.
Do the arithmetic, a commercial jet flying 550 mph will reach a target 1/4 mile away. It is about a 1/2 mile across the Hudson River from NJ to NY.
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