Posted on 02/24/2007 7:17:13 AM PST by aculeus
The Burj Dubai, slated to be the tallest building in the world when it’s done in 2009, is rising 160 stories or more (the final height is a secret) in the desert. It’s no anomaly. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 seem to have whetted the global appetite to build taller and taller. Most of the new mega-skyscrapers are in Asia and the Middle East, but the engineers and architects are American. Why the boom? A combination of economic imperatives and powerful egos, both national and personal. Coming soon: the fulfillment of Frank Lloyd Wright’s dream of a mile-high building.
In October, at the premier international conference of skyscraper builders, the first speaker announced without a hint of irony or doubt that by 2030, somewhere, a mile-high skyscraper would be built. Five thousand two hundred and eighty feet. One-tenth of the way to the ozone layer. More than three times as tall as anything now standing and exactly as high as the most fantastic towers ever dared conceived.
When the speaker made this prediction, there was no murmur of dissent from his colleagues, not a single snicker. Nor was David Scott, an accomplished engineer and the chairman of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, hustled off the stage and gently dosed back to a normative view of what can be achieved by mortals. The 750 planners, designers, and technicians in the room met his statement with a shrug—not, it seemed, because Mr. Scott had lost the thread, not because they were jaded by the repetition of an ancient dream (mile-high towers were proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1950s and by Norman Foster in the 1980s) but because what he said was so obvious, so attainable. For many years it has been a commonplace in the profession that no impediments to such heights exist: the technologies are waiting for the money and the willing client.
Indeed, sitting there in rows, a half-story below ground in an auditorium on the Chicago campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, were the very people who could build a tower one mile high: the foundation engineers who already knew how to pin such a thing to the earth, the structural engineers who could keep it standing in a 100-year wind, the architects who would give it form, the contractors who would know how to phase the behemoth’s construction—even the guys who would have to figure out how to wash the windows. And there are going to be a lot of windows.
Dubai (400)Welcome to Babel. The language is English, the units are metric, the know-how is mostly American, and the site is anywhere in the world where money, land, and opportunity converge, catalyzed by optimism—personal, corporate, or national. Five years after September 11, well into what was expected to be the post-skyscraper era, a boom of increasingly improbable proportions is underway and it shows no signs of abating. Like a bar graph measuring increased faith in the future, the towers keep getting taller—after lingering for decades around 1,400 feet, the height now needed to achieve a jaw-dropping wow-factor is approaching 2,000 feet—and all the biggest are clustered far from the building type’s familiar centers in North America.
“Everyone I know flies from Dubai to Tokyo to Shanghai to Hong Kong to Taipei,” says Carol Willis, an architectural historian and founder of New York’s Skyscraper Museum. “They’re almost never home.”
The current “world’s tallest” titleholder, the 101-story tower completed in Taipei in 2004, stands at a sinister 1,666 feet. When it is completed in 2008, the Lotte World II Tower in Busan, South Korea, will edge seven feet higher. The Burj Dubai, an epochal construction, stands now at about 1,000 feet with only 90 of its planned 160-plus stories completed; when it is finished in 2009, it may top out at over 2,600 feet—however, just as in the great Manhattan skyscraper race of the late 1920s (which the Chrysler Building won with its extended spire before being dwarfed in 1931 by the Empire State Building), the true planned height is a closely guarded secret. The Burj Dubai’s lead architect, Adrian Smith (until recently with the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill but now doing business as Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture), says that as soon as the final number is announced, a competing developer in Dubai will release plans for an even higher tower. A building down the Emirates coast in Doha, to be completed next year, will likely make little news: at 1,460 feet, it is a baby—only ten feet taller than the Sears Tower, which, with 108 floors, has been the tallest building in the United States for the last 33 years and is now (but for not much longer) the third-tallest in the world.
What’s behind the new boom? The quick answer, of course, is money. Except for very rare exceptions like the polemically motivated, 1,083-foot-tall Ryugyong Tower in Pyongyang, North Korea (if its stalled construction resumes, it will be the world’s tallest hotel), skyscrapers are built for two reasons: to make money, responding to existing demand, or to advertise and flaunt the money one already has. The current boom is driven by both, but the latter impetus—the realm of ego, personal or national—seems to be winning the day.
Of the ten tallest towers now standing, six are in China. In Shanghai—to pick but one impossibly dynamic city—nearly 100 buildings over 500 feet tall (typically, around 40 stories) were put up in the last decade. New York, the city with the most such buildings, has erected fewer than 200 in its entire history. The Shanghai skyscrapers were built in a direct response to the demand for space, associated with the ferocious reawakening of the Chinese economy—that is, to make money, responding to demand.
The old formula for what drives skyscraper construction—high density plus high land values equals high buildings—is quite undone by the new class of super-tall buildings, rising as they so often do from the wide-open spaces of unformed young cities.
By contrast, the twin Petronas Towers—which by climbing 33 feet higher than Sears took the tall-building title out of the United States in 1998—were built primarily to make visible the roar of Malaysia’s Asian Tiger (that is, to satisfy ego). The towers didn’t make a dime, and they still stand largely vacant, but now we all know that the folks in Kuala Lumpur can think big. The increasingly quixotic constructions in Kuwait or Riyadh or Dubai—such as the Babel-like Burj itself, which will house an Armani-branded hotel, boutique offices, and luxury residences—can be seen as the product of a pool of investment capital searching for a purpose and finding it, as skyscraper builders always have, in self-aggrandizement.
[Remainder of this long article is available at the link.]
Yes, if the proposed pedestrian bridges were built as moment frames (rigidly connected at the ends). If the bridge ends were allowed to move at the ends it could work.
I'd be more worried about the extra weight on the structure and foundations. They would have been designed for a certain dead load, and these bridges would add extra weight the structure had not been designed to carry. But there is a fair margin of safety, and if the bridges were only a small fraction of the total building weight, it would be Ok. But highways, rail lines ... probably too much extra weight.
Still, interesting ideas.
I'm not trying to rain on your parade....but, I think you'd find MOST people terrified of venturing out on such structures.
Just for fun, what's the highest such example YOU can find which now exists...???
....Dubai (400)Welcome to Babel. The language is English, the units are metric, the know-how is mostly American,....
This week I had an experience worthy of comment here.
I contracted with the Houston office of a Swiss company to keep an eye on materials being procured for a Saudi company project. At the French owned large American company doing the work, I met up with an Egyptian customer's engineer working for the French owned sister Saudi company and his assistant, a very bright and hard charging young Saudi.
Also there were two German engineers who represented the German fims doing the design and procuremnet.
The American manufacturing company provided several applications and customer engineers to host and oversee the meeting.
Three languages were being spoken but the common tie was English, Windows , Word and Adobe PDF. All the computers, and everyone had a laptop always on and in action spoke windows, word and Adobe PDF. These three are the babel fish, the universal language translators that enabled the diverse technical language to be used by all.
Moreover, the plant had wireless internet so the computers were also connected to home by instant e mail. As an old timer remembering telex, fax and DHL, the ability to communicate fantastic volumes of data with e mail and USB drives with those gathered from all over allowed speed unthinkable just a few years ago.
See my post 43
I don't know if this qualifies, but the bridge is 44 stories up. It's over 150 feet long and people wait in line for hours and they have to give out tickets to manage to crowds. Sounds like they aren't too afraid. I imagine the cost of building them is why there aren't too many around.
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I have given up guessing what God will or won't direct Pat to do . . . |
I once leaned over the edge of the roof of the John Hancock Center in Chicago to take a picture straight down to the street. Held the camera in one hand outstretched, pointing straight down. The other hand outstretched in the other direction, holding onto the window washing rail.
Unfortunately, I didn't know until later that I had not properly threaded the film onto the takeup spool, so I didn't get any pix.
"I once leaned over the edge of the roof of the John Hancock Center in Chicago to take a picture straight down to the street. Held the camera in one hand outstretched, pointing straight down. The other hand outstretched in the other direction, holding onto the window washing rail."
...OK...and, I once flicked the ear of a lion in a zoo in Spain....but I never wanted to do it a SECOND time....YOU win.
Is that Kuala Lumpur...???
Not exactly the same, but a similar "rush" is looking straight down from the "vee shaped" cross section of the St. Louis arch....I think it's 630 feet if I remember correctly.....
PLENTY high...the slant in the walls allows you unobstructed view to the ground.
I understand some Indian tribe is going to build a glass bottomed walkway over a portion of the grand canyon.....yipes.....!!!
And, if THAT doesn't cause palpitations for you there's a roller coaster in Vegas at the TOP of some tower. Scares ME just looking at the track.....
How'd you get outside?
The observation tower
is enclosed by glass . . .
I wasn't in the observation center, I was on the roof.
Another good one is the glass floor up in the CN tower in Toronts. It's fun to watch people put a foot on it and pull back and then they put a bit more pressure on it and keep repeating that until they feel it is safe.
As I stepped out on it, I had visions of "Man Falls to His Death from CN Tower!" for the headline in the paper.
That thing looks like it was built by a kindergarten class.
Buildings should be limited to single floor or less to prevent terrorist attacks.
That's not how we live. By living in fear.
Thanks in advance.
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