Animals
Health
Environment
Technology
History
Strange News
Space & Astronomy
Society
Saudi Prince al-Walid bin Talal aims to build a tower in the desert twice as tall as the current tallest building in the world.
It’d be built in a new city near the Red Sea port of Jeddah, according to the Daily Mail. The height is put at 5,250 feet, just shy of a mile (5,280 feet). That’s sea-level to Denver, folks.
The project, if built, would outdo anything under construction even in the runaway boom city of Dubai (the Burj Dubai will be 2,625 feet when completed).
You have to wonder how long all this reaching for the sky will last, though, and whether a mile-high tower isn’t just a bit of pie in the sky, engineering-wise. Two towering mini-buildings would be included for stability. Workers would commute to the job by helicopter, it’s said.
- Gallery of the Worlds’s Tallest Buildings (soon to be revised!)
April 1st, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Frank Lloyd Wright actually submitted a mile-high building in the early 1950’s in Florida. Got laughed out of Architecture at the time. Buildings didn’t work because of the leverage limitations of anchor and braced structure design. Too hard to counter-balance the winds from that high in the atmosphere or something.
April 20th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Just goes to show you where our money goes when we buy a tank full of gas. Of course, Exxon and the like get their share also. But, come on!!
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:56 am
While the mile high and Wright’s building are certainly ambitions ideas, they pale in comparison to those of Buckminster Fuller. Putting a dome over Manhattan and banning fossil fuel cars was just the beginning of his incredible ideas. He planned to put entire cities in huge “tensegrity” balls that would float due to temperature of the air inside them. See “The Dymaxion World of BF” by Mark. May be hard to find.