A kilometer tall skyscraper will be constructed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and will be the tallest building in the world. The proposed tower will stand at a greater height than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is currently the tallest building in the world at 828 meters.
The competition to construct the world’s tallest skyscraper continues unabated, with ever-greater heights being attained. The Woolworth skyscraper in New York City was the tallest skyscraper in the world a century ago, standing at an impressive 241 meters. The iconic Taipei 101 in Taiwan’s capital city broke the mental barrier of 500 meters in the new millennium. This record has now been held since 2010 by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which stands at an astounding 828 meters in height. This dominance, though, doesn’t appear to have long to run.
With Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture’s Jeddah Tower, the city of Jeddah is prepared to break through a significant psychological barrier: the tower’s 1,000-meter height.
Jeddah sits in the middle of the Islamic world between Mecca and Medina. Since the same architects worked on the Jeddah Tower, hence the two skyscrapers have some visual similarities. They are both “megatall” buildings, a category for those with a height greater than 600 meters (1,968.5 ft).
The Burj Khalifa and the Jeddah Tower are both “Y” shaped, although the Burj Khalifa has just three outside walls while the Jeddah Tower has four. Smith and his engineers found that the three-walled construction was more aerodynamic and more resistant to wind shear at extreme altitudes after conducting extensive wind tunnel testing.
Halting Of The Construction
However, Jeddah Tower, which aims to be a kilometer in height, is still under construction, and its completion date is uncertain. The tower will be the world’s first 1 km (3,281 ft) tall building, and it will be constructed in the northern part of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
It took more than a year to create the vast foundation for the Jeddah Tower, which featured concrete pilings that were 10 feet (3 meters) in diameter and length than a football field. Construction on the tower began on April 1, 2013. Construction above ground began in September 2014.
The foundation of the world’s tallest building steadily ascended until 2017, when a political upheaval struck Saudi Arabia. Alwaleed bin Talal, the main financial backer of the Jeddah Tower, and some of his partners in the Saudi Binladin Group were among the eleven Saudi princes arrested after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (also known as MBS) launched a sweeping anti-corruption “purge” in an aggressive move to consolidate power.
Construction on the Jeddah Tower restarted in 2018 with an anticipated 2020 completion date, and the men were later released after paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.
According to CNN, Mounib Hammoud, CEO of Jeddah Economic Company, announced that construction on the skyscraper, retail mall, and other projects will begin in 2020. Unfortunately, in late 2018 contractor labor disputes and the 2020 COVID epidemic put a halt to those efforts.
Six years after it was scheduled to open, the Jeddah Tower, the crown jewel of a massive construction project in Saudi Arabia’s second-largest city, is still a shell. We are beginning to worry if we’d ever get to see the construction of the world’s first structure above one kilometer in height.
But what happened to Dubai Creek Tower?
Dubai also intended to create the kilometer-tall building, but the project was suspended when a pandemic struck the region. But what’s stopping them now, if anything? What are your thoughts about it?
