Construction of world's tallest tower to begin in Dubai. Nearly 1/2 mile.

[Dover]

Construction of world's tallest tower to begin in Dubai. Nearly half a mile high.



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."...cont'd

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996781

[Deja Q]

1. Cool. And I bet the USAF will knock it down a few years of completion too

Karma Kamelion.

[NEOBuckeye]

2. Babel?

Didn't they try something similar to this in the Mideast region already?

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

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[Ron Green]

4. Building taller and taller buildings. It's so....20th Century.

[markomalley]

5. Looks like a massive minaret to me...n/t

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. "Unique design"?

Hardly....Frank Lloyd Wright designed something in the 1950's that was VERY similar, but was never built (Wright's design was to be a mile high).

I saw the picture, and immediately thought of THIS:

[McKenzie]

8. drawing it is one thing, making it stand up is quite another...

The difficulties in building really tall and thin structures are immense. But you probably know that anyway. I suspect you and I are in quite similar professions.

[Stinky The Clown]

10. Wright and Buckminster Fuller ........

.......... miles ahead of their times. And Bucky wasn't even formally educated. A natural genius.

[nostamj]

7. what happens when architecture meets

VIAGRA....

[Stinky The Clown]

9. I'm not so sure about the central core notion ....

The Twin Towers sorta give pause to that. I assume, of course, that Skidmore also thought about it, so, we'll see. The triangle shape is a neat idea.

Weren't the Petronas Towers designed to be made taller? I think they did that just in case someone eclipsed their size. But on the other hand, 350m is a loooooong add-on.