| Stuff |
[Aug. 7th, 2011|12:02 pm]
Scott
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One of my secret guilty pleasures is skyscrapers.
It's a secret guilty pleasure because if I let it out, I might have to become a skyscraper enthusiast, and skyscraper enthusiasts are crazy. You can find them at their skyscraper enthusiast forums, where they hold polls about their favorite skyscrapers and discuss when they think different skyscrapers are going to be finished and use special skyscraper lingo like "topped out" or "height to pinnacle" and hold their skyscraper world cups.
Which doesn't in itself sound too weird. But the thing is, the world of skyscrapers doesn't change very often. Maybe every few years, a few new big skyscrapers get built? This fazes skyscraper enthusiasts not at all. They just keep holding the same "favorite skyscraper" discussions they held the last week, with a bit more vehemence and a bit more fighting. And oh are there ways to fight about skyscrapers. Like if you've got a 1000 foot tall building that people live in right to the very top, and then a 1100 foot tall building, but the last 200 feet are just a tall bit tacked on to make it look higher, which building is really taller? Of such things are epic flamewars among skyscraper enthusiasts made.
Still, every so often, when I am feeling down, I lock the doors, close the windows, turn on Private Browsing Mode, and go back to Wikipedia's List of Tall Skyscrapers Under Construction. As a guy, there's just something about building really really large things for no good reason that appeals to something primal in me.
As all good skyscraper enthusiasts know, the tallest building in the world is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 2717 feet tall. Keep in mind that there is never any good reason to build anything that large. Just getting to the top is such a production that the elevators have TV screens to keep you occupied during the journey - although if you don't like them, you're welcome to take the 2909 stairs. Cleaning the windows takes a team of forty people three months per clean. And it's not like it's such a spectacular economic success either. Not only did the entire city of Dubai go bankrupt while the tower was being built - the Burj Khalifa is named after the sheik who bailed them out - but over 90% of the tower's apartments just sit there, unused. The only reason to build a tower of that size, honestly, is to send a message. And the message is: "Look! I have a really big tower!"
So the obvious reaction to this astonishing display of human vanity and shortsightedness, or at least obvious if you are a man, is to try to build a tower that is much, much bigger. The most exciting news in the world of skyscrapers this month was that Saudi Arabia has approved the construction of the Kingdom Tower. The Saudi kingdom touts the building as an attempt to diversify the Saudi economy: now instead of just being based on oil, it can be based on both oil and on having ridiculously large buildings. The Kingdom Tower was supposed to be a mile high, until someone did some tests and realized that the ground literally could not support the weight of a building that large, causing them to scale it down to only 3300ish feet.
3300 foot high buildings are more complicated than just piling 3300 feet of bricks on top of each other. Not only can they sink into the ground as mentioned before, but they can get blown over in high winds, generate dangerous thermal gradients, and even give elevator passengers nauseua because of changes in atmospheric pressure. And then of course there's the whole terrorism issue. The Saudis have assured everyone that they are taking every possible precaution to make the tower as safe as possible and that there is absolutely nothing to be worried about even though maybe they might have kind of put Osama bin Ladin's older brother in charge of construction (yes, seriously).
The bin Ladin family talent for secrecy will come in useful here because, although the reports say "over 3300 feet", the exact height is a closely guarded secret. This is pretty common in the world of skyscrapers. If the Saudis revealed that the exact height would be 3316 feet, then everyone else who wanted to build a bigger tower could tell their architects to aim for 3317 feet, like those jerks at auctions who reply to a bid of $100 by shouting "$100 plus one cent!". Apparently the Saudis assume everyone else is just itching to build towers larger than 3300 feet.
...and they just might be right. Kuwait continues to threaten to build a 3284 foot tower (=1001 meters, supposedly for the 1001 Arabian Nights) called the Burj Mubarak al-Kabir. Just to differentiate this from all of the other 3284 foot towers out there, this one will be on a perfectly round artificial island attached to a $94 billion dollar planned metropolis called "City of Silk" connected to the capital by a 23 kilometer bridge. Kuwait has already officially approved the project and started building roads and stuff at the construction site, but people have trouble believing they're actually going to go ahead and do it, just because, well...
But the City of Silk is not the most amazing building under construction. The Russians want to build an honest-to-goodness arcology on the outskirts of Moscow.
So, fair warning, the Crystal Island is only going to be 1500 feet tall. That's barely even higher than the Empire State Building. So what's the big deal?
Size. The Empire State Building, for all its height, was pretty much vertical, with a floor area of 2.5 million square feet. Crystal Island would have ten times that, making it the largest building in the world by far. The underground parking lot alone will have 16,500 spaces; the aboveground portions are expected to house 30,000 residents and include its own in-building school. Other amenities will include gyms, museums, a 3,000 room hotel, and an opera house. By population, it will be larger than about a dozen or so countries.
Although the completion date is still listed as an optimistic 2014, the buzz in the skyscraper enthusiast community is that construction is currently on hold due to the global economic crisis.
There's something kind of stupid about that - let's make a 1500 foot tall giant glass mega-city in the middle of the world's most sparsely populated country, but not when the economy is down, that would be silly. I don't know if it is more or less stupid than Saudi Arabia's decision to build a giant building even when the economy is down.
But I guess that if people have crazy amounts of oil money, there are worse things they could do with it than build something pretty neat looking that captures the attention of the entire world. And think of the aliens! One day, when we're all dead, the aliens will come visit and say "Someone seems to have built a 3300 foot tower on a perfectly round island in the middle of a godforsaken desert region. Clearly these Earthlings must have been pretty neat."
Or if they are really smart, they will radio back to their resource extraction ships, telling them that the earthlings have helpfully marked the location of large oil deposits with 3,000 foot towers, for the convenience of future visitors.
If you don't mind risking developing my same addiction, here's Wikipedia's list of proposed tallest buildings and notable future skyscrapers. |
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| Comments: |
Thank you, that was *really* interesting. And I'm not even usually particularly interested in architecture, even really big architecture.
This was fascinatingly absurd.
An interesting problem for a student of physics is, at which point, given the current height of the highest skyscraper, the current laws of physics as we know them, and the current pace at which these achievers operate, will mankind arrive to a skyscraper that upsets the Earth rotation.
This assumes that it is not balanced by an equal redistribution of mass at the antipodes.
Don't the skyscrapers, if you look at the map, sort of cluster?
Yes, they do. But then, our skyscrapers as of yet are very tiny compared to the sort of mass imbalances that have meaningful effects on planetary rotation.
But if they keep going...
There's already been a small-but-measurable effect on the Earth's rotation over the course of the 20th century due to dam construction -- water spends more time in reservoirs and less in the oceans, and the distribution of reservoirs (mostly in middle-to-high lattitudes) and oceans (more ocean area near the equator) means that the water is on average closer to Earth's axis. The shift in mass distribution speeds up the Earth's rotation very slightly.
Buildings are hollow, mountains are not. For a building to have a comparable effect to a mountain, for example, it would have to be much taller than one. So far even the tallest building in the world is the same height as the tallest mountain in Mauritius, which isn't exactly in the Himalayas. I wouldn't worry too much about that sort of effect yet. As the other poster mentioned, dams have a far greater effect (again, density and space filling helps here!)
You're quite right about the motives of the oil sheiks. They're building structures which strain the cutting-edge of our construction technologies just to say "Look! We can!"
Reflect, though, that someday our technologies both of building and elevator construction will be as advanced beyond those of today as those of today are beyond those of two hundred fifty years ago. In that age, we'll build skyscrapers much bigger than those of the Gulf, and do so for the most mundane purposes.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/73607281/1170620) | From:  cactus_rs
2011-08-07 03:06 pm (UTC)
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! | (Link)
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That is the gist I get from this post.
It would make a nice seat for the future Arabian Republic, at least.
From: (Anonymous)
2011-08-07 04:26 pm (UTC)
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You must be happy to know that North Korea has resumed construction on the Ryugyong Hotel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel).
Oh, very cool. That one is my favourite! :)
Ooooh, that last one is gorgeous. I actually recently got in to this because I needed a ridiculously epic building for a gaming session, and it was set a few years in the future so I got to play with ones that were under construction but not yet finished... :)
(I ended up going with the Ryugyong Hotel, which is alas not that impressive in comparison, but suited the needs of the campaign nicely)
I loved reading this post, and I can't help but think that the Crystal Island looks like a proper futuristic city. Which means that although it's entirely impractical and on hold, I'd kinda like to see it built and filled.
I've been known to get a perverse pleasure looking at dates and comparisons of buildings at http:/skyscraperpage.com/ on occasion...
Hm, wow, thank you. I never would have thought of this as Redditable, but some of the comments there made my day.
From: (Anonymous)
2011-08-28 03:01 am (UTC)
The old World Trade Center in New York | (Link)
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The thing I always liked about the old World Trade Center was that it didn't try to mean anything. It just stood there in lower Manhattan and screamed "office space". It even looked like two giant strips of staples, something you'd find at an office supply shop. I never made it up past the 86th floor, one floor up from my friend's office. The 86th floor, back in the mid-70s was untenanted, so I had a pretty good view, since aside from the elevator core, there were no other supports other than the outer walls.
I think the building replacing it is pretty lame, because it is trying to say something besides "office space". Granted, New York City is all about real estate, so this is probably just hype. The only excuse for a building that big is either office space, housing or we assemble space ships in here like the building NASA used for the moon launch and then the space shuttle, but will probably be turned into condos.
From: (Anonymous)
2011-08-28 03:04 am (UTC)
Re: The old World Trade Center in New York | (Link)
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P.S. Don't be ashamed of liking skyscrapers. I grew up in New York City, so they were useful landmarks, kind of like church towers elsewhere.
From: (Anonymous)
2011-08-31 07:06 am (UTC)
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I bet it costed more than 200.000.000 dead children; i hope you can enjoy the view even with that thought on your head. | |
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