Dubai's 1,312 feet of megalomania - When will the race for the world's tallest skyscraper end?
From “Der Spiegel”: The world’s tallest skyscraper will open soon in Dubai, even as the emirate continues to be battered by the financial crisis. Is Burj Dubai an expression of failed megalomania or proof of Dubai leader Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s stunning vision? The view is clear, the air is soft and silky, and only a thick strip of red separates the sky and the sea at sundown. The boundary between grandeur and kitsch becomes blurred here, halfway up the Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest tower. All of this will apply for only a little more than two weeks, until Jan. 4, 2010, the official opening date—already rescheduled several times—when the developers hope that the tower will begin serving its purpose as a magnet for a two-square-kilometer new development zone.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,667262,00.html
How economic are skyscrapers? They require only small plots of lands. But the building process is more complex.
I wonder how do the efforts compare between one 400 meter and two 200 meter skyscrapers (same building area) ?
And I’ve read that there’s also a limit when the Earth’s crust can’t support the weight of a very tall skyscraper anymore. Will we ever come close to this limit?
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When the “orbital tower” described by Arthur C. Clarke is ever built.
Skyscrapers are economic where land is expensive—However, a single-storey building covering large amounts of land are a lot cheaper to build per square foot.
Skyscrapers do have the advantage of being essentially the same from floor to floor—you generally have a single structural system that just gets lighter as you go higher.
I don’t think we’re going to have problems with the earth’s crust failing in the near future—with current materials, we cannot build skyscrapers narrow enough to produce more than roughly 15,000psf (that’s 10psi) on the earth’s surface. Weak granite has a compressive limit of around 5,000psi. This is not to say we couldn’t impart some interesting crustal-features (like settling into the granite), but that’d be a rather large building.
Compare to, e.g., fault loading from reservoirs
This is Tower of Babel stuff…
If the human race ever stops pushing limits I won’t want to be a member of it anymore.
The true limitation of a skyscraper as inhabited building (as opposed to a tower or “free-standing structure” in the general sense) is its elevators. Go too tall and either the elevators take up too much of the building’s floor plans or people will be waiting too long for them. Going above 1,000 ft. pretty much necessitates the use of sky lobbies, multi-level elevators and/or super-fast elevators.
Suprised they don’t just topple over at that height :)
@jaytkay – Interesting picture. Reminds me a bit of the London Gherkin.
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