JEDDAH | Kingdom Tower | 3,303 FT / 1007 M | ON HOLD
 

Remember, this is not a vision, this is a proposal!

http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x...an/Jeddah1.jpg

«Middle East» multi-millionaire Saudi Prince Al-Walid Bin Talal Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, chairman of Kingdom Holding company intended to establish real-estate projects in Saudi Arabia at a cost of 75 billion riyals (20 billion dollars) in each of the Saudi capital Riyadh and Jeddah, to announce full details of in the last quarter of this year.


and Prince Al-Waleed, that the two projects would be the first real estate project in Jeddah real estate and investments totaling about 50 billion riyals (13.3 billion dollars) located in the north of the city, and specifically North el sailing, as would multi-use, so the center will be longer commercial tower in the Middle East. in addition to the housing towers multiple designs, and buildings dedicated and fully equipped offices, and Cornish miles confer on the project more vital, pointing out that the project would alter the map of the city of Jeddah and landmarks to him while .

explained Prince Al-Waleed, and who was speaking on the sidelines of the prize honoring «public personality in the world of business» by BusinessWeek magazine shrimp and Kingdom Holding Company for the prize «most distinguished company», that the cost of other real estate project in Riyadh amounting to 25 billion riyals (6.6 billion dollars). The words of a huge project consists of a park, a hotel, in addition to more than 10 thousand residential units designed according to the latest designs and contemporary requirements.

http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x...an/Jeddah2.jpg
http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x...an/Jeddah3.jpg

The Jeddah project will be a 1 600 meter high tower, the tallest in the world.
Exploring urban issues facing 21st century, The Mile High Tower offers a fresh perspective on an idea that has been debated by architects for a century"1 mile =1600 M . Exploding land values, growing populations and expanding economies are placing extraordinary burdens on many culturally rich, but land deprived Asian regions. In response to these pressures we have proposed a vertical city. In conceiving the tower as a vertical city, the design team has integrated technological, architectural and urban planning strategies into a single structure that breathes with urban complexity. The scale of the building and the scope of the program force the reevaluation of current skyscraper precedents for form, purpose, infrastructure, transportation, structure, and sustainability.

Architecture and engineering have traditionally treated structure as static—the building frame was constructed to be strong and heavy enough to resist all anticipated loads. The Mile High Tower proposes a lighter, dynamic structural system that actively responds to forces placed upon it. Controlled by wind detecting sensors, stabilizing aileron-like fins run the length of the tower frame and modulate their position to control resonant motion and building drift.

The separation of the structural frame and the building envelope enhances the quality of the interior space by providing an abundance of natural light and ventilation. Equipped with wind generators, photovoltaic panels, a heliostat, and sewage treatment facilities, the tower attains a high degree of sustainability with minimal environmental impact.

Approaching the tower as a theoretical project has proven liberating, freeing the design team to seek new solutions to technical problems, to find creative approaches outside the present financial climate, and to implement environmentally sustainable strategies that will enhance the next generation of ultra-high rise buildings. Our paradigm is the human body. This near-future tower incorporates structural and climatic systems that, like the human body, respond dynamically and efficiently to forces placed upon them.

Pickard Chilton company have done the skyscraper design, plus other specialized engineering firms for structural, infrastructure and traffic design, cost and time planning!!

Seems far more like a vision to me than a serious proposal. Isn't this part of Kind Abdullah Economic City? I don't recall the plan ever calling for a building even remotely as tall as this.

Also.. it says it will use a heliostat (I am assuming they intend to use it for lighting), which typically is barely capable of bringing light down more than about 15-20 floors at maximum in a tower 1,600 METERS tall.. a laughable concept at best. I'd also like to point out that tooling in photoshop for a few seconds.. the tower in that rendering has a height ratio of over FIFTEEN TO ONE... almost DOUBLE what is considered the UPPER END of what is economically feasible for a supertall building (Note: I didn't say it was impossible to build). This sounds more like they were doing some feasibility studies to me, which have many obvious non-feasible components...

The tower in that sketch reminds me of the proposal for Samsung Togok Tower, but morbidly tall

I am gonna go out on a limb and say this will not be built AND is not a serious proposal.

Doesn't Saudi Arabia have a weird floor limit? Because Kingdom Centre is about 1,000 feet tall and it only has 41 stories.

Its their money....

^^^- I think the height limit is only Riyadh.

yea...my ass.

If they are really serious about it, they gotta redo the design...

That is so stupid. A 5,000 foot tall tower? Seems like everyone is trying to build a taller tower than the next person.

By the year 2050 the norm will be skyscrapers proposed at a "miniscule" 3,000 feet tall. No one will even bat an eye.

^I'm not sure why you seem upset by that?

I think they have the will, money, and capability to build something like this. I hope they do, it will shut Dubai up forever.

Someone, somewhere, someday, is going to build a mile-high tower. But this ain't it.

[QUOTE=Pandemonious;2963929]the tower in that rendering has a height ratio of over FIFTEEN TO ONE... almost DOUBLE what is considered the UPPER END of what is economically feasible for a supertall building (Note: I didn't say it was impossible to build).QUOTE]

Offtopic but could you explain to me something I've never been able to understand? How come there exists such a precise height to width ratio limit for supertall towers? Surely this limit only applies to office use or something where an insane amount of people are in the tower at one time and so the building needs a huge amount of elevators. What would be the limit then for an upper class res tower like the Chicago Spire which definitely doesn't need as many elevators?

I ask because people always talk about this limit when there are tons of supertall towers getting built with a ratio of 10:1 or even more. The Chicago Spire looks really thin, all those crazy tall res towers in Dubai as well, etc

But if and when that were to happen -- it wouldn't be a bad thing, right?

Because of course change the numbers and that statement fits for any of the past twelve decades....

Re The Jeddah proposal, It's possible that vertical cities will be desirable one day. Cuts down on travel times and we may be faced with environmental issues that make it pretty necessary one day.

This comment isn't really aimed at this tower specifically, but I've become bored of super tall towers that have no design basically. All they are is a super tall rod. Where's the architecture in that? Where's the design? I realize of course that if a building is super tall, say 2000 feet or more, then why worry with much detail? I can certainly understand that for the building's facade, but still, give us something that has some shape to it and actually has presence on the skyline that distinguishes it from other towers so that people can say something about its design other than, "It's the pointy one."

And yes, I understand that only certain shapes work at certain heights, so it's not always an architectural reason for their blandness, but an engineering one, which in some cases can't be avoided. But I've seen a certain pattern develop with these types of projects. I hope they branch out a little more to make them more interesting. This is where I applaud Burj Dubai, since it's not merely a super tall broomstick.

[QUOTE=malec;2964765]Yes, there are towers that approach larger ratios than the roughly 8:1 (for concrete and/or composite structural systems) that is the higher end I speak of, however.. they are not yet built. CS will have over 9:1... but it is designed more like a mast-like tower (A-la 7SD, the top of the burj is more like just a huge mast like tower also, since the floorplate outside that is so small, but BD has an ENORMOUSLY wide base where the three petals flare out). This concept has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with floor loads, elevator space, or use of building. In fact, an enormously tall building due to height to width ratio, typically will have such a huge base that even a conventional elevatoring system is sometimes possible. This concept of height to width for a supertall buildings is more to do with the building resisting the overturning forces of the wind. It is a simple concept.. a building is so tall, it has so much wind blowing on it, and somehow all of that wind load must be redirected down into the foundation. If a building is too tall and too thin.. that becomes approachingly economically unfeasible given the amount of extra strcture that must go into it... also affecting other aspects of the useability of the structure in the process. It is not some "precise" number as you describe it but can very depending on many factors..

ØØ:rainbow:

Unless you think that only a box is a representatiton of Architecture ...:rolleyes:

Design-wise, I believe BD has the ultimate supertall design. Its cascading setbacks cascade and wrap around each other, getting thinner as they go higher until they reach some distant pinnacle way up in the sky. Its design just screams "world's tallest", and leaves you satisfied with this humanity's achievement. However, the flat tops of Al Burj and, to some extend, this guy, no matter how ridiculously tall above the ground and even above the top of BD they may be, design-wise just don't project "you just can't build taller than this".

Dude...you're from Chicago...we have all the flat space WE need.

Its just rich boys and thier pissing contest toys, tyring to prove that their both urban and modern (none of which are really convincing messages).
Better a box than what SOME cities are passing for architecture these days.

That almost looks EVIL!

Does it have Lasers?

Dude...you're from Chicago...we have all the flat space WE need.

If you want to move 50 odd miles outside of the city:D . Don't think that would exactly be the case in...Jeddah?

Of course not. Although in some cases extremely tall boxy buildings aim to make a statement. The old WTC in New York for instance was just two really tall boxy towers. At 300 feet they would have been hideous and totally pointless architecturally, but at 1,300 feet and some change they made a statement about what they stood for. They gave off a sense of power and something that was truely on a huge scale.

I don't get that sense of purpose of design from some of these super tall skinny towers. But I don't know why you quoted my message. This isn't a jab at Middle Eastern cities or architecture, I'm not even a fan of Chicago Spire either, though it could be worse I suppose. I rather like the designs that are being thought up in Dubai with the super talls there, as I already mentioned about Burj Dubai.

:no:

This is getting truly ridiculous. Even Los Angeles has more high-rise demand than Saudi Arabia. Don't believe me, check the Markets for yourselves.
The non-wealthy citizens of the middle-east has other problems to deal with than having their own time wasted by these selfish tycoons trying to see if they can build something over 5,600 ft tall.
This isn't SIMCITY, this is real life.....
But since it's their money, not America's, if they want to waste precious amounts of their capital, which could (and should) be used to fight the war on terrorism and poverty, so be it.


You see, humans have the ability to build something this tall, but its economically foolish, at least right now.
If this is supposed to be a residential, it's simply impossible to satisfy the supply of rooms it will hold, even if they had help from the citizens of the booming CHINESE economy renting lofts in it.

You are aware that Jeddah is the fourth largest city in the Middle East after Tehran, Baghdad and Riyadh with a population of over 3 million? That's larger than Chicago.

I think they need to make the white horizontal lines much more subtle.

This is largely correct: from Wiki:
Jeddah (also spelled Jedda, Jiddah, Jidda, or Juddah; جدّة Ǧiddah), a Saudi Arabian city located on the coast of the Red Sea (21.50° N 39.1667° E), is the major urban center in western Saudi Arabia, the largest in the Western Province, and the second largest city in Saudi Arabia after the capital city Riyadh. The population of the city currently stands at over 3.4 million. It is considered as the commercial capital of Saudi Arabia and the wealthiest city in the Middle East and western Asia.

That last part surprises me, and that data may now be outdated, thanks to Dubai. But Jeddah is no slouch in the region.

^ ^ ^
Doesn't matter, not even Tokyo has demand this high.

While not a fan of this design, I don't neccesarily have a problem with building a supertall here. Even if the market isn't there right now, these things are built to last. Especially in a non-market economy, where the developer can afford to wait for the profits, even if it means waiting for some time.

Remember, at one point the Sears Tower was something of a failure because of interior design problems and a difficulty attracting tenants. No one's saying today that it shouldn't have been built.

Tokyo have more than 8 million and total of Great Tokyo Metro (include Yokohama, Kawasaki, Saitama, etc.) area are the largest metro area in the world, even bigger than the New York. So Jeddah seems are not that big to me..

Well I'm just going to go by emporis here, no clue how this information adds up to real life...but...

Per Emporis Jeddah has no towers over 30 stories tall as of right now. The tallest building in Jeddah is 126 m, and there are only 4 projects on the table that are taller than this. It is impossible to compare this city to Chicago, or ANY major city in the world. And I appreciate the defense of the middle-east, but are any of you attempting to maintain that a mile tall building needs to be built when as of right now there are 3 towers over 100m, tallest of which is 126? For some reason, I do not believe that this can ever be defended as necessary, or even remotely feasable/possible. A city in the sky? Maybe needed in other cities within the next 50 years, but DEFFINITELY not here.

Yeah, but the WTC towers were not boxes for any reason you gave above. They were their shape for two reasons:

1) It was very in-vogue in the 1960's to design minimalist buildings where function trumped form and decoration was considered evil.
2) They were government built, owned and operated buildings. Building the WTC at all constituted an outrage by a public horrified by perceived waste and exuberance, throwing in a flashy, and thus expensive, design would have sunk the project.

Not to mention, when WTC 1 and 2 were built...I believe there was a lot of outrage over how hideous the designs were.

The box is a very brutal shape for a skyscraper. It certainly has tremendous value. That being said...the box shouldn't become the box...if you know what I mean.

Meh. Unoriginal.

It's just completely unnecessary.

Ha, true.
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I don't expect this behometh to get built, but then, they have the funds and the cheap labour. It'll look a bit too extreme though in such a place though, I'm not even a novice at what Jeddah is like, but I assume they don't even have any 50+ buildings there ?

If this thing was proposed in Chicago or New York you guys would be jumping for joy but it would still be every bit as unnecessary. Let the Gulf States have a pissing contest. Who cares? I hope they build three of them.

A building of this size would equally overshadow any city, whether it's New York or Jeddah. I know what you are getting at, but skyline-wise it won't matter whether a nearby tower is 100 or 300 m when this one is 1600. Demand-wise - you're talking about need, while the real issue here is "want". Not everything that is created serves a necessity; many things are just novelties that people are willing to pay for. Well, this tower is just a really big novelty. As for demand, I'm confident the building would fill up anywhere between 1 and 10 years. As tall as it may be, 1600 meters of office floors in one building is roughly as much (even less actually, since much space inside this tower would be taken up by elevators) as 16 100-meter towers - roughly the size of the skyline of any mid-size American city. And if a city with 500,000 people can fill this space, then I am certain a city with almost 3.5 million would do it with much greater ease. I bet that if jeddah peoposed 16 100-meter towers, there would barely be any questions from anyone whether the city can fill them. It's just the height that makes it seem larger than it actually is. As for the huge sum, it seems like the developer can afford to sit on it, and investing in real estate, especially landmark real estate, is one of the best investments anyone can ever make. Besides, the money the investor would lose on building such an inefficient structure, he can make back easily with tourism and higher rates charged for living/renting space in such a trophy building. Would it look ridiculously tall on Jeddah's skyline? yes. However, is it destined to be an economical failure for the developer? Not necessarily.

Well said :tup:

@PuyoPuyi: Actually the following statistics may suprise you:

Greater Tokyo Metro: 32,000,000
Greater New York City: 25,000,000
Greater Los Angeles: 21,000,000

Stupid.

source? l.a. will probably pass ny one day in terms of metro size, but the largest number i recall seeing for l.a. is ~17 mil, with ny's highest being around 22 mil. just curious.

that said, i have also seen ny listed with a metro area as small as 11 mil people, which would have to have some strict boundaries.

I respectfully think the first part of this is an ill conceived statement. How could it equally overpower any skyline? We are talking about a 100 meter tallest vs. a 600 m tallest in cities such as Chicago or even *possibly) 800+ in Dubai. How is that equally overshadowing? And with regards to the demand, a huge spring of demand does not just surge forward at once. Economically? If there was a demand for this much office space anywhere in the area, they would allready have more than 3 100m towers in the city. Even if they built 16 100m towers that would still be rediculous, as it would be quadroupling the amount of total tower office space currently available in the city. I would deffinitely still question that. I'm confused by the strategy of anyone building this building. I do not disagree that this is a novelty building, which is fine, but that doesn't change the fact that it's still not warranted/justifiable. Tourism? I respectfully, once again, do not think that tourism to Saudi Arabia to see this building is going to make up for the cost of a 10(I think that's right. I need to go back) billion dollar building.

Oh, and in regards to above, we would not be jumping for joy if this building was proposed in America. Just because we are from America doesn't mean we don't want other places to succeed. I LOVE the Burj Dubai, and jumped for joy at that. This building is MUCH, MUCH uglier.

Does it have nuclear powered elevators?

Hey... Most of all these buildings are thought up in the States anyway. (For all the people that care about the WTB's being built outside the US)

(i.e. S.O.M. designs for Burj Dubai)

I like to think of these building like the I.S.S. (International Space Station) We are working with other countries, together, to form something awesome.

Those numbers are probably lower than those that include the Non-Census residents who don't participate.

Here's a little drawing how a Mile-High tower would look in the Manhattan skyline. And as Lecom said, it doesn't really matter if the surrounding buildings of such a tower are 100m or 300m high. In fact, I would even say constructing such a tower in the desert surrounded by parks or on an artifical island is the right choice because it would totally overpower ANY skyline. That building would be more than double the height of the Burj Dubai.

http://www.jochenhertweck.com/upload/ny_jeddahtower.jpg

Not at first. They were originally unveiled to the public in the middle of the 1960's, during the pinnacle of Minimalism. It was only later, when they were almost done and the taste-du-jour had changed where they lambasted.

Ada Louise Huxtable wrote a article for the NY Times practically gushing over Yamasaki's ability to design a massive building complex, yet retain a sense of intimacy. Less than a decade later Huxtable wrote the oft-quoted line of "These are big buildings, but they are not great architecture."

Ultimately, critics hated the complex. It was too detailed for the modernists, and too basic for the traditionalists. It's unique Gothic-Modernist design didn't fit into any school neatly, so it became an architectural anathema. With the new urbanist movement, its superblock was widely criticized for cutting off the neighborhoods (some of which would not have even existed had it not been from the excavation of said super block) from each other, and that the WTC was essentially designed as a world unto itself, with people riding into it by train and never leaving until it was time to clock out and go home. Though that argument ignores the fact that prior to the WTC, there wasn't much to see or do in the immediate vicinity of the Trade Center.

Thanks for that image, Raptor. Illustrates my point very well.