Skyscraper fandom

[nancylebov]

squid314 wrote:

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.

The article has been forwarded to reddit. Worthwhile comment from mindbleach: "It's a problem I regularly experience on reddit. I'll make a comment and see a reply to the effect of "not so!" and it takes five minutes of back-and-forth to figure out of the complainant is a nitpicking genius or a cocksure moron.".

Comments

[lethargic_man]

(Reply on DW because LJ is giving me "Varnish Error 503 Service Unavailable", including to your linked original post):

I read somewhere (can't remember where) that because people start projects to make really tall buildings at the height of an economic boom, and such buildings take a while to complete, their completion tends to coincide with the following bust, and it's not unusual to find them sitting vacant afterwards.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

I was going to comment on the elevators thread, but I'd have to sign up for yet another timesink. So I'll say it here:

Diagonal elevator shafts, like (or combined with!) flying buttresses, touching ground outside the basic building footprint.

[madfilkentist]

Eventually someone will build a skyscraper so high that they'll have accidentally created the space elevator.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Well, at least it's not battleships this time...

-- Steve'd rather have another race to the Moon or something, but at least this is fairly innocuous as a way to compete for national prestige compared with other, more traditional ways.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Yep.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Good point. I agree that a race to the moon or Mars would be nicer, and i think better-spent monetarily.