World’s Tallest Building – One Mile Tall ( Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)

kingdom-tower-3-thumb-330x684-60276

kingdom-tower-1

Embedded Video Below:

 Jonathan Paula discusses Saudi Arabia’s newest planned skyscraper – the “Kingdom Tower” which when finished will sit 5,280 feet high (over a mile tall)..

He shares his opinionated and enlightened view of the world with you, by way of an unfiltered and sometimes harsh stream-of-consciousness. Jonathan Paula is a 25-year-old professional YouTuber and creator of the hit web series, “Is It A Good Idea To Microwave This?”. He graduated from Emerson College in 2008 with a degree in Television Production and Radio Broadcasting. He currently lives in Rockingham, New Hampshire with his fiancée.



kingdom-tower-2-thumb-330x166-60273

 Screen shot 2013-07-30 at 12.48.45 AM

How high does a tower need to reach before it’s considered too high? If you think relaxing up on top of the Burj Khalifa’s Atmosphere won’t give you vertigo, try Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Tower — a structure that will extend one mile upwards — almost twice the height of Dubai’s tallest.

Those Middle Eastern princes just can’t get enough of those insanely tall skyscrapers. Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal, head of Kingdom Holding Company recently gave his approval for construction of what will be billed as the world’s tallest man-made structure — the Kingdom Tower.

Screen shot 2013-07-30 at 12.51.49 AMPrince Al Waleed Bin Tala

The Kingdom Tower will be built in Saudi Arabia’s city of Jeddah. The tower will stretch one mile up into heavens and include 12 million cubic feet of space, several stories of office space, several stories for a hotel and four tiers of residential space, with the upper most tier reserved for “alternative energy generation” solutions (perhaps including a pendulum to keep the entire tower from collapsing).

The Kingdom Tower project is so large that it’ll cost $30 billion to construct. To get to the top from the ground floor, an elevator ride would take an estimated 12 minutes to ascend. That’s quite a journey for a view that is sure to be mostly sand and clouds.

As if it wasn’t already hard enough to keep the glass on the Burj Khalifa squeaky clean, think how much more difficult it’ll be to clean the dirt off windows twice as high up.

No matter how you look at it, the Kingdom Tower reeks of excess, but who cares when you’re rolling in money?

. . .  demonstrating clearly the stupidity of man . . . always attempting to go where even the devil fear to tread.

Advertisement

‘World’s Largest Building’ – New Century Global Center, Chengdu, China

Aerial viewBiggestOpening

Years ago I had the notion that the great shopping mall in Edmonton, Canada was the greatest. Then last summer, we visited The Venetian in Las Vegas and thought that this was even more fantastic. Now we see such similar structures as in Marina Bay Integrated Resort in Singapore or in Macau & Dubai. But nothing come anywhere near to compare with the greatest human structure of them all . . . the one & only “New Century Global Center” in Chengdu, China.

It’s China’s gift to the world!

It’s where history & modernisation harmonise!!

China’s fourth largest city may have problems with smog, but you’d never know it sitting at the urban centre’s beachside resort. Of course, Chengdu, doesn’t have a beach, and the resort is indoors.

The city has just opened the New Century Global Centre, a structure that China touts as the “World’s Largest Building.” The giant structure has 1.76 million square metres of floor space and is half a kilometre long, 400 metres wide and more than 100 metres tall.

iMax Screen

Contained inside is a 14m-screen IMAX theatre, two five-star hotels, a shopping village and a long stretch of offices. The developers claim that you could fit more than 20 Sydney Opera Houses inside the Global Centre.

We have borrowed a Japanese technique,” guide Liu Xun told the Sydney Morning Herald. “There is an artificial sun that shines 24 hours a day and allows for a comfortable temperature.”

Beachfront layout

The sun shines down on a manufactured beach-side resort built to hold over 6,000 people.

images-1

When people first enter into the massive structure, they are met with an 18-storey concourse, with giant escalators highlighting the building’s huge glass ceiling.

images-5

The entranceway alone is shocking in its opulence, the Guardian reports:

Lined with a stratified cream cake of hotel balconies and zig-zagging escalators, visitors are blasted with artificial sea breeze, designed to ‘make one intoxicated, as if he were enjoying himself in the fabulous heaven.’ Moving past aquarium walls and through a strange hybrid townscape of Polynesian huts crossed with a middle eastern kasbah, tourists arrive at the 400 m-long coastline, where the largest artificial waves in the world break in front of the longest LED screen in the world – on which ‘the alternating morning cloud and twilight afterglow extend the horizon limitlessly in the temporal and spatial directions.’

”It is Manhattan, not Chengdu,” Zhau Yun, who heads the British Chamber of Commerce, told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Zhau said that the city is building new superbuildings faster than Shanghai and that she hopes the city knows what it’s doing.

Of course, the Global Centre isn’t the only mega-building project in China. A few hundred kilometres away in Changsha, the Sky City project looks to erect the world’s tallest skyscraper — a building that will top the current champion, the Burj Khalifa, by 30 feet.

Now do you still think greatly of Miyazaki Ocean Dome: Largest Indoor Water Park in the World – Japan?

CHINA-ARCHITECTURE-GLOBAL CENTER

CLICK ON YOUTUBE

 

Dubai – The Greatest Show on Earth

Dubai Jumeirah Beach & its Six-Star Hotel

It’s the City that Oil Built. It’s always the greatest show on earth when Dubai presents with none anywhere else to compare!

Dubai was first mentioned in 1095, and the earliest settlement known as Dubai town dates from 1799. Dubai was formally established in 1833 by Sheikh Maktoum bin Buti al Maktoum when he persuaded 800 members of the Bani Yas tribe, living in what is now part of Saudi Arabia, to follow him to the Dubai Creek by the Al Abu Falasa clan of Bani Yas. It remained under clan control when the United Kingdom assumed the protection of Dubai in 1892. Its geographical location made it an important trading hub and by the beginning of the 20th century, it was an important port.

In 1966, oil was discovered, expanding the city by 300% and bringing in international oil interests.

The modern emirate of Dubai was created after the UK left the area in 1971. At this time Dubai, together with Abu Dhabi and four other emirates, formed the United Arab Emirates.

Today, Dubai City has emerged as a global city and a business hub.

Although Dubai’s economy was built on the oil industry, the emirate’s model of business drives its economy, with the effect that its main revenues are now from tourism, real estate, and financial services, similar to that of Western countries.

Dubai has recently attracted world attention through many innovative mega construction projects and sports events. This increased attention has highlighted labour rights and human rights issues concerning its large Indians, which made up half of its total population.

Dubai’s property market experienced a major deterioration in 2008 and 2009 as a result of the worldwide economic downturn following the financial crisis of 2007–2010.

With that in hindsight, the show progresses on . . . 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

WHAT’S NEXT?

The World’s Tallest Tower

Diagram comparing the height of Burj Khalifa t...
Image via Wikipedia

Diagram comparing the height of Burj  Khalifa to other towers & structures

The Burj Khalifa, originally named Burj Dubai, and currently the tallest tower in the world, officially opened in Dubai on Jan. 4 2010 amid an impressive pyrotechnics display that highlighted the tower’s 2716.5-feet of aluminum and steel, and its 26,000 hand-cut glass panels. The Burj Khalifa blows away the next-nearest skyscraper, which is Taiwan’s 1670-foot Taipei 101, and the building has even surpassed ultra-tall, ground-cable-supported radio antennas.


Architects’ vertical leapfrogging, however, isn’t likely to stop at the Burj Khalifa. While the tower will be a tough one to beat, it is likely to remain at the pinnacle for only about another half-dozen years. Developers around the world have proposed numerous new skyscrapers. Some projects have leapt off the drawing boards, though plans for many record-breaking towers have been scuttled because of the global economic spasms of the past couple of years.

The original name of the Burj Khalifa, the Burj Dubai, was changed at the last minute to recognize United Arab Emirates president Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who as emir of Abu Dhabi gave struggling Dubai a $10 billion bailout last month.

So what buildings could be the next to rise up and steal the Burj Khalifa’s crown? Here in the chart below are some of the tallest towers that have been dwarfed: Taipei 101 (Taiwan) as mentioned, Shanghai World Financial Centre (China), Petronas Towers (Malaysia) & Sears Tower (USA).

Waiting to compete for the prized crown are eight more on the drawing board:

1. Burj Mubarak al Kabir – 3,284 ft. Location: Madinal Al Hareer (City of Slk), Kuwait

2.1 Dubai – Three towers: 1969 ft., 2625 ft. and 3281 ft. Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates

3. Miapolis – 3000 to 3281 ft. Location: Miami, USA

4. Nakheel Tower – 3281 to 4593 ft. Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates

5. Sky City 1000 – 3281 ft. Location: Tokyo, Japan

6. Bionic Tower – 4029 ft. Location: Shanghai, China (As originally propoased)

7. Kingdom Tower – 3281 ft. Location: Jeddah, Saudi Arab

8. Millennium Challenge Tower – 6067 ft. Possible Location: Kuwait