The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is probably one of the most impressive feats of engineering ever accomplished by man:

Burj_Khalifa_building

At 828 meters tall and using an absolute shed load of glass and steel, it’s awe inspiring, and is certainly a building I would love to visit. However, the Burj isn’t going to remain the world’s tallest building for that long. This week, Saudi Arabia announced plans to start construction on the Kingdom Tower:

Kingdom Tower

The Kingdom Tower, being built in Jeddah, is set to stand at over 1000 meters high, or 3280 feet if you’re old fashioned. The estimated cost is $1.2bn and will have the worlds tallest observation deck which will be situated on the 157th floor:

Kingdom Tower 2

The structure is said to require over 5.7m square feet of concrete and around 80,000 tonnes of steel. Any figure you look at with this building, it is massive. Personally, I would have liked to have seen the numbers involving glass. Specifically how much of it will be required and what type of glass they are going to use. If it was me, I would be specifying a high grade of self cleaning glass. I wouldn’t want to put any men at work at one kilometre high in the sky!

What this skyscraper also represents is the way in which humans are going to have to live on this planet. I won’t go into it much in this post as I have a post planned on this that will go into greater depth. But going forward, expansion outwards won’t always be an option. We’re going to have to look skywards if we want to fit a growing population into this Earth.

More stats on this staggering building can be found here: http://www.kingdomtowerskyscraper.com/

As always, all comments welcome on this!