Lust for Height
By Philip Nobel
Friday, February 23, 2007

The Burj Dubai, slated to be the tallest building in the world when it’s done in 2009, is rising 160 stories or more (the final height is a secret) in the desert. It’s no anomaly. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 seem to have whetted the global appetite to build taller and taller. Most of the new mega-skyscrapers are in Asia and the Middle East, but the engineers and architects are American. Why the boom? A combination of economic imperatives and powerful egos, both national and personal. Coming soon: the fulfillment of Frank Lloyd Wright’s dream of a mile-high building.
In October, at the premier international conference of skyscraper builders, the first speaker announced without a hint of irony or doubt that by 2030, somewhere, a mile-high skyscraper would be built. Five thousand two hundred and eighty feet. One-tenth of the way to the ozone layer. More than three times as tall as anything now stand ing and exactly as high as the most fantastic towers ever dared conceived.

When the speaker made this prediction, there was no murmur of dissent from his colleagues, not a single snicker. Nor was David Scott, an accom plished engineer and the chairman of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, hustled off the stage and gently dosed back to a normative view of what can be achieved by mortals. The 750 planners, designers, and technicians in the room met his statement with a shrug—not, it seemed, because Mr. Scott had lost the thread, not because they were jaded by the repetition of an ancient dream (mile-high towers were proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1950s and by Norman Foster in the 1980s) but because what he said was so obvious, so attain able. For many years it has been a commonplace in the profession that no impediments to such heights exist: the technologies are waiting for the money and the willing client.

Indeed, sitting there in rows, a half-story below ground in an auditorium on the Chicago campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, were the very people who could build a tower one mile high: the foundation engineers who already knew how to pin such a thing to the earth, the structural engineers who could keep it standing in a 100-year wind, the architects who would give it form, the contractors who would know how to phase the behemoth’s con struction—even the guys who would have to figure out how to wash the windows. And there are going to be a lot of windows.

Welcome to Babel. The language is English, the units are metric, the know-how is mostly American, and the site is anywhere in the world where money, land, and opportunity converge, catalyzed by opti mism—personal, corporate, or national. Five years after September 11, well into what was expected to be the post-skyscraper era, a boom of increas*ingly improbable proportions is underway and it shows no signs of abating. Like a bar graph mea suring increased faith in the future, the towers keep getting taller—after lingering for decades around 1,400 feet, the height now needed to achieve a jaw-dropping wow-factor is approaching 2,000 feet—and all the biggest are clustered far from the building type’s familiar centers in North America.

“Everyone I know flies from Dubai to Tokyo to Shanghai to Hong Kong to Taipei,” says Carol Willis, an architectural historian and founder of New York’s Skyscraper Museum. “They’re almost never home.”

The current “world’s tallest” titleholder, the 101-story tower completed in Taipei in 2004, stands at a sinister 1,666 feet. When it is completed in 2008, the Lotte World II Tower in Busan, South Korea, will edge seven feet higher. The Burj Dubai, an epochal construction, stands now at about 1,000 feet with only 90 of its planned 160-plus stories completed; when it is finished in 2009, it may top out at over 2,600 feet—however, just as in the great Manhattan skyscraper race of the late 1920s (which the Chrysler Building won with its extended spire before being dwarfed in 1931 by the Empire State Building), the true planned height is a closely guarded secret. The Burj Dubai’s lead architect, Adrian Smith (until recently with the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill but now doing busi ness as Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture), says that as soon as the final number is announced, a competing developer in Dubai will release plans for an even higher tower. A building down the Emirates coast in Doha, to be completed next year, will likely make little news: at 1,460 feet, it is a baby—only ten feet taller than the Sears Tower, which, with 108 floors, has been the tallest building in the United States for the last 33 years and is now (but for not much longer) the third-tallest in the world.

More at: http://www.american.com/archive/2007/january-february-magazine-contents/0116-lust-for-height

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There is definitely a global appetite to build taller structures, but, I'm not grasping the connection to 9/11. Does such a connection exist, outside the mind of the author?

The global real estate market is going from red to white hot, this is a result. I wouldn't be to surprised if Trump got in on this at some point!

He is one of the few people with the know how, means, and ego to build that tailest in the world. I hope he does to, I still think we should reach for the sky on the 9/11 sight.

__________________
1999 SL500
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

not to mention that fab 'do.

tom w

__________________
[SIGPIC] Diesel loving autocrossing grandpa Architect. 08 Dodge 3/4 ton with Cummins & six speed; I have had about 35 benzes. I have a 39 Studebaker Coupe Express pickup in which I have had installed a 617 turbo and a five speed manual.[SIGPIC]

..I also have a 427 Cobra replica with an aluminum chassis.

Trump won't build anything as tall as those buildings. The cost per square foot goes up exponentially above a certain height.........something around 900' or so.

Nothing over 1200' can be justified economically with rents. You need to build it without regard to ROI.........something that would be abhorrent to Trump.

i don't know.....he has his hair piled pretty high.

the SS in the picture appears to be built of reinforced concrete. a good choice. if the world trade towers had been such they would still be here and the repairs would have been finished a year or so ago.

i would love to peruse the plans of that building. one big probelm on tall buildings is the elevators. getting enough of them to service the tenants adequately without eating up the entire floor area.

and as for a mile high skyscraper, i don't know how you handle emergency exiting. anyone want to join me walking down a mile of steps along with a couple hundred thousand other occupants?

i think maybe i would prefer a parachute!

i was working in a 20 story office tower in Southfield Michigan (the detroit area) in 1974 when a big storm came along and forced an evacuation. i headed toward the fire stairs and when i got near the door i heard the sound of people tramping down them.....it sounded roughly a lot like a train going by. i considered the possibility of being trampled and went back to my office and crawled under a drawing table to wait til the sound died down. then exited at my leisure. while waiting i listened to the creaking of the steel structure as the wind moved the building back and forth. it was difficult to tell myself that the structural engineers MUST have designed it to withstand the 70 mph winds outside.

in the end? no problemo. and we all took the rest of the day off.

tom w

__________________
[SIGPIC] Diesel loving autocrossing grandpa Architect. 08 Dodge 3/4 ton with Cummins & six speed; I have had about 35 benzes. I have a 39 Studebaker Coupe Express pickup in which I have had installed a 617 turbo and a five speed manual.[SIGPIC]

..I also have a 427 Cobra replica with an aluminum chassis.

True, Trump only builds what makes sense and makes him money. I just wouldn't count him out on such a project, just because of his ego. As he gets older I wouldn't be surprised if he did something like that.

__________________
1999 SL500
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

i wonder if he is broke.

why else would he have that pathetic tv show?

tom w

__________________
[SIGPIC] Diesel loving autocrossing grandpa Architect. 08 Dodge 3/4 ton with Cummins & six speed; I have had about 35 benzes. I have a 39 Studebaker Coupe Express pickup in which I have had installed a 617 turbo and a five speed manual.[SIGPIC]

..I also have a 427 Cobra replica with an aluminum chassis.

The ego..........yet again..........

If I get on my roof, I could probably see that building.

__________________
Michael LaFleur

'05 E320 CDI - 86,000 miles
'86 300SDL - 360,000 miles
'85 300SD - 150,000 miles (sold)
'89 190D - 120,000 miles (sold)
'85 300SD - 317,000 miles (sold)
'98 ML320 - 270,000 miles (sold)
'75 300D - 170,000 miles (sold)
'83 Harley Davidson FLTC (Broken again) :-(
'61 Plymouth Valiant - 60k mikes
2004 Papillon (Oliver)
2005 Tzitzu (Griffon)
2009 Welsh Corgi (Buba)

I know he's doing pretty well, but could he really fund something like that. I've head he's been doing all this T.V. and public stuff because of a rapidly depleting budget to begin with. Whats the family worth these days? Or just him? I met him, and his brother Robert on a few occasions, at dinners, and parties, and a friend of mine, restored a 1950 Ford F-1 pick-up truck for him, as a gift to his brother Robert, for a birthday. It was like a $150,000.oo concourse resto, and took well over three years to complete. I went to Coney Island with my friend, for the presentation from Don, to Robert. Was kinda touching event, and one hell of a birthday gig at a private restaurant/hall.

The ego, Trump owns some extemly valuable RE. In the REI world he is an all star. Ego is huge, but very few people put together deals on his level. He has proved again and again that you can aquire $100m-$300m properties with none of your money.

__________________
1999 SL500
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

I have heard $2B-$6B, don't know how accurite that is, as you know its possible to hide a lot. Anyone who can drum up $320M in a five minute phone call to buy a property....

__________________
1999 SL500
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

Wow, where was he the day my mom was horny??

In his baby carriage...........???

















.......sorry, it was a slow pitch right over the plate........