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| Kingdom Tower Artistic Rendering |
By Michele Berger
From The Weather Channel
Imagine stepping onto a building’s observatory and being literally in the clouds. If the Kingdom Tower gets built as it’s currently designed, that’s exactly what will happen, with an observatory planned for 1,640 feet up that, when weather allows, will offer stunning views of the Red Sea.
And construction on this, what will become the world’s tallest building, is about to begin. Once completed, the $1.2 billion Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, will soar 3,280 feet into the sky, looming over Dubai’s Burj Khalifa (at 2,717 feet), which currently holds the “tallest” distinction.
According to Building Design magazine, work on the skyscraper is slated to start April 27 and will take more than five years to complete. For comparison’s sake, the Empire State Building, at 1,250 feet tall, took about a year to construct.
In February of this year, a foundation was laid for the Kingdom Tower, which will include, perhaps not surprisingly, a Four Seasons hotel, luxury condos, office buildings and the world’s highest observation tower, according to a news release from EC Harris/Mace, the companies tapped to oversee construction.
In addition to the remarkable height, other Kingdom Tower–related numbers are pretty astounding: The building, designed by U.S.-based Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, is meant to have more than 50 elevators (some reports say 56, others say 59) and 12 escalators. A ride all the way to the penthouse will take a full 12 minutes, Inhabitat reports. Total area will equal 500,000 square meters (that’s 5.3 million square feet). It’ll have 3,190 parking spots.
The official Kingdom Tower skyscraper website states that pictures of the rising building should be available later this year, and that a completion date of 2017 or 2018 is “highly unlikely.” So 2019 it is. Until then we’ll just have to settle for a building that’s almost in the clouds.
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