The Tallest Buildings in the World

Dubbed The Worst Building in the History of Mankind by Esquire Magazine in January, 2008, the unfinished and never occupied 105-storey Ryugyong Hotel is reportedly back under construction after a 16-year lull.

The Ryugyong Hotel is an unfinished concrete skyscraper. It was intended for use as a hotel in Sojang-dong, in the Potong-gang District of Pyongyang, North Korea. Its 105 stories rise to a height of 330 m (1,083 ft), and it contains 360,000 m² (3.9 million square feet) of floor space, making it the most prominent feature of the city’s skyline and by far the largest structure in the country. At one time, it would have been the world’s tallest hotel.

There’s a new super-skyscraper going up, and for once it’s not in Dubai. The new Tokyo Sky Tree will stand a whopping 2000 feet (610 meters) over Tokyo, making it by far the tallest building in Japan and perhaps the second tallest building in the world.

It’ll be a bit short, however, of the tallest tower in the world, despite some news sources calling it that, with the Burj Dubai already at 2,087 feet and expected to grow to an insane total of over 2,600 feet. But still, 2000 feet is nothing to scoff at, putting it higher than the CN Tower, the Taipei 101 and the Sears Tower.

The top of the tower will feature a restaurant and the requisite broadcast antennae, but it’s not known what’ll be in the rest of the building. The cost is expected to be around 60 billion yen, or $555 million, and it should be completed in 2011

Two days ago, the all-authoritative Xinhua produly proclaimed that the new building, which is to be named Shanghai Center (we are unsure if this has any relation to the existing Shanghai Center) will be the tallest building east of Dubai at 580 meters and 118 stories. According to them, that’s 72 meters higher than the Taipei 101 Tower, currently the tallest building in Asia at 508 meters.

Bangalore is all set to have the world’s tallest sky tower at Tippasandra near BDA’s Anjanapura Layout. The proposed tower will scale 560 metres, beating the Canadian National Tower (553 metres) in Toronto.

The sky tower was earlier planned in Freedom Park on the old Central Jail premises, but was scrapped because it would have attracted a lot of tourists, leading to traffic problems.

The proposed tower will be built to boost communications, tourism and commercial activities. It will be a major landmark in the southern part of the city.

A special feature of the tower is that it will be a major revenue earner for the BBMP. With a microwave dish platform at an altitude of 410 metres, the tower will enhance overseas and inter-departmental communications of government organizations like the Railways, All India Radio (AIR), police and Doordarshan.

Four floors will be earmarked for these organizations.

This apart, four floors will be set aside for private telecom giants, who will set up their infrastructure.

The floor diameter at 350 metres serves as a microwave disc platform to facilitate live telecast of major events within a radius of 100 km. Visitors can get a bird’s eye view of Bangalore from here.

More here…

Kuwait is building the world’s tallest tower at 1,001 meters in Madinat al Hareer, also known as the City of Silk. When completed, the Burj Mubarak al-Kabir will beat a residential tower undergoing construction in Dubai estimated to rise between 700 to 800 meters.
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The Ras al Khaimah Convention and Exhibtion Centre looks a lot like something out of Star Wars. Unlike the traditional high-rise building, the design for the Ras al Khaimah Convention and Exhibition Centre accommodates all primary functions, such as the convention centre, hotel rooms, apartments, offices and retail space in a giant sphere.

The City of Guangzhou - host city to the 2010 Asian Games is also set to house one of the world’s tallest buildings. The new TV Tower will be one of the tallest buildings in the world - reaching 610m in height and is hoped will attract 10,000 visitors daily. The 610-metre-tall twisted, tapering tube is formed by the rotation between two ellipses which form a ‘waist’ in the centre of the building. All the giant building’s functional workings are hidden at the base and all infrastructural connections are met underground. This level supports other facilities as well, including a museum, dining facilities, commercial space and car parks. Slow-speed panoramic and enclosed high-speed double-decker lifts serve both entrance levels. Between 80-170m will consist of facilities like a 4D cinema, restaurants, coffee shops and outdoor gardens. At 170+ there will be an open-air staircase which spirals almost 200 metres higher. The building is set to be finished late 2009, in time for the games.

Dutch Information Based Architecture (IBA) is the prime contractor on this project.

Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest skyscraper, is facing construction delays of at least a year after a leading contractor on the project went bankrupt, leaving the tower without any external walls.

Work that should have begun in the first quarter of last year won’t start until April at the earliest following the collapse of Switzerland-based Schmidlin Ltd Facade Technology, said George Efstathiou, a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, which designed the tower in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Delays to the US$900 million, 160-storey skyscraper are a setback to Dubai’s plans to create a 202-hectare district featuring hotels, offices, apartments and the world’s biggest shopping mall as it seeks to become the Middle East’s No. 1 tourist hub. While the tower’s internal structures have already passed the 100th storey, the lack of a facade means work on fitting out the building can’t begin.

“It’s very unusual for a tower to be this tall without cladding,” Efstathiou said yesterday in an interview on the sidelines of the “Building Tall” construction conference in Dubai.

“The cladding is the enclosure of a building, so any interior work that needs dry conditions cannot be completed if it’s not in place.”

Wolfgang Rudolph, US general manager of Permasteelisa SpA’s Josef Gartner unit
“But we have a new contractor on board and they have a local partner and a scheme to get us back on track,” he said.

The facade for the Burj Dubai, comprising thousands of metal panels, will now be provided by Hong Kong-based Far East Aluminium Group, Efstathiou said.

“The cladding is the enclosure of a building, so any interior work that needs dry conditions cannot be completed if it’s not in place,” said Wolfgang Rudolph, US general manager of Permasteelisa SpA’s Josef Gartner unit, one of the world’s largest producers of so-called curtain walling.

Schmidlin Ltd Facade Technology, based in Aesch, Switzerland, filed for bankruptcy on Feb. 22 last year. The company said at the time that the high-risk and technologically-challenging nature of its work had led to spiraling costs, leaving it “massively in the red” since 2003.

Forget the kilometer-high Burj Dubai under construction in the Persian Gulf’s fast-growing city-state. A British consortium is building something even wilder, which surely qualifies as the world’s largest bona-fide gadget: The Time Residences tower, a solar powered skyscraper that will use the electricity thus generated to rotate through 360 degrees.

“We didn’t want to build just another building or tower, we wanted to create something unique - a precious place to live - a genuine contender to be one of the great buildings in the world,” said Tav Singh, director of Dubai Property Ring, the Dubai arm of UK-based property investors UK Property Group.

The completed tower will offer 200 expensive apartments for people who want to spend lots of money to screw up their circadian rhythym. Singh said they want to build many more such towers, with one for every time zone.

More..Rotating tower to be solar-powered [Gulf News]

Whatever next for the Arabian city that has an artificial ski slope covered in snow even when the temperature hits 50C? Not to mention the world’s tallest building, some 7,000 metres (2,300 ft) high, rising above palm-shaped artificial archipelagos in the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. Oh, and a growth rate of 16% and a population where foreigners in need of “luxury” homes outnumber locals.

Well, what about the world’s first rotating skyscraper?

Commissioned by the Dubai Property Ring, a firm of UK-based developers, the 30-storey apartment block will use solar energy to power 20 electric motors that will rotate the tower through 360 degrees over the course of a week.

“This will be a fair building,” says Nick Cooper, the British engineer working with MG Bennet and Associates of Rotherham, which will build the mechanism. “Everybody will have the same views for the same amount of time.”

Mr Cooper is not referring to “fair” as in “funfair” - though the building is, it has to be said, the spectacular proposed centrepiece of the giant City of Arabia amusement park, complete with animatronic dinosaurs, which is due to open in 2009.

Time Residences will comprise 200 apartments. Its 80,000-tonne bulk will rest on a series of more or less friction-free polymer bearings. “It moves very slowly,” says Mr Cooper. “It is not a theme park ride.”