Gizmodo: world's tallest building

Burj Dubai Becomes World's Tallest Man-Made Structure Today

AddyDugdale — Tue, 20 May 2008 03:40:00 EDT

As of today, the Burj Dubai skyscraper in the Middle East stands at 650 meters, and here's a diagram found on the SkyscraperCity forums, comparing it to all the other towers. The construction has finally surpassed the current tallest man-made structure, the Warsawa radio mast in Poland, which stands at 646 meters. Only another 169 meters to go before the tip of the aircraft beacon is up, then. Clicky for bigger. [SkyscraperCity—thanks, Brian]

5250-Foot Tower Will Make Burj Dubai Look Like Pencil

Kit Eaton — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:52:38 EDT

Sure, the Burj Dubai tower looks amazingly tall, but it's final height— currently projected to be 2,300 feet— is less than half that of a new building planned for Saudi Arabia. It's going to be 5,250 feet high. Yup, that's just 30 feet short of a mile tall: taller than anything under construction anywhere, and making it easily the world's tallest building. Think they should stick a TV antenna on the top and go for that extra 30 feet? I sure do.

It's going to be built in a new city near Jeddah on the Red Sea and is funded by billionaire Prince al-Walid bin Talal. He bought London's Savoy hotel for a cool $2.5 billion in 2005. So you can suspect that there'll be a hotel in the building somewhere. By my calculations, the tower will have somewhere between 320 and 350 floors, so perhaps that should be "several hotels".

Not much is known about the details yet, other than the fact that it'll have two supporting flying-buttress towers to help keep it up (both more than 800 feet high). It will also have advanced damping systems to stop the swaying at high floors from making people sick, and it's going to need amazing engineering to cope with freezing wind at the top and desert heat at the bottom.

It's so tall that much of the ferrying of material and construction workers will have to be by helicopter. And that's just cool. [Daily Mail]

The Tallest Building in the World Looks Like a Stack of Pringles

AddyDugdale — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:00:54 EST

On our blink-and-you'll-miss-it visit to the world's largest building site, aka Dubai, we stopped for a gawk at this, the Burj Dubai. Currently the tallest structure in the world, it stands at 156 stories and 585 meters high, but is expected to reach around 800 meters when finished. Designed by Adrian Smith, the tower continues the Armani-Samsung love-in, as the Italian designer is putting his name to a sexy hotel, while the Korean mega-corp is one of the three constructors on the skyscraper. But the cruelest cut of all is that Burj Dubai (burj means "tower" in Arabic) will be dwarfed by Kuwait's Burj Mubarak Al-Kabir, which will measure 1,001 meters (3,284 feet) when it is ready. But that's not expected to be until 2012 so, until then, size queens will be eyeing up Dubai. [Burj Dubai]