The Tallest Buildings in the World
I have visited the Wikipedia list of the tallest buildings in the world at least three dozen times. I can recite all of the information listed on it without even looking. There are so many very tall buildings in the world, and most of them happened recently, but people donโt know anything about them even though they are some of the most incredible things to ever exist.
Surely you are familiar with the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, with a height of 829.8 meters (2717 feet). There is also the Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, which is 678 meters (2227 feet) tall and built only this year. There is also the 632 meter (2073 feet) Shanghai Tower from 2015 and, of course, the unforgettable Abraj Al-Bait Clock Tower in Mecca, which is 601 meters (1972 feet) tall and has four clock faces, each 43 meters (141 feet) around. They destroyed an important historical site to build it, but it is so incredibly big and isnโt it beautiful.
The architect for the Abraj Al-Bait Clock Tower is in Stuttgart, Germany and employs about 30 people. The architect of the second tallest building in the world, the Merdeka 118, is called Fender Katsalidis Architects in Melbourne, Australia and also built the third tallest building in Australia, which is the tallest building in Melbourne and the fifteenth-tallest residential building in the world.
The tallest residential building in the world is the Central Park Tower located at 225 W 57th Street in Manhattan. It was completed in 2021 and designed by Adrian Smith, who also designed the Burj Khalifa. It is 472 meters (1550 feet) tall and it has 98 floors and cost 3 billion dollars to build. It is owned by the Extell Development Company, which also owns One57, the 306 meters (1004 feet) tall tower that had the most expensive residence in New York in 2014. The unit sold for $100 million to an entity who wished to remain anonymous, but who was later revealed to be Michael Dell of Dell the computer company.
220 Central Park South was designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects. It was completed in 2019 and is 290 meters (953 feet) tall. It cost 1.4 billion dollars to build and is owned by Vornado Realty. The second most expensive residential unit in the United States is at floor 73 and was bought by Joe Tsai in January of this year (2023) for $188 million.
The sharpest tower in the world was designed by SHoP Architects. It is not yet finished, but it has a height-to-width ratio of 24:1. Itโs at 111 W 57th Street and cost $2 billion to build. On January 21, 2019, a suspended scaffold attached to the building broke free from the exterior of floor 55 and showered pieces of broken glass from cracked windows over nearby sidewalks due to high winds. A year later, in January 2020, a terracotta block fell from the tower, denting the roof of a passing taxi. Another high wind on October 29, 2020, knocked the tower's construction crane loose, causing debris to fall. Two weeks later, on November 15, 2020, a glass curtain wall fell fifty-six floors into a nearby street. On December 24, 2020, a 2 ft x 11 ft (3.35 m ร 0.61 m) pane of glass fell from the 58th Street side of the building.
On September 11, 2015, around 5:10 pm, a crawler crane collapsed into the Great Mosque in Mecca due to a combination of human error and strong winds. The collapse killed at least 111 people and injured 394 others, trapping many in the debris created by the collapse. In the investigation after the incident prosecutors elected not to file charges against 42 individuals who were under investigation, including 16 members of the Bin Laden family.
What if the world always gets bigger and it never gets smaller, not even once. What if you were riding in a car that was going 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles per hour. What would it feel like to go that fast and never stop.
Life is incredible when you know that the greatest thing could happen to you instantly, or that it could happen in three years, or that it could never happen to you. What if you died tonight with no motive. What if God said โI never knew you.โ What if you were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and you did not know until the flood came and swept you away.
The Jeddah Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which has been under construction since 2013, will become the tallest building in the world when it is complete. It is estimated to have over 200 floors. Construction stalled in 2018 when the developers were arrested for corruption. They are not planning on resuming construction until at least 2025, but the piles are 200 meters (660 ft) deep and the pad over 90 meters (300 ft) across, and the building will weigh over 900,000 tons. It is owned by the Jeddah Economic Company, which is owned by Kingdom Holding Company (33.35%), Abrar Holding Company (33.35%), businessman Abdulrahman Hassan Sharbately (16.67%), and the tower's own contractor, Saudi Binladin Group (16.63%). It has been likened to the Tower of Babel.