Jeddah Tower will be world’s tallest building, but sky’s the limit

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• Jeddah Tower 1,000m tall
• Technology exists to go to 9km
• Unoccupied space at height

Since the invention of the modern high-rise in the early 1900s, to the completion of the Burj Khalifa in 2010, the height of the tallest building in the world grew nearly five fold, or 661 metres, going from the 167 metres of the Philadelphia City Hall to the Burj’s 828 metres.

The Jeddah Tower, on which construction resumed in October after a pause since 2018, is now designed to stretch that record another 172 metres to an estimated 1,000 metres.

Industry experts tell AGBI that with available technology we can not only get there, but go much further. If we wanted to, that is.

And there is no place like the Gulf to see just how high the race to build closer to the sky takes us.

According to Daniel Safarik, director of research at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in Chicago, China has given up chasing super-high-rises amid efforts to cool its real estate market. Beijing banned new towers higher than 500 metres four years ago.

In Africa, continental records will be established and quickly broken in the coming years, but buildings there are not yet at GCC-level heights. In Southeast Asia, Malaysia just completed construction of the Merdeka 118, the second tallest tower in the world at nearly 679 metres.

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“But, besides the Gulf, it’s really hard to pinpoint where the world-shattering records will come from,” Safarik says. “I’d be hard pressed to think of anywhere else outside of Saudi Arabia, UAE or maybe Qatar.” Plans are afoot for a 2,000-metre skyscraper in northern Riyadh.

If money were no object, experts say technology already allows us to build higher than that.

Bill Baker, a structural engineer with SOM in Chicago who worked on the Burj Khalifa, says that his firm studied this question in 2021 for research commissioned by Discovery Channel. 

“Using advanced structural engineering and construction methods, we conceptualised a three-kilometre tower – 10 times the original height of the Eiffel Tower,” he says.

“We found that, with the emerging technology of ultra-high-performance concrete, it might be possible to reach up to nine kilometres, about the height of Mount Everest.”

High-rise hurdles

There are plenty of construction and public-perception hurdles.

Bringing people up and down, preventing sway and controlling air flows are among the physical challenges.

Innovation is making it easier to build elevators that can serve a super-high-rise without requiring unwieldy and weighty cables. This avoids users needing to switch between several elevators as they climb up – a common annoyance in Dubai.

Kone, the Finnish engineering company, has developed a carbon-fibre cable that it says can enable a single “660 metre elevator rise” at Jeddah Tower, a client of theirs.

Safarik says that another method is linear induction, although its limits have not really been tested. “It’s essentially a maglev (magnetic levitation) train on a vertical track, where the elevator is floating in space held by magnets,” he says. 

The other – and possibly bigger – question is whether people are keen to spend any amount of time in super-tall buildings, given the isolation of being so far above the ground and the need to acclimatise to high altitude. Food might even taste different up there.

“A tower of 3,000 metres would compare to going from sea level to high-altitude locations like Vail, Colorado, or the Matterhorn in Switzerland, where visitors experience lower oxygen, higher UV exposure and occasional altitude sickness,” Baker says.

At existing record heights, wealthy individuals own upper-level units more as a status symbol and investment than full-time residences, Safarik says.

This brings it back to money. These super-towers are not just the highest in the world, they are also among the most expensive. 

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Extravagant construction revitalises neighbourhoods. State-owned developer Emaar made a lot of money by building and selling units in lower high-rises that offered a view of the Burj.

“Iconic real estate buildings have the ability to put cities on the global map and become tourist draws and enhance the value of the surrounding district,” Ronald Philip, a vice president at Dubai World Trade Centre, wrote on LinkedIn earlier this month.

“Jeddah Economic Company has similar ambitions [as the Burj Khalifa] with Jeddah Tower, which is envisioned to be the crown jewel of a wider 57-million-square-foot, $20-billion development dubbed Jeddah Economic City.”

It is possible that as towers grow taller the unoccupied space between the top-level units and the exterior tip of the building will grow bigger.

Already, the highest floor in the Burj Khalifa that is fully habitable is 585 metres high, while the building stands at 828 metres.

It might just be that as cities worldwide continue to beat each other’s heights, we will see more super-towers along the lines of the SOM team’s reinvented Eiffel Tower, which would have pods to take visitors up and down to enjoy the view, and the tallest vertical farm in the world – but no inhabitants at all.