From The B1M:
The skyscraper is both the symbol for mankind’s limitless ambition and an immensely practical and profitable solution to our increasingly urbanized lives.
For decades, conventional wisdom said that 63 stories was the optimal height for a skyscraper.
While 63 stories may sound precise, it is in fact a rough figure that clearly depends on a variety of conditional factors – but it illustrates the argument: at a certain point, skyscrapers are no longer economically feasible.
Beyond that point they ceased their practical purpose and become something else.
The last century has seen the title change hands from building to building no less than nine times, but with the construction of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa in 2010 – a building that jumps more than 300 meters higher than its predecessor – we’ve seen that race cool, and perhaps end.
The Burj Khalifa is the first structure since Chicago’s Sears Tower to hold on to the title of world’s tallest building for longer than a decade. In that time, competing projects to the Burj have come and gone, brought back down to earth by mounting costs and their own impracticality.
Plans for the Burj Kalifa tower first emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Keen to diversify its economy away from the oil industry and to leave its mark on the world, the small port city of Dubai began to invest heavily in creating tourist attractions and turned aside that most superlative of construction titles: the world’s tallest building.
Dubai officials didn’t want to invest in constructing the world’s tallest building only for its record to be broken a few years later by another project.
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill envisioned an unheard-of 62 percent increase in height from the last world’s tallest. To put that in perspective, over the past century no other contender has gone higher than 19 percent – including the Empire State Building.
Building the world’s tallest building is now such an immense undertaking that it cannot be achieved by developers alone. That’s why, looking back over the last few decades in skyscraper construction, these remarkably tall buildings are no longer named after corporations, but after cities and countries.
This perfect storm needed to create the world’s next tallest building – a booming economy, a near endless supply of money, a desire to be put on the world map, and uncategorical support from the government – now has to match the immense height that Dubai has already presented to the world.
It was a lot easier to build a 500 meter plus skyscraper 10 years ago than it is to build an 800 meter plus one now.
Currently there isn’t anywhere in the world that has the financial backing and ambition to beat Dubai, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill may have achieved exactly what they were asked to when first conceiving the Burj Khalifa: to create the world’s tallest building that would last.
So will we ever build taller? Is this the end of the race? For now, it would seem so.
The Empire State Building was so tall, so grand, that it seemed almost impossible. It was unthinkable that anyone could build taller, and it took 40 years for its record to be beaten.
Why do we build tall buildings? Because we can. And when the time is right, when that perfect storm appears again, we will.
