Is Jeddah’s Kingdom Tower going to dethrone Dubai’s Burj Khalifa as the world’s tallest building? Recent reports reveal that to be a likely scenario, although the building is only expected to be completed in 2018.
In fact, according to the Saudi Bin Laden Group (SBG) and Advanced Construction Technology Services (ACTS), the companies in charge of supervising the construction of the Kingdom Tower, the world’s first 1 kilometer tall skyscraper will consume roughly 80,000 tons of steel and half a million cubic meters of concrete in order to overtake the 828m tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
Previously known as the Mile-High Tower, the US $1.23 billion (AED/SAR 4.5 billion) construction plan and design was conceived by the architects Adrian Smith and Gordon Jill as the center-piece of the Kingdom City project, a new urban center located on the north side of Jeddah, along the Red Sea coast.
As of today, this initial phase of the construction work is over, and the actual work on the tower is supposed to start soon, although there are no updates on the finalized construction schedule.
www.kingdomtowerskyscraper.com
—Elisabeta Tudor
