The tallest skyscrapers in the world

    In a previous article, we discussed the tallest skyscrapers in Russia . Unfortunately, now not one of the high-rise buildings erected in the country is among the ten tallest buildings in the world. Therefore, before the completion of the construction of the Lakhta Center (hello to the commentators of the previous article), we will talk about skyscrapers in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, China, the USA, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

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    Willis tower


    The oldest of the ten existing tallest skyscrapers in the world was built in 1974 in Chicago. Its height is 442 meters excluding the spire, with a spire - 527 meters. In the Russian-language Wikipedia, Willis Tower takes 11th place, but this is somewhat incorrect: the Lakhta Center, which has already been put in 8th place in the ranking, will be completed in 2018.

    Just think: for forty years, only nine skyscrapers in the world overtook the 108-story Willis Tower in Chicago, and in the United States only the Freedom Tower, which opened in 2014, beat this result.

    The skyscraper was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which later erected both the Freedom Tower and the tallest building at the moment - the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Initially, the building was called Sears Tower, and the name Willis received in 2009. The Willis Tower Foundation stands on concrete piles driven into solid rock. The frame consists of nine square "pipes" forming one large square at the base. Each such "pipe" consists of 20 vertical beams and many horizontal. All nine “pipes” are welded to the 50th floor, then seven pipes go up to 66, five remain to the 90th floor, and the remaining two “pipes” rise to another 20 floors. How exactly it looks is clear from a 1971 photograph.

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    Worker stands on the spire of the tower.

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    The Willis Tower in this photo is on the right, with two spiers.

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    Zifeng Tower


    In Chinese Nanjing, until the middle of the 19th century, there was a Porcelain Pagoda , a Buddhist temple 78 meters high. Travelers described it as one of the wonders of the world. She was replaced by the skyscraper Zifeng.

    The construction of the 450-meter high Zifeng high-rise building was completed in 2009. It is the business center of the city. It houses offices, shops, shopping centers, restaurants and an observatory. In total - 89 floors.

    The construction of the tower lasted only four years. In the process, the project was changed: the tower could have a height of 300 meters. For China, where population density is extremely high, efficient land use is crucial. The triangular site for construction was used to the maximum: the skyscraper has a triangular base.

    The idea of ​​the architects was to interweave the motives of Chinese dragons, the Yangtze River and green gardens. A river is a vertical and horizontal seam separating glass surfaces. According to architectural thought, these surfaces themselves are a reference to dancing dragons. Inside the building placed vegetation and pools.

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    View of the city from a spire on a skyscraper.

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    Petronas Towers


    In 1998, in the capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, skyscrapers were erected under the name Petronas Towers . The height of two 88-story skyscrapers is 451 meters, including a spire.

    The skyscraper is built in the "Islamic" style, each building is an eight-pointed star with semicircular protrusions for stability. The construction site was changed after geological surveys. Initially, one skyscraper was supposed to stand on limestone, the other on rock, so one of the buildings could sag. The platform was moved 60 meters. The foundation of the towers is the deepest concrete at the moment: the piles are driven 100 meters into soft soil.

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    Construction was complicated by an important condition: only materials produced domestically could be used. Especially for the building, they developed durable elastic concrete reinforced with quartz and comparable in strength to steel. The mass of the skyscraper turned out to be twice as much as that of similar steel buildings.

    The bridge between the twin towers is secured with ball bearings. Hard mounting is not possible, as the towers are swinging.

    Elevators in the building are two-story models developed by Otis. One cabin stops only on odd floors, the second - on even floors. This allowed to save space inside the skyscrapers.

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    International Commercial Center


    Offices, a hotel and shopping centers are located on the 118 floors of the Hong Kong International Commercial Center. The height of the building is 484 meters. It was originally planned to build a skyscraper 574 meters high, but the project was changed due to a ban on the construction of buildings above Mount Victoria.

    The construction was completed in 2010, but there was no official opening: tenants already used the building with might and main. From 102 to 118 floors, it is the tallest hotel located above ground level, managed by Ritz-Carlton. On the last, 118th floor, there is the highest pool in the world.

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    Shanghai World Financial Center


    In 2008, the Shanghai World Financial Center , a neighbor of the Shanghai Tower, was built in China . The height of the 101-story building is 492 meters, although 460 meters were originally planned. The building housed a hotel, conference rooms, offices, shops and a museum.

    The building withstands earthquakes up to seven points, has fire-protected floors. After the attack on the twin towers in New York, the building design was modified so that it could withstand a direct hit by an airplane.

    Due to its silhouette, the skyscraper was called "opener". The trapezoidal opening at the top shouldhave a spherical shape, but the Chinese government forced to change the design so that the building does not resemble the rising sun on the flag of Japan. Such changes made it possible to reduce the cost and simplify the design. The upper part of the building was planned like this:

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    Here is the result:

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    Taipei 101


    The capital of Taiwan, Taipei, boasts a skyscraper with a height of more than half a kilometer. Together with the spire, the height of Taipei 101 is 509.2 meters, and the number of floors is 101.

    Taipei 101 for some time was also distinguished by the fastest elevators in the world: they rise at a speed of more than 60 kilometers per hour, or 16.83 meters per second. From the fifth to eighty-ninth floor, people rise in 39 seconds. Now the new record belongs to the Shanghai Tower.

    At 87 and 88 floors, there is a 660-ton steel ball pendulum. This architectural decision was made not only to decorate the interior. The pendulum allows the building to compensate for gusts of wind. Strong, but not rigid frame made of steel withstands extreme earthquakes. These solutions, together with the foundation of one and a half meter diameter piles hammered 80 meters into the ground, made the building one of the safest in the world. On March 31, 2002, an earthquake of 6.8 points destroyed two cranes installed on the building and claimed the lives of five people. The tower itself was not harmed. But there is a theory that it was a skyscraper that activated seismic activity.

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    Freedom Tower


    World Trade Center 1 in Manhattan, New York, overtook its pursuer in the face of Taipei 101 by 32 meters, although if you count the distance from the ground to the roof, then the American Freedom Tower on the contrary loses to the Taiwanese tower by 37 meters. The height of the World Trade Center 1 is 541.3 meters on the spire and 417 on the roof.

    The building stands on a site occupied by the twin towers of the World Trade Center, destroyed in a September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. When designing WTC1, the experience of the past was taken into account, and the lower 57 meters were made using concrete instead of the steel structure that became the standard.

    The building was officially opened on November 3, 2014. It is occupied by offices, trading floors, restaurants and the City Television Alliance.

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    Royal Clock Tower


    In Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, in 2012, a complex of high-rise buildings of the House Tower was built opposite the entrance to the al-Haram mosque, where the main shrine of Islam, the Kaaba, is located. The tallest building in the complex is the Royal Clock Tower, 601 meters high. It is designed to accommodate up to one hundred thousand pilgrims of five million people annually visiting Mecca. The Royal Clock Tower is the third tallest building in the world.

    There are four dials with a diameter of 43 meters on the tower at a 400-meter height. They are visible from any part of the city. This is the highest altitude watch in the world at the moment.

    The spire on top of the hotel is 45 meters long. There are 160 loudspeakers on the spire for a call to prayer. The 107-ton crescent at the very top of the building has several rooms, one of which is a prayer room.

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    The tower has 21 thousand flashing lights and 2.2 million LEDs.

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    Shanghai tower


    The second tallest skyscraper is located in China. This is the Shanghai Tower, a building 632 meters high, adjacent to another skyscraper from the list - the Shanghai World Financial Center. Offices, shopping and entertainment centers, a hotel were placed on 130 floors.

    The elevators in the building were developed by Mitsubishi Electric. Their speed is 18 meters per second, or 69 kilometers per hour. At the moment, these are the fastest elevators in the world. There are three such elevators in the building, another four two-story elevators develop a speed of 10 meters per second.

    You should not expect a beautiful view from the windows of a skyscraper. The walls of the building are double, it has a second shell designed to maintain temperature.

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    The tower has a twisted structure, which adds stability to combat the wind.

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    From this perspective, you can see the spiral gutter for collecting rainwater used for heating and air conditioning.

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    In February 2012, a video was published where two young and talented ruffers climb to a height of 650 meters - to the very top of a construction crane building the Shanghai Tower.



    Burj khalifa


    Opened in 2010 in Dubai, the UAE, the Burj Khalifa tower has overtaken all existing skyscrapers and is still the leader in height.

    The tower was designed by the architectural bureau Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, who created the Willis Tower and World Trade Center 1, which we spoke about earlier. The construction of the Dubai Tower was carried out by Samsung, which also participated in the construction of the Petronas Towers. The building has 57 elevators, you need to use them with transfers - only one service elevator can go up to the last floor.

    The tower houses the Armani Hotel, the design of which was designed by Giorgio Armani himself, apartments, offices, shopping centers, fitness centers and observation platforms with a jacuzzi. Indian billionaire B.R. Shetty completely bought two floors, including the hundredth, for more than $ 12 million each.

    As with the Petronas towers, we developed our own special type of concrete for the world's tallest skyscraper. It can withstand temperatures up to 48 degrees Celsius. During construction, concrete was laid at night, adding ice to the solution . The builders did not have the opportunity to fix the foundation in rocky soil, and they used two hundred piles with a length of 45 meters and a diameter of 1.5 meters.

    If the Shanghai Tower has a gutter for collecting rainwater, then in the case of the Burj Khalifa Tower, this approach is not needed: there is little rainfall in the desert. Instead, the building has a condensate collection system that allows you to collect up to 40 million liters of water per year for watering plants.

    During the filming of the film “Mission Impossible: Phantom Protocol”, Tom Cruise decided to climb the tower to write the name Katie Holmes and make a great shot.



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    Planned buildings


    At the moment there are only two building projects that are able to get on the first line of the rating of the highest skyscrapers in the world.

    The 828-meter-high Burj Khalifa seems less impressive than the Dubai Creek Harbor Tower project . Its roof height will be 928 meters - that is, it will already beat the current record by 100 meters. And the height on the spire will completely exceed one kilometer - it will reach 1014 meters. But this is not certain - the parameters of the building are kept secret. Like the Eiffel Tower, the Dubai Creek Harbor Tower will be open for the World Expo 2020 if everything goes according to plan. The foundation was laid on October 10, 2016.

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    Jeddah tower, which was laid down in 2013 and is planned to be completed by 2020, must also cover a kilometer. At a tower height of 150 meters, a terrace with a diameter of 30 meters will be placed. Construction is not going very fast - on December 2, 2016, 47 floors were ready. The building will become the center of the new Kingdom Center business district, which is now a desert in Saudi Arabia.

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