In a house located on the 320th floor, one kilometer high, it is difficult to imagine what life will be like. Will the ground move a little like the ground moves on an airplane? Will wind blows be felt on the façade? Will running water comen good pressure? Can the windows be opened even for half a minute? Will the spaces be more or less open or rather convoluted because the structural mass will take up a lot of space? How will the garbage be disposed of? Is it scary just thinking about a fire? Can the partitions be removed to join the kitchen to the living room? And the most important questions: Will that be a photogenic but lonely life? Will they end up giving up going outside because the outside is so far away?
There is no 320th floor in the world today and no one lives one kilometer high, because the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building on the planet since 2014, reaches 828 meters high and is only inhabited up to 584 meters, its 163rd floor. What follows are floors occupied by machinery and an antenna that stretches a little hyperbolically.. However, two projects in Saudi Arabia have proposed over the last year to take the roof further. The Jeddah Tower in Jeddah was planned in 2011 to reach a height of 1.6 kilometers (the symbolic mile of a famous utopian skyscraper by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1950s), but it later shrank to a height of 1,000 meters at the direction of the geologists who analyzed the soil of their plot. The works started in 2014 and were suspended when work was being done at 390 meters high in 2017 because its promoter, Prince Bin Talal, fell into disgrace with the Saudi Government and ran out of credit. Last year, the Jeddah Tower regained political favor and new avenues for state financing.
This same month, even more extravagant news came from Riyadh: Public Investment Fund, the sovereign fund that invests oil profits and headed by Prince Mohamad Bin Salman, failed a competition for the construction of a two-kilometer-high tower in the north of the kingdom’s capital. Norman Foster’s studio was the author of the chosen project and will construct a building for which there is already a budget of 4.62 billion euros.
The world, however, has reacted with skepticism. «My forecast today is that the project will be done and disclosed, but it will not be built. But I thought the same about The Line [una ciudad de 170 kilómetros en Arabia] and the works are already underway,” explains Juan Carlos Arroyo, the engineer who has signed the structural project for the renovation of the Torres de Colón in Madrid.
“I very much doubt the necessity,” adds Eduardo Prieto, architect and professor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid. «We never see an economic report on these projectsa study that says what demand there is for a building like this, neither residential, nor office space, nor the cost of maintenance that can be calculated.
There is a social status in living physically and metaphorically above others.
Andrew Harris
In the Burj Khalifa there are entire floors of offices and apartments that have never been inhabited, but it doesn’t seem like that is a very relevant piece of information. The viewing points and restaurants for tourists fulfill their function and make money, while the name of the building is known throughout the world. Not at the level of the Eiffel Tower but more than any other building of the 21st century. It is impossible to know whether its promoter, a Dubai public company, has recovered its investment or not.
Why are buildings like this proposed? «My intuition is that, first of all, There is a social status in living physically and metaphorically above others.. Secondly, those ways of life that promise a form of well-being, of escaping the congestion, pollution and crime that are often associated with street level. And, thirdly, this emotion of seeing the world from above,” he says. Andrew Harris, Professor of Urban Studies and Geography at University College London. «It’s a curious situation: many ultra-rich people today seem to want to live at the top of the city, even though that requires a lot of additional expenses. But we should not treat this desire as something radically new. New heights and shapes are certainly a feature of 21st century skyscrapers, but there are important precedents. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the best place to live was the ground and not the top. Then everything changed because of technology.
Information about the two kilometer tower is still very scarce, so The analyzes have, until now, been geopolitical in nature.: What makes a sovereign fund enter into a project like this? In summary, the answer would be that, faced with a future in which hydrocarbons will no longer be an infinite wealth for Saudi Arabia and its neighbors, the idea of its elites is to convert their cities into enclaves of free life for the billionaires of the planet.
What remains to be considered is what life can be like in a building like this. First: what can you do with a building two kilometers high? «What is foreseeable is that The first third of the building would be dedicated to offices and commercial uses, the second third to homes and hotels and the third would not have many uses other than viewpoints and some technical services.», explains Prieto.
And that is because such a structure could only be supported on an immense base, with a large podium that would have to be refined as the building gained height, until ending in a pinnacle. «I would say that the structural core would have to measure 300 meters by 300 meters at least.although it would not have to be a completely solid core, but rather it could house services and elevators,” says Arroyo.
The ground floors of the building, with very deep bays and without interior patios, could only function to house offices or shopping centers. When the building rose and thinned, the offices would disappear and houses would appear, because in Saudi Arabia there is not and will never be a demand for so much office space. In fact, around the world, office towers are already being emptied and recycled into residential buildings. In recent years, Large technology firms have preferred to create their headquarters in horizontal buildings and little visible, instead of settling in scenarios typical of Succession.
So the two kilometer tower will gain height and the structural core and the bays will become thinner from 500 meters onwards, where it will be possible to make houses, facing the facades and well lit. In the Burj Khalifa there are 900 apartments between the 19th and 77th floors, described in some reports as “well designed in details but a little cavernous.”
There are videos that show the homes in the skyscraper. Their apartments do not have larger spaces or much more sophisticated finishes than those of any upper-middle class home in Spain. The only peculiarity is that they often tend towards irregular shapes to adapt to the facades, which are curved.
Starting from a 12th floor, about 40 meters high, the great challenge to maintain a building is no longer gravity but the wind, so imagine yourself on a 120th floor.
Eduardo Prieto
More structural information: it is expected that the plan of the two-kilometer tower will tend to a Y shape, the one that best resists the windand that it be built with metal structures, because the concrete is too heavy to be able to work with it at that height and because the wood is not rigid enough.
There is another almost distressing doubt: that of vertical displacements, going up and down from home to the street and back to home. We have no precedent for anything like the two-kilometer tower, but Arroyo estimates that, Even with the fastest elevators, getting from the highest floors to the ground floor will take half an hour, including several transfers. Like taking the subway from home to work, but in a four-square-meter car.
Half an hour in the elevator to get from the garage to work is an impossible investment of time. And to leave the house? Also, unless the two kilometer tower is made for that very thing: to live outside the world.
“From a 12th floor, about 40 meters high, the great challenge to maintain a building is no longer gravity but the wind, so imagine yourself on a 120th floor,” explains Prieto. «A few days ago I ate in a restaurant they built on top of an old industrial warehouse in Barcelona and in the soup you could feel the vibration of the structure, the liquid moved. I estimate we were 35 meters away.», adds Arroyo.
The mention of wind is relevant to explain that in a home on a 320th floor the windows cannot be opened, also to avoid pressure changes that break the constant pressurization that will have to be promoted, as occurs in airplanes. «The alienation from the world would be total. I’m not even sure that the views are worth it. At 200 meters above sea level you can see the city, but at a kilometer and a half you can only see mists and clouds, you can’t see the people on the street,” says Eduardo Prieto.
There is another problem which is the foundation. To anchor such a mass to the ground without cracking it, a much larger platform would have to be created, a perimeter with about a kilometer radius, according to Arroyo, which would isolate the world’s tallest tower from neighboring buildings. The inhabitants of a 320 floor will live like one lives on a space mission, oblivious to the rest of the world, ignorant of the weather on the street, surrounded by technology and design, occupying rather intricate spaces but luxuriously furnished and surrounded by private services that would console them from their loneliness: swimming pools, gyms, restaurant clubs… The views would be impressive, but rather abstract. No one from outside will be able to enter unless it is to work on the maintenance of the building. Those inside will not have many incentives or facilities to go outside. It will not matter if there is a democracy or an Islamic dictatorship on the street. And the building will be so expensive to maintain that no one inside will be able to challenge the system. The water will arrive with motors that will repeat the pumping every few floors. The facades will be cleaned with drones…
It’s possible? “Yes, but it is expensive just like any solution that defies common sense,” says Prieto. «How will there be hypertechnological solutions“The building will be presented as an example of efficiency, but I am very skeptical.”
On a less hyperbolic scale, residential skyscrapers appear all over the world: in Florida, in Gibraltar, in Hong Kong… In Chicago, a public program of tax exemptions andhopes to convert three million square meters of offices into housing within the Loop (its urban center). In principle, the project is presented as a social housing policy but the fine print denies this. Only 30% of the homes will have limited prices for average incomes. “That is the key behind it,” Prieto resolves. “These apartments are not made to solve a housing need but as a financial product.”
