Saudi Arabia is building Kingdom Tower, the world’s tallest building

IT IS costing billions of dollars, and will stand at 1000 metres tall. See which country is trumping the world with construction of the tallest tower in history.

SAUDI Arabia is set to outdo Dubai with construction of the world’s tallest tower beginning this week.

This must be the best viewing platform on Earth. Picture: Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture.

Kingdom Tower will stand at 1000 metres tall and is estimated to cost a whopping $1.23 billion.

Being built in the coast city of Jeddah, the building will have 200 floors and will overshadow the world’s current tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, by 173 metres.

Not for those with vertigo. Picture: Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture

According to The Saudi Gazette, construction of the tower will require 5.7 million square feet of concrete, 80,000 tonnes of steel and will take five years to complete.

The design architects for the building, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, told Construction Weekly that there are some obstacles to building the world’s tallest tower.

Don’t look down. Picture: Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture.

For starters, the foundations of the building will be 60 metres deep and will need to withstand the saltwater of the nearby ocean which will require strength testing of different types of concrete.

Then there’s the issue of wind. Every few floors will need to be designed with a different shape to cope with the wind load on the soaring monster.

Delivering concrete to the higher floors is also problematic. In Dubai, builders of the Burj Khalifa pumped 6 million cubic feet of concrete through a single pump at night when the temperatures were low enough to ensure it would set.

The tower to trump all towers. Picture: Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture.

Sang Dae Kim, the director of the Council on Tall Buildings, is confident the project will be successful. “At this point in time we can build a tower that is one kilometre, maybe two kilometres. Any higher than that and we will have to do a lot of homework,” he told Construction Weekly.