Super tall buildings nothing new
Posted on 03 January 2010 with no comments from readers
Dubai claims the crown of the world’s tallest building this week with the completion of the 2,700 feet, or half-a-mile high Burj Dubai.
But there is nothing new about building tall. The Great Pyramid at Giza was the tallest building for four thousand years until surpassed by the English medieval cathedral at Lincoln which was the tallest building in the world from 1300 until the spire collapsed in 1549. By then other super tall cathedrals had been built.
Salisbury cathedral
My own home town Salisbury now has the tallest cathedral in Britain, admittedly a modest 404-feet but a triumph of engineering when it opened in 1320. You can still see the giant wheel used to raise the stone during construction.
Indeed, it is possible to go to the top but the last section is a ladder on the outside. I did this when writing an article about the restoration twenty years ago, and I signed the visitors book after a man who only signed himself Charles.
It took more than 4,000 years for my ancestors to come close to matching the pharaohs of Egypt. And it took 42 years for the Empire State Building to be topped by the World Trade Centre on whose roof I have also stood, alas post-9/11 it is no more.
The 169-storey Burj Dubai will likely also hold its title for some time. The nearest rival is the 1,671 foot Taipei 101 in Taiwan, more than 1,000 feet shorter, and even the KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota is only 2,063 feet high.
The economics of building tall are ruinously expensive which will deter rivals. My city in England peaked in prosperity around the time the spire was completed and spent the next 775 years in a bear market.
In my time in Dubai almost nothing has been built in Salisbury while Dubai has quadrupled its GDP and completed the world’s tallest building. What can be done for an encore?
Available space
Filling the 1,044 apartments in the Burj Dubai, 300,000 square feet of office space and the Armani hotel is the next challenge. But that might not be such a problem.
Imagine the prestige of this location with the world’s highest swimming pool on the 76th floor and plans for a mosque at level 158. Personally I think the Burj Dubai and the surrounding Downtown are the best investments in Dubai real estate, although a further global economic downturn might yet make them an even better buy.
If only my ancestors had bought a house in The Close around Salisbury Cathedral, although actually the developer kept all that property and leased it out for the next 775 years!
