Sky City and Other Planned Skyscrapers

Emirates247 –
China plans to build the Sky City skyscraper.
Standing 838 metres high, 10 metres higher than Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, currently the world’s tallest tower, Sky City in Changsha, China, will be built in mere 90 days and completed by March 2013.

The tower, the company says, will be able to withstand earthquakes of up to 9.0 magnitude, will be fireproof resistant for up to three hours and have 10 fire escape routes for evacuation of a floor within 15 minutes during an emergency.

Sky City will also have 15cm thermal insulators, four paned windows, fresh air heat recovery system, non-electric air conditioners, cooling-heating power system and LED lighting.

Last month at a meeting of the Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in Shanghai, Adrian Smith, who worked on the design of Burj Khalifa and is currently working on the one-kilometre-high Kingdom Tower, Saudi Arabia, said that rapid urbanisation in China would fuel major expansion in tall buildings.

William Baker, a structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill who worked with Adrian Smith on designing the system that allowed Burj Khalifa to be built, told theatlanticcities.com in September that the buttressed core design of Burj Khalifa can be used to build structures even taller than the world’s tallest tower.

“It’s totally feasible to build much taller than even the one-kilometre high Kingdom Tower, which is expected to be completed by mid-2017. We could easily do a kilometer. We could easily do a mile,” he said.

Zhang Yue, Chief Executive Officer, Broad Sustainable Building has said he plans build at a two-kilometre high, 636-floor tower.

Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) Chairman Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, said the 1,000-metre high tall Kingdom Tower in Jeddah will be completed by mid-2017.

Following KHC announcement, an Azerbaijan company said it plans to build the tallest tower in the world, standing at 1,050 metres, surrounded by number of artificial islands and a Formula One racetrack. The project is likely to be completed between 2020 and 2025.

China is set to complete 53 per cent of the 124 skyscrapers under construction over the next six years. The country now has 75 completed skyscrapers above 240 metres in height.

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