‘Fly Above The Rest’

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Tallest Skyscrapers Of The World & The Kingdom Tower

Saudi Arabia based Company of Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal is going to build a 1.6 km high skyscraper in Jeddah. It will be the double high than Burj Khalifa.

The city which will be constructed around it will be over 23 million square area with the investment of $26.6 billion and it will consist on shopping malls and other entertainment centers.

A skyscraper is a continuously habitable, and tall building but there is no diffinition or standard height above which a building may clearly classified as a skyscraper. Here I have a list of top 10 tallest buildings in the world.

This building is known as Burj Dubai, it is a skyscraper in Dubai (United Arab Emirates) and this is the tallest man made structure ever built in history at 828 m (2,717 ft). Its Construction began on 21 Sep. 2004, and completed on 1 Oct. 2009. This building officially opened on 4 Jan. 2010. Its architecture and engineering work done by Owings, Skidmor and Merrill of Chicago Adrian Smith. This project’s total cost was about US$1.5 billion and this project made Dubai itself a mired in a deep financial crisis and forced them to get add from Abu Dhabi, the opening ceremony and surprise naming of this tower to Burj Khalifa, after UAE President Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Taipei 101 is also known as the Taipei Financial Center a landmark skyscraper which is located in Xinyi District, Taipei, Taiwan. The building ranked officially as the world’s tallest from 2004 until the opening of the new Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Taipei 101 designed by C.Y. Lee and Partners. Taipei 101 is called 101 becaus it comprises 101 floors above ground and 5 floors underground. Taipei 101 is owned by the Taipei Financial Center Corporation.

SWFC is a very supertall skyscraper in Pudong Shanghai, China. It consists of hotels, offices, observation decks, conference rooms and shopping malls on the ground floors including Park Hyatt Shanghai and it is the highest hotel in the world. It officially opened on 28 Aug. 2008 for business and two days later, the Observation Deck opened. SWFC Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox and tits construction work started on 27 Aug. 1997 but due to asian finacial crisis project completed on 17 Jul. 2008.

ICC Tower is skyscraper which has 118 floor, 484 m (1,588 ft) completed in West Kowloon, Hong Kong, it is the part of the Union Square project built on top of Kowloon Station. It completed in 2010, and became Hong Kong’s tallest building and has the third highest in the world, after Burj Khalifa and the Shanghai World Financial Center.

The Petronas Twin Towers (also known as Twin Towers) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia were the world’s tallest buildings from 1998 to 2004, Taipei 101 broke its record. The Petronas Towers were completed in 1998 after a seven year build & became the tallest buildings in the world on the date of its completion.

The Nanjing Greenland Financial Center is a 450-metre (1,480 ft) tall, this skyscraper completed in April 2010 in Nanjing, China. It is 89-story building features retail and office space in the lower section, and restaurants and a public observatory at the top. The tower’s stepping is functional. Adrian Smith adn Marshall Strabala who were also together to design Burj Khalifa, designed the competition winning building for the Nanjing Greenland Financial Center.

Willis Tower (formerly named Sears Tower) is a 108-story 1,451 feet (442 m) tall skyscraper in Chicago, Illinois. It was the tallest building in the world n 1974. Currently, this tower is the tallest building in the United States and the fifth tallest freestanding structure in the world.

Guangzhou West Tower is a 103 story, 440.2 m (1,444 ft) tall skyscraper. Construction of Guangzhou West Tower designed by Wilkinson Eyre.

The Trump International Hotel and Tower, also known as Trump Tower Chicago and locally as the Trump Tower, is a skyscraper. The name of the building is after real estate developer Donald Trump. It was designed by architect Owings and Marrill and Adrian Smith of Skidmore and built by Bovis Lend Lease. When openend in 2009 it became the second tallest building in the US after Chicago’s Willis Tower.

The Jin Mao Tower is an 88-story landmark skyscraper in the Lujiazui area of the Pudong district of Shanghai in China. It contains the Shanghai Grand Hyatt Hotel and offices. It was designed by the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

50 Amazing Buildings of the World

1. The Crooked House (Sopot, Poland)

Construction of the building started in in January 2003 and in December 2003 it was finished. House architecture is based on Jan Marcin Szancer (famous Polish drawer and child books illustrator) and Per Dahlberg (Swedish painter living in Sopot) pictures and paintings.

Image via: brocha

2. Forest Spiral – Hundertwasser Building (Darmstadt, Germany)

The Hundertwasser house “Waldspirale” (“Forest Spiral”) was built in Darmstadt between 1998 and 2000. Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the famous Austrian architect and painter, is widely renowned for his revolutionary, colourful architectural designs which incorporate irregular, organic forms, e.g. onion-shaped domes.

The structure with 105 apartments wraps around a landscaped courtyard with a running stream. Up in the turret at the southeast corner, there is a restaurant, including a cocktail bar.

Image via: Kikos Dad

3. The Torre Galatea Figueras (Spain)

Image via: manuelfloresv

4. Ferdinand Cheval Palace a.k.a Ideal Palace (France)

Image via: Mélisande*

5. The Basket Building (Ohio, United States)

The Longaberger Basket Company building in Newark, Ohio might just be a strangest office building in the world. The 180,000-square- foot building, a replica of the company’s famous market basket, cost $30 million and took two years to complete. Many experts tried to persuade Dave Longaberger to alter his plans, but he wanted an exact replica of the real thing.

Image via: addicted Eyes

6. Kansas City Public Library (Missouri, United States)

This project, located in the heart of Kansas City, represents one of the pioneer projects behind the revitalization of downtown.

The people of Kansas City were asked to help pick highly influential books that represent Kansas City. Those titles were included as ‘bookbindings’ in the innovative design of the parking garage exterior, to inspire people to utilize the downtown Central Library.

Image via: jonathan_moreau

7. Wonderworks (Pigeon Forge, TN, United States)

8. Habitat 67 (Montreal, Canada)

Expo 67, one of the world’s largest universal expositions was held in Montreal. Housing was one of the main themes of Expo 67.

The cube is the base, the mean and the finality of Habitat 67. In its material sense, the cube is a symbol of stability. As for its mystic meaning, the cube is symbol of wisdom, truth, moral perfection, at the origin itself of our civilization.

354 cubes of a magnificent grey-beige build up one on the other to form 146 residences nestled between sky and earth, between city and river, between greenery and light.

Image via: ken ratcliff

9. Cubic Houses (Rotterdam, Netherlands)

The original idea of these cubic houses came about in the 1970s. Piet Blom has developed a couple of these cubic houses that were built in Helmond.

The city of Rotterdam asked him to design housing on top of a pedestrian bridge and he decided to use the cubic houses idea. The concept behind these houses is that he tries to create a forest by each cube representing an abstract tree; therefore the whole village becomes a forest.

Image via: vpzone

10. Hang Nga Guesthouse a.k.a Crazy House (Vietnam)

The house is owned by the daughter of the ex-president of Vietnam, who studied architecture in Moscow.

It does not comply with any convention about house building, has unexpected twists and turns, roofs and rooms. It looks like a fairy tale castle, it has enormous “animals” like a giraffe and a spider, no window is rectangular or round, and it can be visited like a museum.