This won’t be news if you follow the world of architecture or live in Saudi Arabia, but we felt we had to share this because it’s so insanely ambitious.
Saudi Arabia is currently working on a skyscraper that will be twice the size of the current record holder, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa (here’s the view from the top and what happens when lightning strikes that one). At 1 mile (1,600 m; 5,280 ft) tall, the Saudi development has a projected cost of $30bn. A city with a capacity of 80,000 people will be constructed around the tower, extending over an area of 23 million square metres.
Permission to build this beast of a building has been granted and construction work is under way. The first video below was shot at the project’s original announcement when the exact height was yet to be set. The second puts things in perspective a little more.
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