Experts Explain Saudi Arabia’s 2KM Skyscraper

how does a tower crane driver get to sit down and and do his or her work uh with a a tower crane that's 2 km I've not seen a tower crane with a lift on it but by jve you need one here right last month it emerged that Saudi Arabia is working on a skyscraper that'll rise 2 kilm into the sky from its Desert Sands if constructed it would easily surpass the world's current tallest building the rather puny 828 m b Khalifa and even double Saudi Arabia's previous world record attempt the Jedi tower now not much has really known about this project other than it's being planned for the Saudi Arabian Capital Riad and that leading Architecture Firm Foster and partners is designing it there aren't even any renders yet these are ones we made ourselves using AI but it got the world talking laughing and thinking about whether something this toall could ever really be built and if so how well to try and find out we got in touch with a leading engineering company can you make that core a little bit more efficient take out some of the structure everything here get concentrated so it has a lot of stress here in the ground level right now that is thicker than Manhattan City Block will it work for 2 km would it work um you know those are questions to be [Music] asked my name is Chris and I'm a building engineer my name is Vinnie I'm an architect today we're going to spend a little bit of time just looking at some of the challenges involved in designing a 2 km tall skyscrape we are very familiar when we walk 1 kilm or 2 kilm but uh when you add this in a vertical we kind of get a little bit lost so this is Manhattan and right here we have Central Park so Central Park is around 4 km in length so up 2 km building you will be half of the length of Central Park so this would be roughly the scale of this building in Manhattan so if you can now find here in Paris state's building Paris States is just a peck around here so Freedom Tower is around there okay so it's tall we kind of knew that but how much space does a building like that actually take up we're going to use the example of uh 432 Park Avenue in uh in New York City which if you look at it one of the first things you're going to notice besides the fact that it's tall is is very slender so what they've managed to do there is cram all of the important stuff into the building and keep it in a really sort of Slender form U which is quite a nice thing in terms of how you're going to build um and hopefully delivering as much useful space in the building as they possibly can so 432 Park Avenue that is 426 M tall so it is a tall building by any reasonable standard okay it's tall and very very slender now that's sitting in in a New York City block now a standard Manhattan block is 80 M by 274 m in kind of plan area for a a block in Manhattan yes let's just sked here just have an idea about the proportion of the city block so this is roughly the proportion okay and uh if this building and the city block of Manhattan will be approximately comping this fo to print here now let's scale that and see what it looks like if we look at a 2 km version of this disregarding all the laws of physics that might make it harder for us okay so moving from 426 M High Ching that up so we've got something that's 2 km that's going to mean we're going to end up with 133 M worth of building now that is thicker than the Manhattan City Block and it's still going to look impossibly tall and impossibly thin so even if it's impossibly thin in the footprint of this building is going to be massive but by shrinking the floor plan as much as possible you create problems elsewhere let's think about it 500 M tall towers we know how to do it we've done many we find loads of examples everywhere the whole challenge now yeah comes when we start no we when you stock them together so everything here get concentrated so has a lot of stress here in the ground level right let's think about that that's not just physical stress and and Engineers will immediately start to think about well hang on how am I going to make this thing stand up how do I to deal with the weight of 2 km worth of building coming down into the ground but it's also all of the other impacts that the building is going to have on its environment so thinking about how many people are going to be in this building and how they're all going to arrive what about all of the deliveries they're going to need you know a building doesn't exist in isolation you're going to have loads of deliveries every day things coming in waste coming out of the building that's all got to go somewhere we've got our example of our 133 meter building this is the size that we adopted in our sort of notional reference design for what this thing is 133 M that's the outside when you're looking at the building that's what you're going to see but of course in the middle we've got all of these other things now that we need to be able to deal with when I'm building a building when I'm thinking about trying to create space I'm worried about what I can do here yeah this is where the good stuff is happening and unfortunately I need to build the core to make the building stand up make it stack up uh but I want to make sure that's as small as possible so this I'm going to call boring but important okay when we start loading so many people through the building when we've got so many demands on that space what's going to tend to want to happen my 100,000 people are going to all want to pile into lifts in here and I'm going to want to put lots of more lifts in the more lifts I put in the more space the core is going to take up the more of that that happens the less of the good stuff is going to exist and therefore you know the whole purpose for building the the the building in the first place starts to become diminished so it's all about the sort of economics if you like there's an important ratio that uh that that people talk about which is the net to growth ratio and that's the sort of metric of how much of the building that you wanted to build is is given over to all of this stuff in the middle that stuff in the middle includes everything from the building's structural core to its Plumbing along with another important but overlooked feature we're saying we've got this 2 km tall building and we've got notionally 500 stories halfway up that's 250 let's just think about that for a moment about my journey when I'm trying to get to my desk so uh you know person number one comes along and they want to um they want to get to their desk up here they've got the Executive Suite level 150 when I get in the lift in the morning I I want to get in there and I want to go more or less straight to where I'm going cuz I've got you know I've got n on a 2 kilom journey to do here I don't want to be stopping every so often it's like getting on a train and picking the stopper train versus the express right we've got this problem with lifts and you can throw lots and lots of lifts at the problem you could take our sort of kind of square building cuz I can only really draw square boxes and and we can throw loads more lifts into here and make this bigger and bigger and bigger to trying to move people around but then we come back to this age-old problem that there's less building there so one thing we can do is we can use what we call a double deck lift okay um now that is are quite neat and you imagine this is this is a ground floor this is level one I've got two lift cars literally welded together um and and you can fit twice as many people in that to do the same Journey um so that is going to reduce the number of of of lift shafts I need to move people around particularly if I'm moving people in bulk if I'm doing that Express train kind of analogy now we really can't go any further without acknowledging that designing a 2 km skyscraper requires a serious grasp of some important course skills that's where today's video sponsor brilliant comes in it offers 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elevators are one way of getting people around the building but a skyscraper needs to be more solid the taller it gets to withstand all the forces that act on it so how to ultra to skyscrapers avoid falling over so we've got some examples here and we've got the jeda tower which has got you know really quite an iconic let's call it a propeller kind of shape to it now it's got this this kind of form because it's a very very strong structure to help it resist the extremely significant forces that are happening when you've got wind and and there's building of a particular height and this is going to help to resolve and deal with those forces that are going to want to make the building move and twist so I think that's really really interesting but what tends to happen with these is that we've got elements of structure now these kind of Shear walls which start to interrupt the space out onto the floor plate so the use to which you can put that space that's outside of the core actually can sometimes start to be limited um now that might work really really well if you've got some uh residential or hotel type uses in there if you get those Shear walls lined up with a notional grid that works for the space you're trying to create fantastic but it does give you give you some kind of constraint in terms of how you might be wanting to use that space if you look at back in time like in the' 70s uh the C tower has also a similar structural layout you can see here from the core structural core and the but score so it goes this is a very rigid structure that goes all the way up to support uh the observation deck I mean I think probably the answer is that uh mankind hasn't found a more efficient way of building something that's tall is going to be able to resist the forces that um that are involved in in a building of this height will it work for 2 km would it work um you know those are questions to be asked wind is one of the biggest forces that act on a building but it's not just the job of the core to stop it from falling over we've got kind of two things going on we've got that sort of self weight if you like of 2 km worth of building and that that is massive and the structures and the foundations are going to need to be designed to to deal deal with that but then you've got this this thing that isn't constant and and the wind and some days there'll be next to no wind and other days it's going to be really Gusty and coming from different directions and the building is still going to need to be able to respond to that and still be a nice place to be even when you're 2 km up in the air so even if the wind isn't changing significantly with the with the height on a on a on a strong windy day if you've got a wind force acting down here and you've got the same wind force acting up here because of the kind of lever effect this is going to have a much greater impact on on what the building's doing so now you imagine you've got this Force which is being applied and then disapplied on and off on and off um that that's starting to excite and make the building want to move here the first one here that the first sketch here we have the tune tune mass dumper does work actually yeah is a pendulum action and and it basically what it's doing is a a significant Mass you know really really heavy weight at the top of the building which is designed so that it will move at a frequency that slows down the behavior of the building and just damps it you know like suspension on a car except this thing is sort of 80 tons or more of of of of of sort of movable steel at the top of the building and I think the one in type A 101 is something like an 18 M diameter um sphere um so you know could be sort of 80 plus tons um sitting at the top of the building there are other elements here that you can add to the design of the building to deal with the wind are such as like a big openings so this could know having this big openings and the facade of the building can actually help for the wind to flow across the building also the shape of the building plan can help with the wind so uh buildings with the square shape can not be very optimal for wind because you can create some Vortex issues simple uh details and you can we can propose in the plan of the building such as the one in tape is to add some shamers so this in this example here help the ating the whole wind pressure that hits the building so that's was very good successful uh detail on the building plan there are other ways to keep something tall and thin upright in fact some Innovative Architects have even looked at bridges for inspiration so um Dubai Creek Tower is quite a good place to start in terms of um you know understanding a different proposal for how you might support something tall um and whether there's any lessons we can learn from that so that's um 1.3 km High um proposal for an observation deck which is you know very long way up um but that um there's not a lot else to that building as far as I understand it so you know you really have got something that is very very slim and you're going to have to do something else to try to um support and hold that hold that still so what about using all that extra land around the base of the the tower to try to um try to restrain it stop it from moving can you make that core a little bit more efficient take out some of the structure um and give yourself some more space in our building would that be interesting very interesting and another idea as well maybe perhaps we could use even the cables and uh having the cable support in this Tower we could also uh propose uh kind of a cable car system to move people and also can we can move Goods no uh doing this we can potentially uh reduce uh the size of the core uh transferring some of the lifts core function along the cables of the the structure you're sort of taking a lot of pressure off that you know we talked earlier on about this point right in the middle where everybody is coming together and having to um you know use the building there and how that's working so hard in all kinds of ways if you can start um you know spreading out a little bit that load where people and goods and deliveries and things are happening there's something really quite elegant about that one thing to point out here is the technical definition of a skyscraper the Council on tour buildings and urban habit habitat specify that a tower must be more than 150 M tall no problem there habitable across 50% of its height sorry Cen Tower Tokyo Sky Tree and Dubai Creek Tower and crucially freestanding so any guy ropes or cables could threaten this structure's official status as the world's tallest building okay so we know how to get people around this Tower and how it might stand up but what might a 2 km skyscraper actually look like another way to improve the structural stability of this building perhaps it could be an idea that you can sunk this building actually you can create this lower ground level so the building still like the 2 km high but actually you build the building below ground level so having this you can okay keep the concept of the cables you can create Bridges across the building so this can provide extra support for the building so uh with like a transport a ground transportation passing through the site this can becomes a connection to the uh you can create this Transportation connection to the building and uh yeah you can uh find ways to capture rain water on the base of the building as well create a landscape microclimate and also no idea to uh to use the the facade of the building to generate energy also the wind loads as well we can have kind of ideas about wind power and generate energy so you know I think we've approach this this quite theoretical problem of how you would how you would design and deliver a 2 km tall building and and you know we don't know um you know what the brief is we don't know how the the design team is approaching it but we do know some of the challenges that they'll be facing in terms of trying to make a building like this stack up so you know this is this is sort of the vinan version of of of how you might make a um a building on this scale but maybe make it just a little bit more um tread that little bit more lightly on the planet now if there's one thing we've learned over the years it's never to write off a project regardless of how crazy it sounds but this really is in a league of its own building a skyscraper more than twice the height of the bur Khalifa in the Saudi Arabian Desert will test Engineers construction teams and Architects to new limits if you're on the project team and have just finished watching this video for some advice you're welcome this video was sponsored by brilliant you can learn more about that at the link below don't forget that we're inspiring the next generation of skyscraper designers through our investment into brick borrow a fantastic Lego subscription service you can learn more and get started today over at brick.com and as always guys if you enjoyed this video and you want to get more from the definitive video channel for construction or if you're an architect or engineer currently working on this Tower and scratching your head we'd advise you to subscribe to the b1m [Music]

Channel: The B1M

Views: 832,269

Keywords: B1M, TheB1M, Construction, architecture, engineering, The B1M, Fred Mills, building, arup, saudi arabia, foster + Partners, skyscrapers, 2 kilometres, wind loads, elevators, building core

Id: letCe6dE3gY

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024