How Tall Can We Build? | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by Skillshare new york city is known for its gleaming skyscrapers but my favorite one by far is the Chrysler Building because not only is this building an art deco masterpiece it was also the site of one of the most spiteful moves in architectural history so this was a late 1920s and a whole bunch of different technologies that come together at the same time like steel construction and elevator technology that created something of an arms race to the sky at the time the Woolworth Building was the tallest building in New York and the world for that matter at 241 meters and it held that title for 16 years and there were several buildings that were looking to replace it one of them was the Chrysler Building designed by William Van Alen who just as a construction began on that building had a falling-out with his partner a guy named H Craig severance severance decided he was going to best his former partner and now bitter enemy so he took on the construction of a rival building at 40 Wall Street throughout 1928 in 1929 the two buildings raced each other to the top constantly changing their designs and adding floors to try to get a lead on the other one and then when all was said and done 40 Wall Street topped their building with a flagpole raising their total height to 282 meters a full 26 meters taller than the Chrysler Building and then on October 23rd 1929 Van Alen surprised severance and the rest of the world for that matter when they raised a 38 meter spire up into the top of the Chrysler Building they had built it in secret on the inside and they stuck that thing up like a stainless steel middle finger beat the 40 Wall Street building by 12 meters and it became the tallest building in the world that is some next-level spite ironically the Chrysler buildings big triumph was barely even mentioned in the press because the very next day was the day of the great stock market crash of 1929 that said the Great Depression into motion and just 11 months later the Chrysler Building was superseded by the Empire State Building which held the title of the tallest building of the world for the next 40 years as long as there are people we're gonna be reaching for the sky but exactly how high can we go now before all the nit pickers come out of the comments and start telling me I'm wrong I know you've already started the Empire State Building was the tallest building for about forty years it was not however the tallest structure in the world during all that time I will get into that right now as we look at the history of the tallest structures humans have ever built start off hey 40 years is a long time to hold the title as the world's largest structure but that doesn't hold a candle to the Great Pyramid of Giza standing in a hundred and forty six metres tall the Great Pyramid was completed around 2650 BCE and it was the tallest structure in the world for nearly four thousand years it was finally bested by the Lincoln Cathedral in the UK in 1311 which stood 160 meters tall this held the record for an impressive 573 years asterisk the Lincoln Cathedral did actually lose its title in 1549 when a storm blew down one of its spires and several different churches came up over the years that became the tallest building in the world at the time but none of them were taller than 160 meters of the Lincoln Cathedral that was not beat until 1884 when the Washington Monument was completed at 169 meters this only held the title for five years before the Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889 at a height of 300 meters almost doubling the height of the Washington Monument the Eiffel Tower was actually a turning point because it was the first structure made out of steel which showed the potential for the material the Eiffel Tower was the tallest structure in the world for a solid 41 years until the aforementioned Chrysler Building raised that spire in 1929 officially opening its doors in 1930 at 319 meters tall which makes it the first building in history to go over a thousand feet next came the Empire State Building just one year later at 381 meters tall the Empire State Building was the first building tall enough that if you jumped off of it he would actually reach terminal velocity before you hit the ground don't test this by the way just just trust me now the Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world until the 1970s but in the 1950s that ushered in a wave of TV and radio technology and a boom in large communication towers this includes the Griffin television tower at 480 meters in 1954 the ko BR TV tower at 490 meters in 1956 and the Austin Kino tower in Moscow at 537 meters in 19 to seven and finally the Big Daddy the Warsaw Tower in Poland in 1974 it's 646 metres which remained the tallest structure in the world until it fell in 1991 at which point the tallest structure became the CN Tower in Toronto if 553 meters now if you want to talk buildings meaning occupy buildings that people live and work in the next one after the Empire State Building like I mentioned before was the World Trade Center which topped out at 417 meters this was eclipsed just three years later with the Sears Tower in Chicago now it's called the Willis Tower at 442 meters this held the title for an impressive 25 years until 1998 when the petronas towers went up in kuala lumpur which reads 451 meters it was top six years later in 2004 by the Taipei 101 tower at 509 meters and then another 6 years later the daddy estuve all daddies the current champion by a friggin longshot the Burj Khalifa opened in 2010 the Burj Khalifa is the tallest occupied floor the tallest spire tallest architectural element it is in fact the tallest structure humans have ever built at 828 meters the Burj Khalifa is so tall you can watch a sunset from the ground take the elevator to the observation deck and watch the sunset again they did this using a tapered triangular design that both increased window space and provided the best protection against resonance oscillation in the wind plus it was calculated to properly distribute the enormous weight of the building several new construction techniques were pioneered in the Burj Kalifa like innovative ways of getting concrete to the top floor of the building these innovative techniques are gonna come in handy in the upcoming years as people try to beat the Burj Khalifa some of these are actually under construction here they are in order of height first is the Burj Mubarak al Kabeer in Kuwait this one is a thousand one meters tall inspired by the book a thousand one Arabian Nights it will feature 234 floors of office and living space including seven open-air gardens and three centres of worship this one is really more in the planning phase right now and isn't expected to open until 2030 and for those paying attention a thousand and one meters is over one kilometer tall but was still more than a decade before it's finished it probably won't be the first to reach that milestone that one may go to the next one on our list the Jeddah tower in Saudi Arabia which is already under construction should really just list as proposed height as ridiculous because that's basically what they're going for here with 168 occupied floors the Genna tower will rise a minimum of a thousand and eight meters though the actual heights being kept a secret also known as the Kingdom tower the jeddah tower was designed by adrian smith who also designed the Burj Khalifa it was originally planned to be one mile high or 1,600 kilometers but has since been scaled down it's going up in Jeddah Saudi Arabia will be part of the entire development called the Jeddah economic City and the cost is 20 billion dollars but don't think Dubai is gonna lose their crown without a fight after all over-the-top projects are kind of what they're known for now so even as Jeddah tower creeps up on them Dubai's broken ground on the Dubai Creek Tower a massive complex surrounding a cable tower plan to go as high as 1400 meters tall almost doubling the Burj Khalifa it'll have 20 floors of residences hotels and retail with observation decks and sky gardens up above it's designed by Santiago Calatrava and features the white cable arrays he's famous for radiating out in a square formation similar to the Eiffel Tower this complex will lie 18 kilometers away from the Burj Khalifa in downtown Dubai and it's estimated to be finished in 2021 though it has gone through some delays now one observation I would like to make is how the epicenter of super tall buildings has changed geographically over the years and it goes to the very reason why we build these buildings in the first place having the tallest building in the world is a symbol of a nation's prosperity it's a display of their economic and technological might it helps frame that country in the minds of the rest of the world you know a bunch of churches in Europe in the Middle Ages in the 20th century it was the United States showing up around the Millennium Asia was showing its might now it's the Middle East some think in the future Africa will have its turn and while there are several super tall buildings that they're constructing right now none of them are quite tall enough to make this list so those are buildings that have actually begun construction or at least been financed but there's also a lot of buildings that have been proposed and designed that push the limits of human engineering a Tokyo Sky Mile Tower is one of a couple of mega projects aimed to turn Tokyo Bay into a livable real-estate Tokyo is a city that's bursting at the seams and one of the most densely populated places in the world a sky mount hour would not just be the tallest building in the world it would actually be a milestone the first mile-high building at seventeen hundred meters five thousand five hundred and seventy-seven feet it would house 55,000 people and be the centerpiece for a project called next Tokio which aims to increase the city's footprint in to Tokyo Bay the buildings also designed to be green and powered by solar wind and fuel made by algae farms in the bay the sky mile tower isn't the first proposed mile high building in fact Frank Lloyd Wright designed a building named the Illinois that would rise a mile high in 1957 it would have five hundred and twenty eight floors equaling eighteen point four million square feet of space parking for fifteen thousand cars and featured a tripod design tune mast dampener to counter the effects of the wind and high-speed elevators all way ahead of its time in 1957 the other project that aims to make use of Tokyo Bay is the Shimizu megacity pyramid and this is starting to get into some really out there stuff the megacity pyramid would rise two thousand and four meters and have a base covering eight square kilometers and it would house between 500,000 and 750,000 people it's designed to be an entire operating city tucked into the geodesic pyramid design or multiple skyscrapers connected by tunnels that run through the beams of the pyramids design it's geometric design is stable enough to withstand earthquakes and it's open interior is designed to dissipate tsunamis an important element in a city built on the Pacific Ring of Fire but going back to Dubai for a minute the Dubai city Towers is a proposed building that would rise 2,400 meters into the sky literally three times taller than the Burj Khalifa it would have 400 floors that are serviced not by elevators but by a bullet train traveling at 340 kilometres an hour it would be constructed of a central core with six outer core spiraling up around it and connecting with the centre every 100 floors distributing the mass of the building and preventing Wynn oscillation this is still in the planning stages and mostly just the demonstration of advanced building technologies ultimate tower brings us back to the United States where this design was created to ease the housing issues around the San Francisco Bay Area it's meant to be an enclosed city for millions of people designed to mimic African termite mounds it's basically a human sized termite mound how big is a human sized termite mound you might ask three thousand two hundred and eighteen meters or more than two miles high and spreading out over ten square kilometers at the base designed by Eugene Tsui it uses natural methods to create entire ecosystems inside the structure cooling the inside by a series of waterfalls and rivers the complex doesn't feature floors so much is 120 levels each its own ecology Lakes gardens even a series of mirrors would reflect the sunlight throughout the entire building and energy being naturally generated he wants to make ultimate tower a benchmark for ecological living in the entire planet and cost a hundred and fifty billion dollars about the same as the money spent so far in the International Space Station and really close to the amount of rent somebody might spend on a 700 square foot apartment in San Francisco but ultimate hour is not the ultimate mega project that belongs to the famed exceed four thousand so named for being four thousand meters tall also known as four kilometres tall or 2.5 miles with a six kilometre wide base covering 36 square kilometers it's designed to house 500,000 to a million people on eight hundred floors and would cost up to 1.2 trillion dollars now obviously this is not a project that's remotely in the works this was just an idea developed by Peter Neville he wanted to see if he could find the limits of our current construction methods and in the process broke the record for the tallest building ever planned and blueprinted this is truly an over-the-top futuristic idea the x8 4,000 would be taller than Mount Fuji and even need to be pressurized because the air pressure toward the top would be so small residents would have trouble breathing so balconies are kind of out the size would actually be big enough to disrupt weather pattern so locations would matter you wouldn't want to put it in a place where it would mess up the weather for a nearby city and this really is about the best we can do with our current technology and engineering ultimately the tallest thing you could possibly build would be a space elevator which would extend out from the surface a hundred thousand kilometres the design challenges around that are huge because you would basically have to use a counterweight floating out at geostationary orbit and connected by an impossibly long tether made out of some kind of material that we can't quite do yet at mass level anyway and it would also be vulnerable to space debris of which there are millions of pieces out there I've talked about all this in a previous video and then there's the idea of building mega projects in space like ring world's and entire arcologies that would orbit the earth or travel out to other planets does that count is building up it's certainly fun to think about and it's gonna be really interesting watching the next generation of super tall buildings raising their middle finger spirals into the sky on a wave of spite by the way there are a ton of proposals and designs for buildings out there that I had to leave off this list just for time so there's a favorite of yours I didn't mention please bring it up down the comments below and tell me would you want to in one of these buildings why are why not discuss or if you think you could top these ideas or just like this subject because you're in the architecture and whatnot you can learn a lot more about how to build your own building and it's Skillshare specifically there are tons of classes on Skillshare for a program called sketchup which is something that both the pros and hobbyists use to kind of design buildings and create renovation projects one class you might want to check out is Sketchup architect from 2d plans to 3d models by Tomas Sultan Tomas has been working as an architect for 20 years and as an expert not just on the program but how to implement it into real plans along the way he gives you pro tips on how to create beautiful mock-ups of buildings and to get your vision just right not into architecture Skillshare is still worth checking out they've got over twenty five thousand videos on everything from how to play an instrument to design to business you name it whatever you're interested in there's something you can learn about it it's Skillshare it's only ten dollars a month with the annual subscription but if you sign up at the link down the description of this video you can get to three months from Skillshare you can learn a lot in two months anyway go check it out by typing this into your internet machine or just clicking the link in the description down below I think you'll like it alright thanks the Skillshare for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon who are building a community keeping the lights on around here and just 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 1,016,188

Rating: 4.8793712 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, future tech, megatall buildings, chrysler building, burj khalifa, eiffel tower, dubai creek tower, jeddah tower, dubai city tower, tokyo sky mile, ultima tower, x-seed 4000, shimizu mega city pyramid, space elevator, Burj Mubarak al-Kabir, sears tower, tallest building in the world

Id: kkMWb_8IiB4

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2019