The largest skyscraper in the world. The most famous skyscrapers. How skyscrapers are built. Innovations in the construction of skyscrapers. The tallest skyscraper in the world What is the name of the skyscraper
The first skyscraper in the world. Inventor of the first skyscraper.
It is difficult to call any building the first skyscraper for many reasons:
It never happened,no, and it is unlikely to happen,a clear definition of the concept of "skyscraper".
there has never been, no, and never will be a clear criterion for the height of a building above which it can be considered a skyscraper;
many architects of high-rise buildings remained forever unknown.
To understand this, you need to remember:
who was the builder of the Tower of Babel?
who was the builder of the Egyptian pyramids?
who was the builder of multi-story buildings in ancient Rome, etc.
In all cases, the architect is unknown to us.
The first high-rise buildings were simply very tall buildings. Multi-story buildings were built on massive solid foundations and supported by thick walls several meters thick.
In the second half of the 19th century, high-rise buildings meant all buildings above six or seven floors.
The architects, not without reason, believed that no one would want to climb any further steps.
The psychological barrier was broken only in 1874, when a ten-story skyscraper, the New York Tribune Building, with elevators, appeared in New York.
The first skyscraper was the building of the insurance company (The Home Insurance Building), which existed until 1931.
The building originally had 10 floors.
Later, in 1891, two more floors were added. The author of the project is an American architect William LeBaron Jenney.
It is believed that for the first time in this building the architect used a load-bearing steel frame.
Previously, the role of the supporting structure was performed by external walls.
In this case, the building rested on a metal frame supporting both external and internal walls.
Thanks to the supporting frame, the total weight of the structure was reduced by almost a third.
The architect did not dare to completely abandon other load-bearing structures, so the building also had a load-bearing rear wall and granite columns.
The concept of “skyscraper” arose with the advent of rolled metal products.
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The very first skyscraper in the world
Louis Henry Sullivan Louis Henri Sullivan |
Important The full transition to a load-bearing steel frame was carried out during the construction in 1891 of the 11-story Wainwright Building in St. Louis, designed by an American architectLouis Henry Sullivan(09/03/1856, Boston, - 04/14/1924, Chicago). Wainwright Tower may lay claim to being the first skyscraper. Today, most high-rise buildings have a load-bearing steel frame, but there is a noticeable shift to the construction of skyscrapers using reinforced concrete. A An architectural element without which it is impossible to imagine a modern skyscraper is the elevator. The first elevators in an office building appeared in 1870 in the Equitable Life Building in New York. On a note Louis Henry Sullivan formulated the principles of skyscraper construction, and architects, in general, still follow these principles. First- a skyscraper needs an underground floor, which will house boilers, power plants and other devices that provide the building with energy and heat. Second- the first floor should be given to banks, shops and other establishments that need large space, a lot of light, bright display cases and easy access from the street. Third- the second floor should have no less light and space than the first, since it is easily accessible using stairs. Fourth- between the second floor and the top one there should be countless office spaces, which may not differ in any way from each other in layout. Fifth- the topmost floor, as well as the underground, must be technical. Ventilation systems are located here. All five principles were used by Sullivan in constructing the Wainwright Building. The main principle of all new architecture, which the architect formulated as follows: " Form fits purpose". Applied to other Sullivan buildings, this principle could mean that the factory building did not need to have Corinthian columns, or the station need to have Gothic spiers. In the case of a skyscraper, functionality was understood in a special way. In Sullivan's understanding, to be a skyscraper, a building must soar and soar upward. |
Today, more and more often there are reports about the construction of the first skyscraper in this or that country, or in this or that city.
Example
Construction of the first skyscraper in Bulgaria with a height of 150 meters began in October 2007.
Construction of the first Pakistani skyscraper by the Chinese began in 2007.
The first skyscraper in the Caucasus began construction in North Ossetia in 2008.
Since 2008, the first skyscrapers in Siberia have been built in Novosibirsk.
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- A skyscraper (tracing paper from the English skyscraper) is a very tall building with a load-bearing steel or reinforced concrete frame, designed for people to live and work. In Russian the term “high-rise building” or simply “high-rise” is also used.
The minimum height of a skyscraper building is controversial. In the United States and Europe, buildings with a height of at least 150 m (500 ft) are considered skyscrapers. Emporis defines a skyscraper as a building above 100 meters, as opposed to simply tall buildings (35 to 100 meters), and SkyscraperCity as a building above 200 meters. Skyscrapers above 300 m are called supertall by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, and those above 600 m are called “megatall”.
Categorization of high-rise buildings and compilation of their ratings has some ambiguity due to the variety of measurement methods. Currently, the generally accepted criteria are those developed by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
According to these criteria, a building is defined as a structure designed for use as a residential, office (commercial) or industrial premises. An essential characteristic of a building is the presence of floors. Thus, the described rating obviously does not include television and radio towers.
The Council proposes three criteria for measuring the height of a building (in all cases, measurements are taken from the lowest significant entrance to the building):
structural height of a building - the height from sidewalk level to the highest point of the building's structural elements (including spiers and excluding television and radio antennas and flagpoles).
This is the main criterion. It is used to compile a ranking of the tallest buildings.
to the highest accessible floor - the height of the building to the floor level of the highest accessible floor of the building.
to the tip of the antenna/spire - the height of the building to the highest point of the antenna, spire, etc.
Until the 19th century, buildings taller than six floors were rarely built. This was due to the inconvenience of climbing stairs to great heights. In addition, the suction water pumps used at that time made it possible to raise water no more than 10 m.
The development of technologies of steel, reinforced concrete and water pressure pumps, as well as the invention of safe elevators, made it possible to increase the height of buildings tens of times, which is especially in demand in megacities where the cost of building area is high.
As of November 2016, there were 3,720 skyscrapers in the world (over 150 m in height), of which 110 were super-tall and 1,153 above 200 m; More than 1,080 are under construction, including 143 super-high-rise ones. Construction of another 146 skyscrapers (22 of them super-tall) has been suspended for now. The most skyscrapers (over 150 m in height) are in China (together with Hong Kong and Macau) - 1392, in the USA - 706, in Japan - 227 and in South Korea - 198, in the United Arab Emirates - 197, in Australia - 91, in Singapore - 78. 38 skyscrapers have been built in Russia (15th place in the global ranking), another 16 are under construction.
The world's tallest skyscraper is under construction April 18th, 2013
A couple of years ago, the Internet wrote about two projects of kilometer-long skyscrapers - the Nakheel tower in Dubai and the Mubarak al Kabir tower in Kuwait. However, the Dubai project was canceled due to the crisis of the Nakheel group, and the Kuwaiti project was stuck at the stage of approvals with the government.
However, a kilometer-high building will be erected on our planet in the near future. Back in 2011, it became known that Kingdom Holding, owned by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, signed a contract for the construction of the Kingdom Tower skyscraper in Saudi Arabia, the height of which will exceed 1000 meters.
The tallest skyscraper in the world - Kingdom Tower will rise more than 1 km. over the city of Jeddah, off the coast of the Red Sea. The tower will include hotels, residential apartments, offices and the world's highest observation deck. Adrian Smith was appointed as the chief architect of the project; he also designed the Burj Khalifa, as well as a number of other skyscrapers in the USA, China and the UAE (see his website). Amount Prisoner Kingdom Holding The contract is valued at $1.2 billion. Kingdom Tower will be the central and first stage of construction of the area Kingdom City, in the construction of which the Saudi prince is ready to invest a total of $20 billion.
Upon completion of construction, which will take 5 years, Kingdom Tower will surpass the Burj Khalifa, the current record holder, by at least 173 meters. Unique design feature Kingdom Tower there will be a sky terrace with a diameter of 30 meters, located on the 157th floor. In total, the tallest skyscraper in the world will have more than 200 floors. Construction is scheduled to begin in March 2012.
It is known that the main problem of such grandiose projects is their payback. At a press conference in Riyadh Prince Alwaleed assured that “this project will provide sustainable profits Kingdom Holding and its shareholders. We have been in discussions for four years to make it economically viable... This project is very feasible, and everyone is happy with its potential profitability.”
From the top of the tower, an area within a radius of about 140 km will be visible. It is assumed that the satellite city will consist mainly of luxury housing, hotels and business centers.
The architectural highlight will be a saucer balcony:
Regardless of which country this building is erected, the construction of an anthropogenic structure, more than 1 kilometer in height, is an important achievement, indicating considerable technical progress of all mankind.
Data project as well will be carried out by a joint organization from the companies EC Harris and Mace. The Guardian newspaper reports that it was this team that was involved in the construction of the tallest building in Western Europe - The Shard. This is the Shard Tower in London.
Directly ourselves construction will be handled by the Bin Laden Group, which is owned by the Osama bin Laden family. Invest construction of Kingdom Tower there will be a company called Jeddah Economic, which is controlled by Al Waleed bin Talal (Prince of Saudi Arabia). According to plan construction of the Kingdom Tower skyscraper should begin in the middle of this year and end in five years.
The project developer is the British company Hyder Consulting, and the architectural design will be carried out by Omrania & Associates from Saudi Arabia.
In April 2011, several news outlets reported that the construction plan had been accepted and the total cost of the construction would be about $30 billion.
The total cost of the project, including the satellite city, is expected to be $20 billion (for comparison, the cost of building the tallest skyscraper at the moment, the Burj Khalifa, is $1.5 billion), but the original plan was for no more than $10 billion.
Project Kingdom Tower not the only architectural development that claims to be the tallest building. It is also known that within the framework of another project called “Caspian Islands” in the Republic of Azerbaijan they are going to build a 186-story skyscraper with a height of 1050 meters. In addition, Kuwait has a high-rise tower project called "City of Silk", which is 1001 meters high. The People's Republic of China has developed a project for the Sky City high-rise building, the height of which is 838 meters.
Not everyone knows about the history of skyscrapers and how they came to be. This is quite an interesting story and is discussed in our new article.
As time went on, small companies grew into mighty corporations, and a new generation of industrial and financial magnates demanded ever more impressive quarters for their headquarters. The need for new offices conveniently coincided with the development in the nineteenth century of techniques for constructing a new type of building - skyscrapers. Until the 1880s, the construction of buildings higher than 8-9 floors was considered irrational, since buildings made of brick required such a strong foundation that even windows and doors on the lower floors were unsafe to open, however, as a result of many small and one large innovation, the construction of skyscrapers suddenly it became possible. The main innovation was that the walls of houses began to be made lighter, because the building was not supported by them, but by a steel frame.
The word skyscraper has existed in England since 1794 and was used in a variety of meanings: a tall hat, a tall baseball, the topmost sail on a ship. The word was first used to describe a house in 1888 (although the term skyscraper building appeared four years earlier) and not in New York, as one might think, but in Chicago. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Chicago was the leading city in the world in the construction of large structures for a very simple reason - the devastating fire of 1871. Chicago's first skyscraper was the Home Insurance Company building, built from 1883-1885, quickly followed by the Leiter House (1889), the Confidence House (1894), and the Carson, Peary and Scott House (1889). Soon, skyscrapers so changed the cityscape (urban landscape, Americanism of 1850) throughout America that the word skyline, which previously meant “horizon line,” acquired a modern meaning - the outlines of skyscrapers against the sky.
The Home Insurance Building is the world's first skyscraper, built in 1885 in Chicago, USA, demolished in 1931.
House of Krason, Peary, Scott. Built in 1889.
Skyscrapers were born in Chicago, but New York became their real home. The first New York skyscraper, the twenty-two-story New York Peace House, opened in 1890, and soon other high-rise buildings rose above the city: Pulitzer (1892, 93 meters), Flatiron (1903, 86 meters ), Times Tower (1904, 110 meters), Singer (1908, 180 meters), Metropolitan Life (1909, 210 meters) and finally, built in 1913, Woolworth House (240 meters).
It seemed impossible to build anything bigger than the Woolworth, with its 58 floors and 14,000 employees, and indeed for seventeen years it was the tallest building in the world until the Chrysler was built in 1930. It had 77 floors and was almost one and a half times taller than Woolworth's (320 meters). According to the project, the Chrysler was supposed to have a height of 282 meters, but the architect's rival decided to build a building 60 centimeters higher on 40th Street. Then Chrysler architect Van Allen hastily and secretly designed a 37-meter steel spire, which became a remarkable decoration of the building. Chrysler retained its undisputed leadership for a very short time. It had not yet been completed when work began on the even more ambitious Empire State Building project on 5th Avenue on the site of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Rising to a height of 381 meters, the 102-story building held the world championship for forty-three years, until the 110-story, 443-meter, murderously ugly Sears Tower was erected in Chicago in 1974.
The use of a steel frame and light walls made it possible, in principle, to build high-rise buildings, but by no means solved all the problems. A lot of improvements had to be made to make these houses functional. Among them were revolving doors, which made it possible to avoid drafts that interfered with the normal regulation of the temperature of the building and were extremely fire hazardous, and most importantly, fast and safe passenger elevators were needed.
The elevator is believed to have been invented by Elisha Otis, although various lifting devices had long been in existence when Otis became famous in the late 1850s. He never claimed to have invented the elevator. His contribution was the invention of a simple, reliable device - a spring mechanism with clamps on gears - that made the use of a vertical elevator safe. Loving spectacular shows, Otis traveled around the world demonstrating the safety of the elevators he designed. The elevator he was in was pulled up on a rope to a height of 15 meters, and his assistant, to the horror of the audience, cut the rope with an axe, but the elevator only managed to fall a few centimeters before the mechanism invented by Otis stopped it. Orders for his device came in hundreds. (Yet the first elevators were not very reliable. In 1911, the New York Tribune reported that in the previous two years at least 2,600 people had been killed or injured in elevator-related accidents.)
Skyscrapers changed the appearance of American cities beyond recognition, but added almost nothing to American speech. It is said that the expression twenty-three skiddoo, meaning “get away quickly” in slang, appeared thanks to the Flatiron skyscraper, located at the intersection of 23rd Street, 5th Avenue and Broadway. The unusual geometry of the house supposedly created strong drafts that lifted women's skirts as they approached the building along 23rd Street, where men gathered to gaze at women's legs, but the police were on alert and chased away onlookers with this exclamation. Unfortunately, there is no evidence for this theory. It is known that the word skiddoo, meaning “to run away,” was the invention of the prolific neologism cartoonist T.A. Dorgan, who worked in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, but how it became inextricably linked with the number 23 remains (like much else) unknown.
In the previous article we discussed the tallest skyscrapers in Russia. Unfortunately, now none of the high-rise buildings erected in the country is among the ten tallest buildings in the world. Therefore, until the completion of the construction of the Lakhta Center (hello to the commentators of the previous article), we will talk about skyscrapers in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, China, the USA, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Willis Tower
The oldest of the dozen currently existing tallest skyscrapers in the world was built in 1974 in Chicago. Its height is 442 meters without the spire, with the spire - 527 meters. In the Russian-language Wikipedia, the Willis Tower ranks 11th, but this is somewhat incorrect: the Lakhta Center, which has already been ranked 8th in the ranking, will be completed in 2018.Just think: in forty years, only nine skyscrapers in the world have surpassed the 108-story Willis Tower in Chicago, and in the United States this result was beaten only by the Freedom Tower, opened in 2014.
The design of the skyscraper was carried out by the architectural bureau Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which later erected both the Freedom Tower and the tallest building at the moment - the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The building was originally called the Sears Tower, and received the name Willis in 2009. The foundation of Willis Tower rests on concrete piles driven into solid rock. The frame consists of nine square "tubes" forming one large square at the base. Each such “pipe” consists of 20 vertical beams and many horizontal ones. All nine “pipes” are welded up to the 50th floor, then seven pipes go up to 66, by the 90th floor five remain, and the remaining two “pipes” rise another 20 floors. Exactly what it looks like is clear from a photograph from 1971.
A worker stands on the spire of a tower.
The Willis Tower in this photo is on the right, with two spiers.
Zifeng Tower
In Nanjing, China, the Porcelain Pagoda, a 78-meter-tall Buddhist temple, stood until the mid-19th century. Travelers described it as one of the wonders of the world. It was replaced by the Zifeng skyscraper.Construction of the 450-meter high-rise Zifeng building was completed in 2009. It is the business center of the city. It houses offices, shops, shopping centers, restaurants and an observatory. In total - 89 floors.
Work on the construction of the tower lasted only four years. During the process, the project was changed: the tower could have a height of 300 meters. In China, where population density is extremely high, efficient use of land is essential. The triangular construction site was used to the maximum: the skyscraper has a triangular base.
The architects' idea was to interweave motifs of Chinese dragons, the Yangtze River and green gardens. The river is the vertical and horizontal seams that separate the glass surfaces. These surfaces themselves, according to architectural thought, are a reference to dancing dragons. Vegetation and pools were placed inside the building.
View of the city from a spire on a skyscraper.
Petronas Towers
In the capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, skyscrapers called Petronas Towers were erected in 1998. The height of the two 88-story skyscrapers is 451 meters, including the spire.The skyscraper was built in the “Islamic” style; each building is an eight-pointed star with semicircular protrusions for stability. The construction site was changed after geological surveys. Initially, one skyscraper was supposed to stand on limestone, the other on rock, so one of the buildings could sag. The site was moved 60 meters. The foundation of the towers is the deepest concrete foundation at the moment: the piles are driven 100 meters into soft soil.
Construction was complicated by an important condition: only materials produced within the country could be used. Strong elastic concrete, reinforced with quartz and comparable in strength to steel, was developed especially for the building. The mass of the skyscraper was twice that of similar steel buildings.
The bridge between the twin towers is secured with ball bearings. Rigid fastening is impossible, as the towers sway.
The elevators in the building are two-story models designed by Otis. One cabin stops only on odd-numbered floors, the second - on even-numbered floors. This saved space inside skyscrapers.
International Commerce Center
The 118 floors of the Hong Kong International Commerce Center house offices, a hotel and shopping centers. The height of the building is 484 meters. Initially, they planned to build a skyscraper 574 meters high, but the project was changed due to a ban on the construction of buildings higher than Mount Victoria.Construction was completed in 2010, but there was no official opening: the building was already in full use by tenants. The 102nd to 118th floors are the highest above ground level hotel operated by the Ritz-Carlton. On the last, 118th floor, there is the world's highest swimming pool.
The building can withstand earthquakes up to magnitude seven and has fire-protected floors. After the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, the design of the building was modified so that it could withstand a direct hit from an airplane.
Thanks to its silhouette, the skyscraper received the name “opener”. The trapezoidal opening at the top was supposed to be spherical, but the Chinese government forced the design to be changed so that the building did not resemble the rising sun on the Japanese flag. Such changes made it possible to reduce the cost and simplify the design. This is how the upper part of the building was planned:
Here's what happened as a result:
Taipei 101
The capital of Taiwan, Taipei, boasts a skyscraper more than half a kilometer high. Together with the spire, the height of Taipei 101 is 509.2 meters, and the number of floors is 101.For some time, Taipei 101 was also distinguished by the fastest elevators in the world: they rise at a speed of more than 60 kilometers per hour, or 16.83 meters per second. People rise from the fifth to the eighty-ninth floor in 39 seconds. Now the new record belongs to the Shanghai Tower.
On the 87th and 88th floors there is a 660-ton steel pendulum ball. This architectural solution was made not only to decorate the interior. The pendulum allows the building to compensate for gusts of wind. The durable but not rigid steel frame can withstand the strongest earthquakes. These solutions, together with a foundation of piles one and a half meters in diameter driven 80 meters into the ground, made the building one of the safest in the world. On March 31, 2002, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake destroyed two cranes on the building, killing five people. There was no damage to the tower itself. But there is a theory that it was the skyscraper that activated the seismic activity.
Freedom Tower
World Trade Center 1 in Manhattan, New York, has surpassed its pursuer, Taipei 101, in terms of spire by 32 meters, although if we count the distance from the ground to the roof, the American Freedom Tower, on the contrary, is inferior to the Taiwanese tower by 37 meters. The height of the World Trade Center is 1 - 541.3 meters on the spire and 417 on the roof.The building stands on the site occupied by the twin towers of the World Trade Center, destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. When designing WTC1, past experience was taken into account, and the lower 57 meters were constructed using concrete instead of the standard steel structure.
The building officially opened on November 3, 2014. It is occupied by offices, retail spaces, restaurants and the City Television Alliance.
Royal Clock Tower
In Mecca in Saudi Arabia, in 2012, a complex of high-rise buildings, the Tower of the House, was built opposite the entrance to the al-Haram mosque, where the main shrine of Islam, the Kaaba, is located. The tallest building in the complex is the Royal Clock Tower Hotel, 601 meters high. It is designed to accommodate up to one hundred thousand pilgrims out of the five million people who visit Mecca annually. The Royal Clock Tower is the third tallest building in the world.On the tower at a height of 400 meters there are four dials with a diameter of 43 meters. They are visible from any part of the city. This is the highest altitude clock in the world at the moment.
The length of the spire at the top of the hotel is 45 meters. The spire contains 160 loudspeakers for the call to prayer. The 107-ton crescent at the very top of the building has several rooms, one of which is a prayer room.
The tower contains 21 thousand flashing lights and 2.2 million LEDs.
Shanghai Tower
The second tallest skyscraper is located in China. This is the Shanghai Tower, a 632-meter-tall building adjacent to another skyscraper on the list - the Shanghai World Financial Center. Offices, shopping and entertainment centers, and a hotel were located on 130 floors.The elevators in the building were developed by Mitsubishi Electric. Their speed is 18 meters per second, or 69 kilometers per hour. These are currently the fastest elevators in the world. There are three such elevators in the building, and four more two-story elevators reach a speed of 10 meters per second.
You shouldn't expect a beautiful view from the windows of a skyscraper. The building has double walls and has a second shell designed to maintain temperature.
The tower has a twisted design, which adds stability to combat wind.
From this angle, a spiral gutter is visible to collect rainwater used for heating and air conditioning.
Burj Khalifa
Opened in 2010 in Dubai, UAE, the Burj Khalifa tower has surpassed all existing skyscrapers and is still the leader in height.The tower was designed by the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, which created the Willis Tower and 1 World Trade Center, which we previously discussed. The construction of the Dubai Tower was carried out by Samsung, which also participated in the construction of the Petronas Towers. There are 57 elevators in the building, they must be used with transfers - only one service elevator can go up to the top floor.
The tower houses the Armani Hotel, designed by Giorgio Armani himself, apartments, offices, shopping centers, fitness centers and observation decks with Jacuzzis. Indian billionaire B.R. Shetty completely purchased two floors, including the hundredth, at a cost of more than 12 million US dollars each.
As with the Petronas Towers, the world's tallest skyscraper developed its own special type of concrete. It can withstand temperatures up to 48 degrees Celsius. During construction, concrete was laid at night, adding ice to the solution. The builders did not have the opportunity to secure the foundation in the rocky soil, and they used two hundred piles 45 meters long and 1.5 meters in diameter.
If the Shanghai Tower has a gutter to collect rainwater, then in the case of the Burj Khalifa Tower such an approach is not needed: there is little rainfall in the desert. Instead, the building has a condensate collection system that can collect up to 40 million liters of water per year for watering plants.
During the filming of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Tom Cruise decided to climb the tower to write Katie Holmes' name there and get a great shot.
Planned buildings
At the moment, there are only two building projects that can rank first in the ranking of the tallest skyscrapers in the world.At 828 meters high, the Burj Khalifa seems less impressive compared to the Dubai Creek Harbor Tower project. Its roof height will be 928 meters - that is, it will already beat the current record by 100 meters. And the height of the spire will exceed a kilometer - it will reach 1014 meters. But this is not certain - the parameters of the building are kept secret. Like the Eiffel Tower, the Dubai Creek Harbor Tower will be open for World Expo 2020 if all goes according to plan. The foundation was laid on October 10, 2016.
The Jeddah Tower, which was founded in 2013 and is planned to be completed by 2020, is also expected to cover a kilometer. At the 150-meter height of the tower there will be a terrace with a diameter of 30 meters. Construction is not going very quickly - on December 2, 2016, 47 floors were completed. The building will become the center of the new Kingdom Center business district, which is now a desert in Saudi Arabia.
