Designing Megatalls
October28
The 828-meter (2,717 ft) high Burj Khalifa has reigned over Dubai’s skyline and architecture’s collective conscious. It didn’t just break the record; 62% taller than its predecessor, Taipei 101, it obliterated it. Its legacy has been remarkable — and remarkably useful to the man who designed it.Adrian Smith conceived the Burj Khalifa as an architect at Skidmore, Owings and Merill (SOM), but by the time the tower opened in 2010 he had started a firm of his own, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, alongside Gill and Robert Forest. Known as AS+GG, the company specializes in designing supertall and megatall skyscrapers — buildings at least 300 meters and 600 meters respectively.
Supertalls are still relatively rare, with just 173 completed worldwide, and megatalls exceedingly so, with only three currently standing, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH).
For the past 15 years, AS+GG has crafted a portfolio of skyscrapers spanning Asia, North America, Europe and the Middle East. These designs have now been compiled into a new book called “Supertall | Megatall: How High Can We Go?”
One of the longest entries in the book is dedicated to the innovations packed within the tower’s design, from extensive wind testing with a 1:4,000 scale model, to strategies for mitigating solar radiation, to a condensate-recovery system with the ability to collect 14 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water from the building every year.But “Supertall | Megatall” also points out that the Jeddah Tower’s structural system built on and refined that of the Burj Khalifa, with a three-winged, Y-shaped design for maximum stability — seen in earlier designs like WZMH Architects’CN Tower in Toronto. Smith also said that the Burj Khalifa and the Jeddah Tower were inspired by the sharp, fully glazed Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper, an unbuilt design from the 1920s by German American Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. [read the full article from CNN here]
