Short Stuff: Jeddah Tower

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1:19Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. Josh, Chuck, Jerry, Dave, and Spirit. Short Stuff.

1:25Josh Clark:That's right. That's my cue. This is about the Jeddah Tower, J-E-D-D-A-H. Thanks to Architectural Digest and CNN and HowStuffWorks for this stuff. But this is the story of, if it's finished, eventually, we'll be, at least for a while, the tallest building in the world.

1:44Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it's going to make the Burj Khalifa look like poop.

1:50Josh Clark:So let's go back to 2008. There was a billionaire investor named Prince Alawid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. And I think his goal was to make the Burj Khalifa look like poop. He was like, I want to make one taller. I want to build a city around it called the Jeddah Economic City. Terrible name. And basically, like, they wanted to compete with Dubai, but in Saudi Arabia.

2:15Chuck Bryant:Right. because Dubai is in the UAE. And he wanted to build the first skyscraper to reach over 3 ,280 feet or higher. And for those of us in the United States and for our friends in Liberia, that is a kilometer. So this would be the first kilometer high building, which is mind-bogglingly tall. And he's doing it, baby. In 2000, well, I guess they made it up to 2018 before.

2:45Josh Clark:Oh, no. Year. I was thinking feet.

2:49Chuck Bryant:Right. No, no. The year. Yeah, that was a little confusing. I'm sorry about that. That's right. Especially when you know the construction history of the tower. But no, they made it up to 2018, the year. CE, I guess I should have said. Before they had to halt construction, thanks to a bunch of different stuff.

3:08Josh Clark:That's right. You know, it's the way you said it when you said they went all the way up to 2018.

3:14Chuck Bryant:You know, brick by brick all the way to 2018.

3:18Josh Clark:Big year. So yeah, construction pause in 2018. We'll talk about why here in a minute. And also COVID had a big dent in it. The Burj Khalifa is the current tallest building at 2717 feet tall. The year? Oh, no. If you're wondering about the eventual kilometer high building, the Jeddah Tower, if you remember our beloved Twin Towers here in the United States. It'll be about twice the size of those, which is astonishing to think about.

3:48Chuck Bryant:Also, I mean, for a little closer to home, if you don't live in New York, the average two-story house is about 20 to 25 feet tall for comparison.

3:56Josh Clark:How many Big Macs?

3:58Chuck Bryant:I looked and I was like, I'm not doing this.

4:00Josh Clark:Yeah, that's over. It was designed, both Burj Khalifa and the Jeddah Tower, by an American architect named Adrian Smith. Did not know that. Yeah, and they're both, you know, it's not a copycat of the Burj Khalifa, but it's definitely similar in structure because what Adrian Smith reckoned and figured out was that making a building that tall as a triangle, as a Y shape instead of a square, instead of a box or a rectangle, is a lot safer for like, you know, he did wind tunnel testing and stuff like that. It was like this thing is going to meet the wind in a safer way.

4:39Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it gets awfully windy the higher up you go. And if you want to, if you're like wind cheering buildings, that sounds interesting. I could not recommend more. A 1995 New Yorker article called the 59 story crisis about when the Citibank, I've talked about it before. I don't know when. But when the Citibank building in the 70s was built and occupied and the engineer architect figured out like, oh, God, like basically I forgot to carry the one. Get everyone out of there. They had to figure out how to shore it up before a hurricane hit. Oh, geez. That was like on its way, basically. It's a really, really great article.

5:17Josh Clark:I guess at the time they would have brought in Bruce Willis to solve that problem. That's right. Yeah, man, I got to read that. That sounds great.

5:25Chuck Bryant:It is so greatly suspenseful. It's just a wonderful article. One of the best ever.

5:30Josh Clark:Awesome. So the Burj Khalifa, one of the differences is that one tapers in different stages at different sections. But the Jeddah Tower is sort of one big triangle. It's going to be one continuously tapering tower.

5:43Chuck Bryant:Right.

5:43Josh Clark:And literally sort of piercing the clouds at one point.

5:47Chuck Bryant:Yeah. I saw that Adrian Smith was inspired by how palm leaves stick up from the top of a tree before they unfurl. Cool. And bend over. And I looked at a picture. I'm like, yep, that looks like the Jetta Tower. Yeah. Awesome. So you want to take a little break and come back and talk about, I don't know, the Jetta Tower some more?

6:06Josh Clark:Yeah, let's do it.

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8:39Josh Clark:So we're going to just give you a few nuts and bolts appropriately about the Jetta Tower. The big showstopper there will be the observation tower, open air observation tower, which is terrifying. It'll be at 2 ,187 feet. They were going to have a helipad on it, or it was supposed to be a helipad, I think. And architects were like, you can't land a helicopter on something that high out here. That's not a good idea.

9:08Chuck Bryant:So we'll make it an observation deck. We'll just tell everybody to ignore the giant H in the circle on the deck. Yeah, exactly. Stand in the center of that. So, yeah, I mean, I don't like heights, but I would check that out if I ever found myself in Jeddah.

9:23Josh Clark:Yeah, maybe.

9:26Chuck Bryant:By the way, Jeddah is actually already a town there on the Red Sea. There was a guy who was interviewed in this How Stuff Works article, maybe Architectural Digest, where he said, like, this is not a place where you would normally live, which I think is kind of mean to people who live in Jeddah. But I get his point. It's not like Jeddah Economic City, but it's claimed to fame, as far as I know, is that it is the tomb. It holds the tomb of Eve, Eve of Garden of Eden fame. And they think that, yes. And they think that Jeddah is the, is a derivation of Jada, which means grandmother. Okay. That's some Raiders of the Lost Ark stuff right there.

10:11Josh Clark:Wow. Wow. All right. My mind is kind of blown.

10:16Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it blew mine, too. I just could not share it.