Short Stuff: Jeddah Tower

The Jeddah Tower is set to be the tallest building in the world. If it ever gets finished. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:10Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. Josh, Chuck, Jerry, Dave and Spirit, short stuff.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  That's right. That's my cue. This is about the Jeddah Tower, J E D D A H.

• 1:21Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Thanks to Architectural Digest and CNN and how stuff works for this stuff. But this is the story of if it's finished eventually will be at least for a while, the tallest building in the world.

• 1:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's going to make the Burj Khalifa look like poop.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  So let's go back to 2008. There was a billionaire investor named Prince Alaweed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. And I think he's, 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 and around it called the Jeddah Economic City. Terrible name.

• 2:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  And basically like they wanted to compete with Dubai, but in Saudi Arabia.

• 2:06Josh Clark?

  Right. Cause Dubai is in the UAE and he wanted to build the first skyscraper to reach over 3,280 feet.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15Josh Clark?

  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.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Oh, no, year. I was thinking feet.

• 2:40Josh Clark?

  Right. No, no, the, the, the year. Yeah, that's, that was a little confusing. I'm sorry about that.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:45Josh Clark?

  Especially when you know the construction history of the tower. But no, they made it up to 2018. The year.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53Josh Clark?

  CE, I guess I should have said. Before they had to halt construction thanks to a bunch of different stuff.

• 2:59Speaker 02

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

• 3:06Josh Clark?

  You know, brick by brick, all the way to 2018. The year.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:24Josh Clark?

  The year?

• 3:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:38Josh Clark?

  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.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  How many Big Macs?

• 3:49Josh Clark?

  I looked and I was like, I'm not doing this.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's over. It was designed, both Burj Khalifa and the Jeddah Tower by an American architect named Adrian Smith.

• 3:59Josh Clark?

  Did not know that.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  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 rectangle, is a lot safer for like, you know, he did wind tunnel testing and stuff like that. It was like, this thing is gonna meet the wind in a safer way.

• 4:30Josh Clark?

  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-Tory 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.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Get everyone out of there?

• 4:58Josh Clark?

  They had to figure out how to shore it up before a hurricane hit. That was like on its way, basically. It's a really, really great article.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  I guess at the time, they would have brought in Bruce Willis to solve that problem.

• 5:12Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, that, I gotta read that. That sounds great.

• 5:16Josh Clark?

  It is so greatly suspenseful. It's just a wonderful article, one of the best ever.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  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 gonna be one continuously tapering tower.

• 5:34Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  And literally sort of piercing the clouds at one point.

• 5:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I saw that Adrian Smith was inspired by how palm leaves stick up from the top of a tree before they unfurl.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 5:45Josh Clark?

  And bend over. And I looked at a picture. I'm like, yep, that looks like the Jeddah Tower.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, awesome.

• 5:52Josh Clark?

  So you wanna take a little break and come back and talk about, I don't know, the Jeddah Tower some more?

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's do it.

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• 8:19Speaker 02

  So we're gonna just give you a few nuts and bolts appropriately about the Jeddah 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 gonna have a helipad on it, or it was supposedly, supposed to be a helipad, I think, and architects were like, "You can't, out here, you can't land a helicopter on something that high out here. That's not a good idea."

• 8:48Josh Clark?

  So like, "We'll make it an observation deck. We'll just tell everybody to ignore the giant H in the circle on the deck."

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Stand in the center of that.

• 8:56Josh Clark?

  So, yeah, I mean, I don't like heights, but I would check that out if I ever found myself in Jeddah.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe.

• 9:05Josh Clark?

  By the way, Jeddah is actually already a town there on the Red Sea. There was a guy who was interviewed in this HowStuffWorks 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 its claim 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.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  What?

• 9:38Josh Clark?

  And they think that, yes, and they think that Jeddah is the, like, is a derivation of Jada, which means grandmother.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 9:48Josh Clark?

  That's some Raiders of the Lost Ark stuff, right there.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Wow. All right. My mind is kind of blown.

• 9:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it blew mine, too. I just couldn't not share it.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  All right. This might blow your mind, too. The Jeddah Tower, at least according to its original plans, who knows what's gonna end up happening, will have about 80,000 tons of steel, 59 ultra-high-speed elevators, eight escalators, seven double-decker elevators. I think if you're going up to that observatory in Terrace, you're gonna go at about 32 feet per second. Which is pretty fast and it's the mixed use space. It's gonna, the bottom third is gonna be office space. Uh, there's gonna be a luxury hotel and then the 167 highest floors, which sounds crazy to say, uh, will be apartments. And of course, um, I'm sure some very rich sheik or somebody will own that penthouse at the crown of the whole thing.

• 10:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I found some pictures, some, some renderings of it and I'm like meh. I mean, you could find the exact same thing in Miami or Rio or it just looks like whatever. It's, you know, I mean, the tower itself is gonna be amazing, but yeah, the, it's just, you know, when you have that much space and that much wealth, it's, there's only so much you can do.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, agreed. Uh, the original name was the Kingdom Tower and they broke ground in April of 2013. Uh, it took more than a year just to lay the foundation and they had these concrete pilings 10 feet in diameter, um, longer than a football field that go down very, very, very deep into the earth. And because of these delays, you know, they had to stop in 2017, um, when there was a political crisis in Saudi Arabia. There was a move to sort of consolidate power and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, uh, had a big anti-corruption purge where he arrested 11 Saudi princes, one of which was the financial backer of the Jeddah Tower, uh, and some of the partners in the Saudi bin Laden group. So because of

• 11:45Speaker 02

  that and COVID, it halted for a lot of years and I think like five years. And I was watching this YouTube video where they basically said like, when that happens in a place like this, like you usually tear it down and start over because, you know, sand damage, salt damage, just corrosion to steel and corrosion to the concrete, um, probably makes it, uh, very unsafe moving forward. But apparently they had the foresight to install these underground sensors in those pilings and they could get readings that apparently said like, we're all good down here.

• 12:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's amazing. That is some foresight. You were telling me about that and you hadn't got to the part where they had the sensors and I was like, please tell me that they are not just building on top of an unsafe structure, or they're gonna have to tear the whole thing down and start over. But nope, you really came through with the great positive twist at the end.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, they eventually restarted after COVID, I think in 2023. September 2023 is when they finally restarted. They said in 2023, it would be another four or five years. But in 2025, just over a year ago, 60 of the 167 floors have been built. And this year in January, they passed just recently the 80 floor mark.

• 13:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so they're almost halfway there. There is, they're thinking that they might be done in the next couple of years.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. But I mean, I did, the YouTube video also said that they are going at like breakneck pace now.

• 13:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's, you don't really want to do that when you're building the world's tallest building, but who knows?

• 13:21Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 13:23Josh Clark?

  Also, little fact, if you're like Prince Mohammed bin Salman, he sounds kind of familiar.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:28Josh Clark?

  When he did that, that anti-corruption purge, that was the same time that he ordered Jamal Khashoggi, the columnist and dissident murdered.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  That's right. Yet he was still welcomed into our White House.

• 13:42Josh Clark?

  So you got anything else?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  I have nothing else. We'll see what happens with the Jeddah Tower. I mean, it looks like it'll be finished. You know, I don't know about four or five years from 2023, but we'll see.

• 13:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And sorry to all the people who saw this, the short stuff title, Jeddah Tower, and were like, they better not bring the White House into this.

• 14:04Josh Clark?

  Short stuff is out.

• 14:08Speaker 00

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