The new record holder for world's tallest skyscraper, the Burj Dubai, has cross the threshold of 1,680 feet tall. It surpasses the Taipei 101 at 1,667 feet, which was set in 2004. That's a pretty impressive feat, and the Burj Dubai was being built at a feverish pace - a floor every three days. However, that wasn't what caught my eye.
It was what buildings were left off the list of prior record holders:
"It's a fact of life that, at some point, someone else will build a taller building," he said. "There's a lot of talk of other tall buildings, but five years into Burj Dubai's construction, no one's started building them yet," he said.The World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan held the title of world's tallest building until the Sears Towers was constructed, and with the construction of the antenna on WTC 1, it retained tallest structure status in the US until an extension was built to the Sears Tower antenna in 2000.
Previous skyscraper record-holders include New York's Empire State Building at 1,250 feet; Shanghai's Jin Mao Building at 1,381 feet; Chicago's Sears Tower at 1,451 feet; and Malaysia's Petronas Towers at 1,483 feet.
The Burj will let the Middle East reclaim the world's tallest structure. Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza, built around 2500 B.C., held the title with its 481 feet until the Eiffel Tower in Paris was built in 1889 at a height of 985 feet, or 1,023 feet including the flag pole.
The company says the Burj will fulfill the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat's four criteria for the tallest building: the height of the structural top, the highest occupied floor, the roof's top, and the spire's tip, pinnacle, antenna, mast or flag pole.
The WTC towers were destroyed on 9/11 by Islamic terrorists. This went unmentioned in the story. Interesting. I guess the writers didn't want to draw the connection between one former record holder and the location of the new record holder - a country in the Middle East.
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