When did building the next tallest building on Earth become such a big deal any way? What you're looking at here is the proposed 3,280 foot "Kingdom Tower" which is will be located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.



As you can probably imagine, there are plenty of technical challenges involved that turn this into an complete failure. Tests on the materials needed to build the tower estimate that it will involve half a million cubic meters of concrete and around 80,000 tons of steel. The tower's foundation will have to be 200 feet deep, and will also have to withstand all the salt water of the nearby ocean.



So how exactly do these engineers intend to pump all that wet concrete more than half a mile into the sky? This process involves selecting several different high-performance concretes that will set withing the steel frame. Building crews will have to pump millions of tons of concrete through a thin, pressurized tube from above into each successive floor.



They'll also likely be following in the footsteps on how the Burj Khalifa was built. Back then, a Samsung-led engineering team was able to pump almost six million cubic feet of concrete through a single tube with a little help from high-tech pumps developed by the German company Putzmeister. As if that wasn't complex enough, the workers could only pour new floors at night, as the temperatures during the day made it impossible to set properly.



With so many obstacles, we wouldn't be surprised if the Kingdom Tower remains nothing more than an architect's pipe dream.

[Saudi Gazette]