I asked William Baker, the SOM structure guru who figured out how to make the Burj Khalifa stay up, how he would respond if a hypothetical developer with limitless resources came to him and said: Okay, time to quit screwing around with ten stories there and 100 feet there. Let’s build the mile-high tower.
“Yup,” he answered. “Okay.” (Baker is from Missouri, and he is frugal with words.)
“How about a mile and a quarter?” I pressed.
“Yeah, we’d figure it out.”
And at what point do you stop being able to figure it out?
“I’m not sure. A mile would be twice the Burj. For now, let’s double what we have. Then we can figure out how to double it again.” So, two miles, then?
...1
- 1. At this point, the limiting factor is not the technology of vertical transportation, but the human body. A fast elevator can glide smoothly and silently into the skies, but if you’re riding it with a head cold, it will be murder on the sinuses. Nothing a Finnish engineer can do about that, except possibly pressurize the cab, though for now that remains a futuristic form of comfort. Human beings may never get used to the strangeness of seeking shelter above the clouds. ... Now that we see how tall tomorrow’s tallest buildings will be, and how common the runners-up, we must adapt again. We could protect certain view corridors, as London does, or limit the shadows a tower casts, or impose an automatic public review on any building over 1,000 feet. What we need is a new ethics of the skyline — a way to wrestle with the question posed by SOM’s Ken Lewis: “Whom does the sky belong to? Given the density we live in, and given that the sky provides daylight to all of us, does someone else have the right to take it?”