The incredibly ambitious Jeddah Tower is currently under construction in Saudi Arabia. Due to be the world's new tallest building once complete, it has already made it into the top 15 tallest buildings worldwide – and it's still less than halfway to its final height.
The Jeddah Tower (aka JEC Tower and Kingdom Tower) is designed by skyscraper specialist AS+GG – i.e. Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill, with Smith responsible for the design of the world's current tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, when he was at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
To put the scale of this mind-bogglingly huge project into perspective, the Jeddah Tower is already a supertall skyscraper. As of writing, it now consists of 118 floors and sits at 474 m (1,555 ft) in height, narrowly surpassing the USA's second-tallest skyscraper, New York City's Central Park Tower, also by AS+GG. However, the finished building will eventually rise more than twice as high. Though its final exact height hasn't yet been revealed, we do know that it will exceed 1,000 m (3,281 ft), easily eclipsing the Burj Khalifa and bringing it to about twice the height of the USA's tallest building, the One World Trade Center.
Inside, a collection of 59 elevators will zoom people around at high speeds, allowing them to navigate between a luxury hotel, lots of office space, and multiple palatial apartments, along with numerous tourist facilities, including the world's highest observation point.
The Jeddah Tower will anchor a new urban development in the Saudi port city of the same name. It's being developed by Kingdom Holding, and construction originally started back in 2013. However, work stalled at the 60th floor and was paused for several years, with multiple reports naming palace intrigues and purges by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the cause for the delay.
Now that it's back under construction, the skyscraper is poised to be a remarkable success story for Saudi Arabia, thriving at a time when several of the country's other ambitious "gigaprojects" – like the Mukaab and the Line – have fallen by the wayside. Completion is still due for late 2028.
Sources: AS+GG, Ian Norman Miller, Thornton Tomasetti
