BILLION DOLLAR BANDU
War, famine, genocide, disease, poverty, climate change, how do we solve all the worlds problems? How about a Mega Scraper costing approximately 1.2 billion dollars built near the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia and over a half-mile high? Hell yes, who’s up for base-jumping?!
I’m so excited, I’m ready to break out the Legos and have a party in my living room. Every technologically or architecturally savvy society since the beginning of time has attempted to prove their superiority through either massive armies or massive buildings and since The United States and most other first world countries have both, the Saudi’s are once again tossing their “hats” into the ring on at least one of those options. If you have never heard of the Burj Khalifa or have yet to see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, the Burj Khalifa located in Dubai is currently the world’s tallest building coming in at a neck-straining 2,716 feet tall with about 162 floors. So if you fell off the top of the building, you would have time to write a poem, smoke a cigarette, and then use the cigarette to light your poem on fire, and then smoke it, before inevitably chest bumping the concrete.
Now in what can be likened to a pissing contest between Ron Jeremy and Tommy Lee, another set of investors are about to break ground in the city of Jeddah overlooking the Red Sea. Still in the planning stages, the Kingdom Tower is proposed to be around 3,200 feet tall with an estimated fifty more floors than the Burj Khalifa, making the recently completed Freedom Tower in lower Manhattan seem like the pudd of four year old fleeing the cold pool water for his beach towel.
As usual, the plans for another giant scraper have not been without plenty of criticism and doubt, financially and architecturally as it seems easier for people to take a negative approach rather than be excited for those who continuously push the boundaries of what can be achieved in defiance of gravity. Like comedy, I enjoy taking calculated risks, and if I had around a billion dollars floating around, whether it came from crude oil or olive oil, I wouldn’t be opposed to designing a building, ship, or car so big that it lands a cameo in a major motion picture. I’m a dreamer and therefore I support this project for its plausible success as a testament to human ingenuity, rather than hope for its failure.
I remember being a little guy lying down in a grassy area where I could just barely see the top of the late World Trade Center. Now as far as building architecture, Towers A & B were the ugliest pieces of crap to ever grace a skyline, but it was like having twin sisters that grew from the ugly tree. They may not have landed all the boys in school, at least not the cute ones, but they were our sisters and we loved them anyway. They always stood together as if they looked after each other. So the threat of some ass-clown planning chaos and logging a little time on Microsoft Flight Simulator is still very real and shouldn’t be ignored, however it didn’t prevent New York from building the Freedom Tower (which is basically a giant middle finger to the terrorists) where our twin sisters lie. So if the United Arab Emirates and other financial partners choose to spend their oil money and erect a couple more super towers in the middle of the desert as a sign of strength, they certainly don’t need my approval, but they have it any way. I applaud the achievements that are the Freedom Tower, the Burj Khalifa, the Patronas Towers, Taipei 101, Empire State Building and the soon to be Kingdom Tower. I hope to visit them sometime soon and drop a little first world currency just so I can have a view of Tom Cruise ascending from the outside and if he deems me cool enough, fire me an action-hero like thumbs up.
Hey, it’s my fantasy; I don’t see Salma Hayek out there pressing her cleavage against the glass, so I’ll go with the next best thing.