Man has always wanted to reach the sky. In the 20th century, this became truly possible when people were captured by the romantic idea of an attainable space. Ambition spilled over the edge in architecture: the birthplace of skyscrapers, America, showed how tall a building can be, and those who wish had the opportunity to settle at the height of the clouds. The idea of erecting skyscrapers is considered to be practical: after all, with a minimum amount of space, you can organize thousands of rooms on hundreds of floors.
But in recent years, experts have found more and more shortcomings in high-rise buildings, and even in Moscow there is talk that it is time to reduce the number of storeys even when building standard residential buildings.
But in the world (mainly in the UAE, China and the USA), giant trees continue to grow in the stone jungle. However, the Chicago-based International Council for High-Rise and Urban Environments (CTBUH) has drawn attention to an ambitious project that has not yet been implemented.
skyscraper Kingdom Tower, the construction of which is planned 32 km from the city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. The building, designed by Burj Khalifa architect Adrian Smith, is set to fly up to 1007 meters, becoming the tallest structure in the world. CTBUH was interested not so much in the boldness of the project, but in the fact that its upper part is a spire, created solely for the sake of achieving a record height. It is absolutely non-functional: it is the “height of vanity” - the distance from the highest functional level of a building to its highest point.
Among the completed projects, the first in terms of vanity was the Burj al-Arab hotel by the Atkins bureau, built back in 1999 in Dubai. CTBUH experts estimate that the exploited part of the building occupies only 61% of its entire height, and the remaining 39% is a spire, which gives the structure a similarity to the sail of a ship. And the idea was born: to create a rating of this kind of buildings with a height of more than 300 m on the basis of the Council's database and analyze how much effort and money is spent just to ensure that the next ambitious project is on the list of the tallest buildings on the planet, glorifying its customers.
Dubai's Burj Khalifa is not far behind: with a total height of 828 m, only the lower 585 m (71%) are exploited. If the spire of the Burj Khalifa were to be made into a separate building with a height of 244 meters in Europe, it would rank 11th among the tallest skyscrapers in this part of the world! And even if the Minsheng Bank Building in Wuhan in central China has a 94-meter spire free from any function, which is significantly lower than the "decorative" part of the Burj Khalifa, this still accounts for 28% of its total height, and such a considerable figure is average an indicator for all skyscrapers rating.
CTBUH also presented a graph that graphically shows the increase in the number of skyscrapers with "unnecessary height" from 1930 to 2010. Note that the already famous Manhattan Chrysler Building (1930) contained 21% "vanity" (67 m spire) of the total height.
The number of "spectacular" high-rise buildings increased sharply by 2010, and the UAE took the lead during this period, although China took the first place in the total number of such buildings: over the past 20 years, 24 such structures have been built there.
The period from 1950 to 1974 became the most exemplary in terms of the economical use of building material, when only 5 skyscrapers built during this time around the world had unoccupied spaces, and even those on average accounted for only 4% of the total height (however, one should not forget, that only buildings from the CTBUH database are taken into account, however, it is quite extensive).
One way or another, "superhigh-altitudes", flying up to the clouds by more than 300 m, cannot sacrifice their place in the list of the tallest buildings, obtained thanks to their "unnecessary" spiers. And among the buildings with a lower height, the most "vain" was the hotel "Ukraine" in Moscow (1957, the team of authors headed by A. G. Mordvinov), one of the seven high-rise buildings in the capital: 42% of its 206 meters are not used in any way. Although what is it in comparison with Iofanov's Palace of Soviets with a 100-meter statue of Lenin instead of a spire: this is where the real "height of vanity" is!
And yet it is impossible to imagine any of today's skyscrapers without "vain" spiers. Pointed ends make the building look harmonious, revealing tectonics - as has been the case since the days of Gothic cathedrals.
