
The Kingdom Tower to be built in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia will be 1,001 meters tall when completed in 2018. It will be the first building taller than 1-km and 173 meters taller than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the current tallest building in the world. NCE reports that Bauer has won the €25M (US$32M) foundation construction contract consisting of 270 drilled shafts of 1.5 or 1.8 m diameter and 110m in length. They also report that the original design was for a 1.6 km tall structure, but the geotechnical investigation found that the site would not support such a structure and the plans were scaled back to the current planned height. [Source: New Civil Engineer. Image: New Civil Engineer]