♪
Narrator: Like giant exclamation marks,
Skyscrapers punctuate the story of our urban development.
People always want to reach.
There's something heavenly about it.
And people have wanted to race for height forever.
Narrator: Developed by the pioneers of architecture
In the late 19th century...
They were, at the time,
The equivalent of our going to the moon.
Narrator: ...These magnificently designed tower giants
Urbanized some of the greatest cities in the world.
It's about defying gravity and leaving a sign of humanity.
Narrator: From chicago to london,
From tokyo to dubai,
Skyscrapers have and continue to define
Our contemporary way of life.
-- Captions by vitac -- www.Vitac.Com
Captions paid for by discovery communications
In past decades, the tallest buildings
Were designed to reflect a city's sense of place.
But today, a new breed has emerged across the globe,
Partially due to the evolution of the skyscraper's form
And advancements in modern technology.
If you predicted tall buildings
Of significant height and quantity
30 years ago,
You'd have said three things with certainty --
You'd say, "building will be in the usa,
It'll be an office building,
And it'll be built out of steel."
And now the exact opposite is true.
The chances are that the world's tallest buildings
Will be located in asia.
They will probably be mixed use
Or maybe even residential function
Rather than pure office.
And the chances are they'll be built out of concrete
Or composite construction.
And we see european cities
That already have a history of tall buildings
Making more and more new tall buildings
Like london or milan in Italy.
♪
Narrator: Experts predict that, by 2050,
More than 2/3 of the global population
Will live in cities.
So, we've seen a huge explosion of tall buildings
All around the world.
Dr. Marfella: It is a global building typology --
There's no question about it.
Narrator: From the far east to the wild west,
From the nordic north to the sunny south,
Urbanization is on the rise and skylines are rapidly changing.
♪
In australia, residents in larger cities
Are opting for a more affordable apartment-based lifestyle --
A surprising change in such a large country.
If we go back half a century,
Living in a high-rise near the city center
Was seen as -- as low-cost living
Or kind of social housing.
This has dramatically changed now.
Australia, like many countries,
Is experiencing a dramatic population boom.
So we are looking at mid-rise and high-rise residential
As an important part in a future city
To generate density -- to generate activity.
♪
Narrator: As people down under downsized,
Residential towers soared skyward
In the country's cultural capital, melbourne.
Dr. Marfella: It was the culture of a concrete tall building.
It is the city that developed the chamfer idea --
The self-climbing formwork.
Narrator: Upon its completion in 2006,
Eureka tower was the tallest residential building
In the world
With 556 apartments, a restaurant,
And state-of-the-art observation deck.
It was the first building that was so slender
To require a liquid-mass damper at the top
In order to stabilize it.
So there's the term --
"liquid damper" is usually with some liquid.
Maybe it could be a water tank
Or something like that -- okay? -- On the top,
So that, if there is a storm, high wind, or something,
The sloshing of the water back and forth
Cleared the same effect,
You know, when the building moves.
So when the building wants to go this way,
The big mass wants to hold back because of its inertia.
♪
Narrator: Measuring in at 975 feet tall,
Eureka became a hot spot
To take in an uninterrupted view of the city.
♪
Malott: There's this whole kind of, like, sub-design
Sort of industry of -- of taking older buildings
And redoing the viewing experience
To make it more thrilling.
Narrator: It's no longer enough
To dine in a revolving restaurant
Or view an expansive skyline through rooftop binoculars.
Today's buildings offer tourist attractions
And experiences of a lifetime.
♪
Dr. Ascher: Yeah, it makes a ton of money.
People will always pay,
Particularly when they're visiting a city
For the first time.
There's not much you have to do to maintain it.
The building's built.
All you have to do is run the elevator.
You know what I mean? It's a bit of a cash cow.
For whatever reason, the human brain is programmed
To enjoy looking out to wide-open vistas.
People love that feeling of being that tall,
And they like that feeling of being kind of scared, right?
Barr: I always think about, what would the world look like
If humans inherently had a fear of heights?
We could never have skyscrapers.
Narrator: Observation decks on skyscrapers
Have become an urban playground for adrenaline junkies,
And their stairwells...
A vertical racetrack
Where competitors always come out on top.
Man: Go!
[ air horn blows ]
Good luck.
♪
Narrator: There's no denying that,
With each passing decade,
Skyscrapers continue to evolve in function and form,
Yet there's a complicated relationship
Between the economy and the skyscraper industry.
[ indistinct conversations ]
This was never more evident than in 2008,
When a global financial crisis
Brought the tall-building industry to its knees.
And dubai was caught in the line of fire.
As the city-state's economy hit a wall,
Construction was stopped in its tracks.
It really affected dubai for about two or three years.
And it was -- it was pretty devastating.
There was a huge amount of rebuilding internally,
Economically, to see how that was going to go forward
In terms of how dubai was actually going to survive that.
Lavery: So we did see a kind of a -- not a pause,
But we saw a leveling out of what was being developed
For a number of years.
Narrator: State-led development, political stability,
And strategic marketing
Helped dubai turn its economic status around.
♪
But the same cannot be said
For other design projects under way in america --
Most notably, the chicago spire...
[ horns honking, siren wails ]
...Which had to abruptly stop construction
Due to a lack of cash flow.
♪
But there were a few success stories out of chicago
During the recession,
Including the lakeside stunner, aqua --
Architect jeanne gang's 82-story mixed-use vertical village.
[ horns honking ]
The aqua tower, designed by studio gang,
Is one of the most interesting tall buildings in chicago,
In my opinion.
From afar, it looks like a simple rectilinear box.
But as you get closer, you start to see
Where the innovation comes in the tower,
And that's with undulating balconies.
These seem random, but there's actually a lot of intelligence
Behind where these balconies protrude.
♪
Narrator: Its unconventional design wouldn't be possible
Without its creative use of modern technology.
A use of computer parametric modeling was used,
Such that the balconies are designed to protrude outwards
Where the views are greatest between buildings
As kind of strategic views
And are pulled in where there's no need for views
Or where there's no need for shading.
What you end up with is a complexity --
A parametric kind of topography on the building
That looks random.
It looks fascinating. It looks innovative.
But it really talks to its context in a --
In an abstract kind of way.
♪
Narrator: To comply with chicago's building code,
A quarter of the site needed to feature open green space.
But gang doubled that,
Convincing her corporate clients to put people before profit.
With the rise of residential buildings like the aqua tower,
It was becoming apparent that,
In order to stay in the skyscraper game,
Developers would not only need to cater to their investors,
But also to the needs of their potential new residents.
♪
Narrator: Across the world in the mid-2000s,
People began to give up their suburban homes
And move into the city.
[ indistinct conversations ]
Unfortunately, the change of scenery
Brought with it new environmental concerns.
Now more than ever,
People were beginning to question
Whether city living was worth putting their health at risk.
♪
What percentage of the world's population right now
Has died from chronic diseases?
About 75% of the world's population.
[ horns honking ]
What we need to do next
Is to improve on these tall buildings
To make the habitats better for humanity.
The health and wellbeing connection of people
With the skyscrapers are very important.
How do we make it better?
Part of that is integrating the anthropogenic environment
With nature
To create this habitat
Where humans and nature will thrive together
In an urban environment,
So we can live long and prosper.
Naz: The body changes -- goes through changes
Of breathing air, pollution, light.
So all our physiological and psychological experiences
Combines our experience of living in a skyscraper.
And the amount that we get from electric lighting by itself
Is not enough.
You have some architects who are keenly aware of that,
And they are designing buildings to facilitate
That contact between sunlight and the building occupants.
Morris: The drive from our perspective
Is to allow people the breathing space.
So in terms of external space, in terms of green space,
Which -- the pressure is on in terms of developers
To allow that to happen
Because the pressures of building high is immense.
Narrator: As a result,
Architects were creating skyscrapers
Which considered not just function and form,
But also environmental wellbeing.
But designing buildings that consider their surroundings
Isn't easy on the cheap.
In order to build smart,
You also need a lucrative budget.
[ siren wails, horns honking ]
Narrator: In 2008,
The financial crisis
Sent the global economy into a tailspin.
But while some countries were struggling,
Others were able to see themselves out of the darkness.
♪
China's growth slowed considerably,
But their economy remained stable,
Due in part to the countermeasures
Taken by its government.
♪
Barr: In the united states, the 1920 census showed that,
For the first time in american history,
Half the country lived in cities
And half the country lived in the rural areas.
[ horn honks ]
In a way, china is doing today
Something similar to what we did in the 1920s.
Narrator: Stimulus policies and packages
Were used to mitigate the impact of the crisis,
Ensuring stability in the tall-building sector.
All the major cities or developing cities in china
Are moving to the west.
And the city needs more modernization in the city
That will lead these new projects to be in their cities.
♪
Narrator: Amidst the chaos, shanghai emerged
As a global capital of commerce and culture,
Emphatically staking their claim
With the shanghai world financial center --
A 101-story monolith on century avenue in pudong.
[ wind rushing ]
Malott: The shanghai world financial center
Was designed at a time
There weren't many skyscrapers in shanghai,
Which was, you know, really only 20 years ago.
Narrator: Even with a clean slate to work from,
The design team was vigilant in ensuring
That their building would fit in.
Malott: Tall buildings should never be in isolation.
There must be a dialogue.
So in this case, the only thing we could speak to
Was this other structure,
Which is this pearl oriental tv tower,
Which sits on the river in shanghai.
You get the sphere of the pearl tower,
And then you get the shanghai financial center,
Which had an aperture at the top, which was a circle.
And the idea is you get solid, void --
Same geometry --
Looking directly at each other.
Then the city around it could kind of develop.
So it is a brilliant strategy -- absolutely brilliant.
Narrator: Brilliant, but not entirely sensitive
To local sentiment.
Because the developer of their project was japanese
And iconography is so important to the chinese,
They saw the circle as the symbol of the japanese flag.
♪
At a certain point, we realized
We just couldn't build that original design.
♪
Narrator: In an effort to mitigate the situation
And not draw the attention of the internet,
Developers decided it was better to play it safe than sorry.
Malott: This was a time
When the internet was coming online in china.
Here you get, you know, a communist country that is --
Its people are suddenly enabled by the internet
To voice their opinions.
In this case, the government, the developer, the architect
Had to respond to that voice.
♪
So bill decided to change the design
From the pure circle
To this current form, which sort of is a --
We call it an inverted trapezoid.
♪
That dialogue with the pearl tower's still there,
So you still get the idea that this building
Is looking somewhere, which I find fantastic.
Narrator: The building was named the best skyscraper of the year
By the council of tall buildings and urban habitat,
An international group of architects and engineers
Who praised the center not only for its simplicity of form,
But, also, its innovative structural design.
Steel trusses were used to counter
Typhoon winds and earthquakes,
While the columns of the megastructure
Were a mix of structural steel and reinforced concrete.
So, a composite building
Is one that incorporates structural steel and concrete
Into one structural member,
Whether it's a beam or a column.
And you get the benefits of one and the benefits of the other
Married together to give you, typically,
Smaller intrusions into floor plates.
Concrete is very good in compression.
Steel is very good both in compression and tension.
When you put these two together,
Then you can create structural members
That are very efficient
In terms of strength and in terms of stiffness.
Malott: The other great thing that
Shanghai financial center did
Was to create spaces in and around the void,
Which is a huge breakthrough.
So you sense this space, right?
You are in the building, and you see other parts of the building.
It triggered something in me to think
That the future of buildings has to be something
About creating and carving out, you know,
These spaces in the air,
So that we can see each other in and around this space, right?
So the building can become a community.
♪
Narrator: With more and more residential skyscrapers
Popping up in shanghai and across the globe,
The next challenge for designers
Was to bring a sense of community to their cities
By merging life and work into one building.
♪
Narrator: In the 21st century,
The desire for multifunctional living and working space
Has become a priority.
Ironically, these two concepts
Have not always been synonymous with city living.
The same could be said about new college campuses,
Known as "vertical universities" --
An emerging phenomena in overcrowded cities like tokyo.
Home to more than 35 million people,
The neon-lit capital of japan
Is one of the largest and busiest metropolises on earth.
Dr. Oldfield: When we think
Of colleges, universities, and schools,
We think of courtyards, quads.
These are typically outdoor spaces
Or large horizontal spaces.
♪
Narrator: The site for mode gakuen was anything but.
It's a 50-story university building
Where three different faculties
Are stacked up on top of each other.
You've got a technology college.
You've got a medical college.
And this is an outcome of tokyo's density.
We couldn't accommodate those buildings
In 5-story, in 10-story buildings.
It's inefficient.
So, in tokyo, we have to build up.
♪
Narrator: The design for the building
Was submitted via a competition.
The only condition --
The structure could not be rectangular.
The winning entry
Was that of a spectacular cocoon-shaped tower
Reaching 669 feet into the sky.
Dr. Oldfield: In mode gakuen, you have three classrooms
Orientated around a central core.
The space between those classrooms become mini-atriums,
And that is student lounges --
The place where students can do group work,
Where they can interact,
The learning landscape of the building.
As our cities are getting denser,
What we're going to find
Is traditional horizontal typologies in buildings --
Schools, colleges, and even farms and cemeteries
Are going to have to start going up
To be able to compete to stay in the city.
♪
Narrator: Of all the cities
Compelled to adopt this vertical lifestyle,
Few have done it with as much flair as singapore --
The little island that could.
[ horns honking ]
♪
Singapore has been doing for a decade or more now
What other cities are still dreaming about.
80% of people in singapore
Live in government-built high-rise housing,
Like marina bay sands,
Where you literally have a-couple-of-acre sky park
On top of these three towers.
Narrator: To create
This extraordinary tri-tower city within a city,
Architect moshe safdie had to invent a cityscape
That works on a human scale,
Despite its dimensions and price tag.
And the key to achieving that was connectivity.
♪
Inspired by the layout of great ancient cities,
Safdie's design reinvents the pedestrian walkway
As a center of civic life.
Antony: It's about bringing that ground floor
Up into the sky.
It's about creating urban habitat in the sky,
Not restricted by a single tower,
But, actually, the entire floor plate
Between 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 towers and in between.
Howeler: The idea of a series of tall buildings
Bound together by a podium structure
With a kind of connection to the eyeline --
A landscape terrace with a series of structures
Like the culture shed and the vessel
That are meant to sort of create a sense of urbanity,
Albeit at a higher level.
But they are really sort of not just these lone buildings --
They're actually starting to work together.
♪
Narrator: Since its humble beginnings in 1885,
Skyscraper typology has continually evolved
In form and in function.
Dr. Oldfield: The history of the skyscraper
Is all about the office building,
The place of work.
Increasingly, we're seeing
Our modern relationship with skyscrapers
Being about housing -- a place to live.
That's a big challenge.
The reasons that drive that single-family house
In the suburb --
Which are about the garden, the park, the community --
You can get that in a tall building.
And that's what we're getting in places like singapore.
Willis: Those things make sense for urban populations,
And the skyscraper is born of urbanity.
And that idea of urbanity can be claimed by the skyscraper.
Can we redefine and re-imagine
Our future cities' tallest skyscrapers
And think of them as microcosms of cities?
We need release from the pressure
Of being in a dense urban environment.
And we can put those spaces on the ground,
But there's no reason we can't put those spaces up in the air.
Dr. Oldfield: We're finding buildings around the world
That are incorporating sky gardens,
Play areas at height,
Gyms at height,
Running tracks linking buildings together at height.
All these things are happening now.
And for me, that's a huge part
Of the future of the tall building.
Howeler: It's self-contained,
But it's well-conceived as a kind of --
As a series of different uses that complement each other.
♪
Lavery: You get thriving areas
And, you know, the creation of parks and this kind of thing,
Which really does give that sense of place
And, you know, creates a kind of a mini-town or village
In its own right.
♪
Narrator: The success of high-density cities
Now and into the future
Depends largely on their liveability and sustainability.
♪
And an important component of this
Is easy access to public transportation.
And anyone that says that a tall building
Is a sustainable typology is mistaken.
They're not -- as a standalone building,
They are not more sustainable than a low-rise building.
Where they can be sustainable
Is when they make use of existing infrastructure.
♪
Hong kong does this really well.
♪
Howeler: I think we admire hong kong
Because of its density
But, also, its energy-efficiency.
It's the most fuel-efficient sort of city in the world
Because everyone takes the metro.
And so the kind of proximity
Of the skyscraper to the rail network
Enables that density to work without the congestion of cars.
Narrator: Connectivity was a major consideration
For the designers of the international commerce center,
The tallest building in hong kong.
The 118-story mixed-use tower
Rises above a cluster of similar,
Yet significantly smaller, structural giants,
Closing in on the retail and entertainment district
Of union square.
Watts: The nodes on the transport system --
That's where the dense development takes place.
And that's where the values are, as well.
♪
Narrator: In other words, the goal to a mixed-use space
Is to minimize your footprint and maximize both your structure
And your connectivity to the rest of the city.
Willis: Mass transit and walkable neighborhoods
And high degree of amenities
And open space for the sunshine --
These are the urban values that the skyscraper can facilitate.
Narrator: Though certain environmental and economic factors are key
To creating a quality high-rise,
Perhaps the most significant
Is the shape of the building itself --
Which, in turn, undeniably shapes our culture.
♪
Narrator: In the 21st century,
As the race for height continued,
Architects developed more innovative skyscrapers
Around the world.
The competition was fierce,
And many great nations stepped up to the plate
To influence form, function, and design.
But china decided to take a quantum leap sideways.
In response to several unique buildings
Created for the beijing olympics,
The cctv headquarters rose into being
Thanks to its creator, architect rem koolhaas.
Aminmansour: The cctv has a sort of a tube structure
That provides the superstructure for the building.
And there are vertical towers,
And there are horizontal parts of it.
Narrator: The building was undoubtedly on the mind
Of president xi jinping
When he called for an end
To his nation's passion for weird architecture.
♪
But others have praised the originality and functionality
Of koolhaas' remarkable design.
♪
If you go up and down, that's sort of not creative.
But if you sort of go up and over and come down,
And up and over, and you're continuously looping...
And winston churchill said, you know,
"first we shape the buildings,
And then the buildings shape us."
And so architects like to say that architecture
Has the capacity to sort of form society, to form culture,
To sort of shape individuals and the way they behave.
You are always shaping and changing peoples' experiences
When you're inside there,
Because you get to play with 3-dimensional space.
And so, as designers,
That's what we're really, really interested in.
♪
Narrator: The daring building
Is made up of two towers that lean in towards each other,
Connected at the top and bottom by sharply angled bridges.
Aminmansour: It would've been extremely difficult,
If not almost impossible,
To do a design of a structure like that years ago
Without the computer technology.
♪
Narrator: Computers are such an integral part
Of our everyday lives,
It's hard to imagine how we ever functioned without them.
They have completely revolutionized the workplace
And unleashed an unprecedented sense of freedom
Among those responsible for building toward the sky.
♪
Aminmansour: Computer technology also allows us
To generate architectural forms
That are very unique and very monumental, very artistic,
That we couldn't do before.
Lavery: We can very quickly define,
Very accurately,
Very complex shapes and forms.
And we can communicate them
Between the architect and the engineer.
30 years ago, extraordinary --
We were drawing with pens on mylar film.
10 years backward, we're doing 2-dimensional drawings
And measuring stuff.
Now everything is done in 3-d, so...
Aminmansour: The structural system,
The pipes -- all the pipes and ducts and wires
And everything else.
And where the doorframes are and where the walls are
And where the glass hits --
All of that now is done holistically.
♪
Brooker: Technology has changed how we design.
It's changed the pace that we design.
It's changed our ability to investigate design.
Morris: So in that regard,
We've kind of leapfrogged the stages that we had before
To develop things faster.
Now, unfortunately, you do things faster,
And then somebody else wants it even faster.
♪
Narrator: Nowhere was this acceleration
Of a building's timeframe more evident
Than in the design and construction
Of the world's supertalls.
And the global epicenter for this movement,
Despite the global financial crisis,
Was indisputably dubai.
♪
If you look again now, that rise that we saw before is back.
♪
Antony: And now that's kind of being driven
More by money and commerce,
And this belief cities need a skyline --
Need the world's tallest.
Dr. Campbell: They've deliberately built
The tallest buildings in the world
As an advertisement for how modern they are,
To show that they can.
Sinn: They started building the tall buildings,
And then people came.
And then they needed [chuckling] more tall buildings,
And it just keeps going and going and going.
♪
Narrator: With a rapidly growing population,
Cities like dubai were faced with an important question --
Could they keep up with the overwhelming demand
For more skyscrapers
Without compromising their structural integrity?
♪
Narrator: Although dubai surely had their eye on the sky,
It would soon become apparent
That the road to success would not be easy.
Morris: Where dubai was at that time,
In terms of this sort of the adrenaline rush
To advance the city itself,
That feeling and part of that drive and ambition
Was pretty phenomenal.
Narrator: The middle east is a field of dreams
For entrepreneurs, engineers, and architects alike,
All seduced by the provocative premise --
If you build it, they will come.
♪
If only the task itself was so simple.
♪
Baker: When you build a building on desert,
There's certain things you have to look out for.
One is that the concrete doesn't get too hot
Because when the concrete cures, it dries off a lot of heat.
They have a very, very good concrete technology system
In dubai.
And they put shaved ice instead of water into the concrete
When they mix it up in order to cool it down
So when it comes to the site, it's not too hot.
♪
Narrator: The bedrock in this part of the world
Is surprisingly solid,
But accessing it is often a challenge.
This is not the sand that we have on the beaches,
Which is nice and soft
And you can move around with your feet, you know.
The deeper you go, the more densely compact it becomes.
And at some point, through the geological process,
That sand becomes a rock.
The deeper you go, you actually get to a level
Where you get very appreciable stiffness in the ground.
Narrator: The climate is another factor
That needs careful consideration in the middle east --
How to block and harness energy from the sun.
Understanding how to work with sun,
Creating shade in the summer months,
Is very, very important,
'cause in dubai,
You can illuminate an office space
60% of the year with sunlight.
And the rest of the time, it might get too hot,
And that's when we need to shade down.
So it's understanding the dynamics of the sun.
Playing with the sun is very important.
Narrator: The final challenge
Is the ancient mariner's worst nightmare --
Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.
♪
Baker: The groundwater is very, very corrosive.
It has more salt than seawater,
And sulfates try to eat the concrete.
And so, because of that,
There's something called "cathodic protection."
♪
When metal rusts, it actually creates what's like a battery.
And so what we do is we use a sacrificial anode,
Which actually reverses the electronic flow of the battery
So that the rebar doesn't rust.
And so we have some sacrificial anodes buried out there
That can be changed out over time as necessary,
And then we waterproofed the raft or the mat at the bottom
So that the water couldn't even get to the surface.
♪
Wells: There's always a sort of precociousness
At the bleeding edge of design.
As the problems present themselves,
They are solved in a clever way.
We see the designs as a form of research,
So we'll do that building -- again,
That will evolve the idea for the next building.
And that's just practical.
Gravity doesn't change from one place to the next,
So why not build on what you've known?
Narrator: Prepared with a solution
For every conceivable problem at hand,
There was simply no holding the emirate back.
They plucked the coveted crown of world's tallest
From the top of taipei 101 --
Not by a mere foot or two, but by 1,053 feet.
♪
That's akin to flying the burj al arab
From the mast of taiwan's tower,
Using it as a symbolic white flag
To signal the ultimate surrender.
Antony: The burj khalifa came along,
And it just took every record and title to the nth degree.
Narrator: Even with a myriad of obstacles to overcome,
Dubai had their sights set on reaching unimaginable heights.
♪
Narrator: Just years after a near-catastrophic market plunge,
Dubai was ready to prove once and for all
That they had what it takes to lead the race to the sky.
And once completed, the megatall burj khalifa
Helped them do just that.
It took the world's most experienced team
To build the world's tallest structure,
Led by architectural firm skidmore, owings & merrill
And their structural and civil engineering partner,
William baker.
We'd won the competition with an idea
Kind of based on tower palace 3,
But I wanted to immediately go into the wind tunnel
To see how it behaved.
And the data came back, and it behaved very badly.
As an engineer -- you know, or anyone in life --
When things go bad,
The one thing to do is not panic.
To make the burj khalifa,
We actually had to invent a new structural system.
We called it a buttressed core.
So, to keep the building twisting,
You want to make an axle in it, something of a torsion box.
And so the concrete walls
Around the central elevators and stairs
Forms this axle that goes all the way up the building
And keeps the building very stiff so it doesn't twist.
But in itself, it's too slender to go such great heights.
So down each of the wings,
We have a series of walls going down the corridor,
Then cross-walls like the flanges of an I-beam
Between demising walls between the units
So that they buttress the central core.
So we call it a buttressed core --
The core, which takes care of the twists
And the central axle of the building,
And then the buttresses, the three buttresses,
That keep it from moving,
Just like the buttresses of a cathedral.
♪
Reaching out is key to providing more stability for the building,
And so those buttresses support the core up to a certain height
And give it more strength and stability that you need.
♪
Narrator: Gone were the days when a building was made taller
By the addition of a few stories.
This was the architectural equivalent of going to the moon.
And making such a giant leap forward
Required a complete rethink
At every stage in the tall-building process.
Baker: Because the building was so tall,
You actually go through different climates.
Because the building was under construction,
We would go up on the outside of the building.
And when you got up to 160 floors,
The temperature would drop, the humidity would drop,
The air would be more clear, there'd be a nice breeze,
And you actually go through a climate change.
Narrator: The burj khalifa cleverly draws in
The cooler, less-humid air at high altitude
Through the top of the structure
To ventilate the whole building.
It also features
One of the largest condensation-recovery systems
In the world.
♪
And on certain days, under certain conditions,
It casts a shadow on top of the clouds.
[ wind rushing ]
♪
Howeler: It's a hybrid building.
You know, it's not an office building
Or residential building.
It's the tallest office building in the world
With the tallest residential building in the world
With a mosque.
So, you stack those things up,
And you get something quite remarkable.
Michael: You start realizing what a megatall is
And just how substantially larger that is,
That it's almost two willis towers
Stacked on top of each other.
So, the idea that we have come so far, so fast
Is really interesting.
♪
Howeler: It's entirely aspirational.
You know, that is a project that was really sort of saying,
"we want to make a mark here.
We want to differentiate ourselves.
We want to claim a certain title."
Narrator: When the burj khalifa opened in 2010,
Dubai was in the middle of a real-estate slump.
Its once-bustling luxury apartments and offices
Lay empty,
Leaving many to think that dubai had overreached,
That its vision for a high-rise, high-profile future
Would fade like a desert mirage,
Bringing an end to their participation
In the race to the sky.
♪
Wells: One of my favorite phrases is,
"evolution's not going anywhere, and it's never gonna get there."
That's where there's a sort of aspiration
To have a bigger building than the family member down the road.
And that just goes on and on, but it doesn't go anywhere.
Dr. Ascher: You get very caught up in this idea
Of the biggest, the tallest, the fastest, the first
Without necessarily really asking why.
Great freedom brings with it
Really incredible responsibility.
And sometimes, when there are no questions around,
You can do whatever you like.
Howeler: If you look at some of the architecture
In the middle east,
It seems like there weren't enough constraints,
That there was just so much of a kind of exuberant desire
For expression.
Watts: I think what they lacked was a strategic plan,
So you would get tall buildings just being developed
By different developers in different parts of town
Without a strategic plan for how those tall buildings
Fitted into the whole real estate of the region.
Dr. Oldfield: So, we're building icons before infrastructure.
That's not a very sustainable way
Of constructing our future cities.
Narrator: Building castles in the sky is achievable
As long as you can, metaphorically,
Retrofit their foundations.
♪
Once the middle east learned from the disaster it averted,
It was set to emerge even stronger
And with a better understanding of what it takes
For tall buildings to become truly iconic.
"iconic" is a kind of overused word.
And in a way, one runs a mile from it,
Because, if anybody starts off with the idea,
"we're going to do something iconic," you're dead.
Brooker: Everybody's got to aspire
To making a great building.
I mean, that's self-evident.
You've got to do the very best building that you can.
But to make it iconic, that's for the public.
They're the ones who decide if those buildings are important,
If they make the right impression.
And if those forces then generate something
Which becomes, in a way, symbolic of a place
And somehow kindles something in a lay reaction --
Somebody walking along the street and saying,
"that's different -- I like that" --
Then somehow this gets transmitted along
To become iconic.
Brooker: If you get all of those things right --
Not just some of them --
If you have all of them right,
Then a building can become iconic.
Then it will be loved, and then it will become iconic.
♪