Jeddah Tower passes 470 m on its way to over 1,000 m

What happened

Jeddah Tower stands in Jeddah, a port city on Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast. According to New Atlas, it has climbed to about 474 m with 118 floors built, just passing New York's Central Park Tower. The architects are Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill, whose firm also designed Central Park Tower. Adrian Smith designed Dubai's 828 m Burj Khalifa, the current tallest building, while working at another firm. The developer is linked to Kingdom Holding.

The tower has had a long and uneven history. Construction began in 2013. Work on the concrete structure stopped in early 2018 at about the 63rd floor, and the site stayed quiet for several years. New Atlas mentions reports that political events in Saudi Arabia lay behind the delay. Construction officially restarted in January 2025, and the tower has risen quickly since then.

Progress through 2026 has been steady. In April, the structural engineer Thornton Tomasetti said the tower had passed 100 floors and about 400 m. By early October, New Atlas reported 474 m and 118 floors. The final height has not been announced and will only be revealed on completion. New Atlas says the finished tower will have 59 lifts, a luxury hotel, offices, apartments and the world's highest observation point.

The numbers give a sense of scale. At more than 1,000 m, the finished tower would be well above the Burj Khalifa and, New Atlas notes, about twice the height of One World Trade Center in New York. Wikipedia lists the planned observatory at about 630 m. The original construction contract, signed in 2011 with Saudi Binladin Group, was worth about 4.6 billion Saudi riyals, or roughly 1.23 billion US dollars, according to the same source.

The engineering behind it

The structure is unusual. Thornton Tomasetti says the tower has no columns, outriggers, floor beams, spandrel beams or vertical transfers. Instead, it uses a system of reinforced concrete walls that are all connected to each other. Each wall carries both gravity loads and wind loads. The plan has three legs, and the building tapers steadily as it rises. A three-legged plan is a common shape for very tall towers because it is stiff in every direction.

Wind is often the controlling load on a supertall building. As wind flows past a tall tower, it can create swirling vortices that shed from alternate sides and make the building sway. Tapering the shape and changing the plan with height helps break up these vortices. Thornton Tomasetti says it worked with the wind consultancy RWDI on extensive wind tunnel tests and computer modelling, which confirmed the structure's performance under wind. This explanation of vortices is general engineering knowledge.

The foundation is a piled raft. According to Thornton Tomasetti, a raft 5 m thick sits on 270 bored piles, each 1.8 m in diameter, reaching depths of up to 105 m. In a piled raft, the thick concrete slab and the piles share the load. Long piles reduce how much the building settles, which matters when the load is enormous and when settlement must be even across the base. This general principle explains why the deepest piles sit where loads are highest.

Building upward also means moving concrete very high. Every floor of wall must be poured in place, and the concrete has to be pumped up through pipes from the ground. As the tower rises, pumping pressure grows and the mix must stay workable long enough to be placed. Concrete strength, setting time and pumpability all have to be balanced. These are general challenges of tall concrete construction rather than reported details of this project.

What it means in Nepal

The sources do not discuss Nepal, so this section is about the engineering skills involved. A building like Jeddah Tower is an extreme case, but it uses the same basic ideas that apply to ordinary buildings. Loads go down through walls and into foundations. Wind and earthquake forces push sideways and must be resisted. Concrete has to be designed, placed and cured properly. Learning these basics well is the starting point for any structural engineer.

The tower also shows how many specialists are needed on one structure. New Atlas and Thornton Tomasetti name architects, a structural engineer, a geotechnical engineer, a wind engineering firm, design consultants and several contractors. Each brings a narrow but deep skill. Students who enjoy structures may later focus on one of these areas, such as foundations, wind or concrete, and work as part of a large team.

A third point is that big projects can stop and start. Work at Jeddah paused around the 63rd floor in 2018 and did not officially restart until January 2025. Schedules on large projects depend on money, politics and decisions far from the site. Engineers must plan for interruptions, protect partly built work while it waits, and check its condition carefully before building on top of it again. Restarting a tall structure safely after years of exposure is a technical task in its own right.