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Tuesday 5 January 2010

RECLAIMING THE TOWER OF BABEL: BUILDINGS MARCH TOWARDS THE SKY

Jane Jetson told her husband as he prepared to go to work, 'On your way out darling, can you please tell the building's caretaker to fix the weather.'

However was that going to be possible? I wondered aloud. But after getting the request, the building caretaker pushed some buttons and the futuristic apartment block was elevated further up into the sky.

This made the Jetsons' apartment to rise above the dark clouds causing all the rain and into some bright sunshine. Even if nothing seems impossible in the world of cartoons, this was overstretching the imagination.

Man's obsession with tall structures according to the Holy Bible, can be traced as far back as the Genesis days, when the Lord thwarted attempts to build into the sky at Babel, by making the people to speak in different languages, hence sabotaging their communication.

But hundreds of centuries later, human kind was to later conquer the skies with buildings search as the Eiffel Tower, Empire State BuildingSears TowersPetronas Twin Towers or the Taipei 101.

Modern day height- defying buildings

Some of these architectural marvels stretched more than 500m into the sky. And now comes another monster project that literally dwarfs all the tallest skyscrapers.


Al Jazeera story of the Burji Dubai just before it was officially unveiled

The Burji Dubai complex, which has just been commissioned and renamed Burji Khalifa, rises an astonishing 828m into the sky, almost a kilometre high and despite the language barriers of the immigrant workers co-opted into the project.

So once more the bar has been raised and already there are talks of other structures that could even eclipse this landmark landmark.

The grandest of these apparently is toying with the idea of a mega skyscraper stretching some 2.4 kilometres towards the stratosphere.

For how much longer is the sky going to be the limit?

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