Short Stuff: Jeddah Tower

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Hey, I'm welcome to the short stuff, Josh, Chuck,

Jerry, David Spirit, short stuff.

That's right.

And it's my cue.

This is about the Jetta Tower, J-E-D-D-A-H, thanks to architectural digest and CNN and

how stuff works for this stuff.

But this is the story of if it's finished, eventually will be at least for a while the tallest building

in the world.

Yeah.

It's going to make the Burj Khalifa look like poop.

So let's go back to 2008.

It was a billionaire investor named Prince, Eloid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.

And I think his goal was to make the Burj Khalifa look like poop.

He was like, I want to make one taller.

I want to build a city and around it called the Jetta Economic City, terrible name.

And basically they wanted to compete with Dubai but in Saudi Arabia.

Right.

Because Dubai is in the UAE.

He wanted to build the first skyscraper to reach over 3,280 feet or higher.

And for those of us in the United States and for our friends in Liberia, that is a kilometer.

So this would be the first kilometer high building, which is mind-bogglingly tall.

And he's doing it, baby.

In 2000, well, I guess they made it up to 2018, before, oh no, here.

I was in good feet.

Right, no, no, the year.

Yeah, that was a little confusing.

I'm sorry about that.

That's right.

Especially when you know the construction history of the tower.

But no, they made it up to 2018, the year, CE, I guess I should have said.

Before, they had to halt construction, thanks to a bunch of different stuff.

That's right.

You know, it's the way you said it.

When you said they went all the way up to 2018.

You know, brick by brick all the way to 2018.

Big year.

So yeah, construction pause in 2018.

We'll talk about why here in a minute and also COVID had a big dent in it.

The Burj Khalifa is the current tallest building at 27, 17 feet tall.

The year?

No, no.

If you're wondering about the eventual kilometer high building, the Jetta Tower,

if you remember our beloved twin towers here in the United States,

it'll be about twice the size of those, which is astonishing to think about.

Also, I mean, for a little closer to home, if you don't live in New York,

the average two story house is about 20 to 25 feet tall for comparison.

How many big Macs?

I looked and I was like, I'm not doing this.

Yeah, that's over.

It was designed both Burj Khalifa and the Jetta Tower by an American architect

named Adrian Smith.

Did not know that.

Yeah, and they're both, you know, it's not a copycat of the Burj Khalifa,

but it's definitely similar in structure because what Adrian Smith reckoned and figured out

was that making a building that tall as a triangle as a Y shape instead of a square,

instead of a box or a rectangle, is a lot safer for like, you know,

he did wind tunnel testing and stuff like that.

It was like, this thing is going to meet the wind in a safer way.

Yeah, it gets awfully windy the higher up you go.

And if you want to, if you're like wind cheering buildings, that sounds interesting.

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I forgot to carry the one.

Get everyone out of there.

They had to figure out how to shore it up before a hurricane hit.

That was like on its way, basically.

It's a really, really great article.

I guess at the time they would have brought in Bruce Willis to solve that problem.

That's right.

Yeah, man, I got to read that.

That sounds great.

It is so greatly suspenseful.

It's just a wonderful article.

One of the best ever.

Awesome.

So the Burj Khalifa, one of the differences is that one tapers

in different stages at different sections, but the Jetta Tower is sort of one big triangle.

It's going to be one continuously tapering tower and literally sort of piercing the clouds

at one point.

Yeah.

I saw that Adrian Smith was inspired by how Palm leaves stick up from the top of a tree

before the unfurl and bend over.

I looked at a picture.

I'm like, yep, that looks like the Jetta Tower.

Yeah.

Awesome.

So you want to take a little break and come back and talk about, I don't know, the Jetta

Tower or some more?

Yeah.

Let's do it.

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So, we're going to just give you a few nuts and bolts appropriately about the jet

of tower.

The big showstopper there will be the observation tower, open air observation tower, which

is terrifying.

It'll be a 2,187 feet.

They were going to have a helipad on it, or it was supposedly supposed to be a helipad,

I think.

Architects were like, he can't out here, and you can't land a helicopter on something

that high out here.

That's not a good idea.

So, we'll make it an observation deck, we'll just tell everybody to ignore the giant

h in the circle on the deck.

Yeah, exactly.

Stand in the center of that.

So, yeah, I mean, I don't like heights, but I would check that out if I ever found

myself in Jeddah.

Hmm.

Yeah, maybe.

By the way, Jeddah is actually already a town there on the Red Sea.

There was a guy who was interviewed in this house stuff works article, maybe architectural

digest, where he said, this is not a place where you would normally live, which I think

is kind of mean to people who live in Jeddah, but I get his point.

It's not like Jeddah economic city, but it's claimed to fame, as far as I know, is that

it is the tomb, it holds the tomb of Eve, Eve of Garden of Eden fame, and they think

that, yes, and they think that Jeddah is the, like, is a derivation of Jada, which means

grandmother.

Okay.

That's some raiders of the Lost Ark stuff right there.

Wow.

All right.

My mind is kind of blown.

Yeah, it blew mine too, and I just couldn't not share it.

All right.

This might blow your mind too.

The Jeddah tower, at least according to its original plans, who knows what's going to

end up happening, will have about 80,000 tons of steel, 59 ultra high speed elevators,

eight escalators, seven double decker elevators.

I think if you're going up to that observatory in Terrace, you're going to go at about 32 feet

per second, which is pretty fast, and it's the mixed-use space.

It's going to, the bottom third is going to be office space, it's going to be a luxury

hotel, and then the 167 highest floors, which sounds crazy to say, will be apartments, and

of course, I'm sure some very rich chic or somebody will own that pit house at the crown

of the whole thing.

Yeah.

I found some pictures, some renderings of it, and I'm like, meh, I mean, you could find

the exact same thing in Miami, or Rio, or it just looks like whatever.

Yeah.

I mean, the tower itself is going to be amazing, but yeah, it's just, you know, when you

have that much space and that much wealth, there's only so much you can do.

Yeah.

Agreed.

The original name was the Kingdom Tower, and they broke ground in April of 2013.

It took more than a year, just to lay the foundation.

And they have these concrete pilings, 10 feet in diameter, longer than a football field

that go down very, very, very deep into the earth.

And because of these delays, you know, they had to stop in 2017, when there was a political

crisis in Saudi Arabia that was a move to sort of consolidate power and crown prince Muhammad

bin Salman had a big anti-corruption purge where he arrested 11 Saudi princes, one of

which was the financial backer of the Jeditt Tower and some of the partners in the Saudi

bin Laden group.

So because of that, and COVID, it halted for a lot of years, and I think like five years,

I was watching this YouTube video where they basically said like, when that happens in

a place like this, like you usually tear it down and start over because, you know, sand

damage, salt damage, just corrosion to steel and corrosion to the concrete, probably makes

it very unsafe moving forward.

But apparently they had the foresight to install these underground sensors in those pilings,

and they could get readings that apparently said like, we're all good down here.

Yeah, that's, that's amazing.

That is some foresight.

Now, you were telling me about that and you hadn't got to the part where they had the sensors,

and I was like, please tell me that they are not just building on top of an unsafe structure,

or they're going to have to tear the whole thing down and start over.

But nope, you really came through with the great positive twist at the end.

Yeah, well, they eventually restarted after COVID, I think in 2023, September 2023 is when

they finally restarted. They said in 2023, it would be another four or five years,

but in 2025, just over a year ago, 60 of the 167 floors have been built,

and this year in January, they passed just recently the 80th floor mark.

Yeah, so they're almost halfway there.

There was, they're thinking that they might be done in the next couple of years.

Yeah, I don't know, but I mean, I did the YouTube video also said that they are going

at like a breakneck pace now.

Yeah, that's, you don't really want to do that when you're building the world's tallest building,

but you know, I agree.

Also, little fact, if you were like Prince Mohammed bin Solomon, he sounds kind of familiar.

Yeah, when he did that, that anti-corruption purge, that was the same time that he ordered

Jamal Kashoggi, the columnist and dissident murdered.

That's right, yet he was still welcomed into our White House.

So, you got anything else?

I have nothing else.

We'll see what happens with the Jedet Tower.

I mean, it looks like it'll be finished.

You know, I don't know about four or five years from 2023, but we'll see.

Yeah, and sorry to all the people who saw this, the short stuff title,

Jedet Tower, and we're like, they better not bring the White House into this.

Short stuff is out.

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