The gold-colored, 730-ton orb swings gently back and forth, balancing the tower against the forces of the wind and ensuring the comfort of its occupants. Inside, between the 88 th and 92 nd stories, a giant pendulum, known as a tuned mass damper, does quiet battle with deadly windstorms and typhoons. 4 Over four thousand miles away near the coast of Taiwan, stands the Taipei 101 tower, now a distant second at 1,667 feet. The Burj Khalifa’s talent for “confusing the wind,” as chief structural engineer Bill Baker calls it, is just one of the methods used to help supertalls resist wind stress. Even with this strategic design, the 206-story Burj Khalifa will still sway slowly back and forth by about 2 meters at the very top. This somewhat odd-looking design deflects the wind around the structure and prevents it from forming organized whirlpools of air current, or vortices, that would rock the tower from side to side and could even damage the building. The building rises to the heavens in several separate stalks, which top out unevenly around the central spire.
![the life supertall tower creaks breaks the life supertall tower creaks breaks](https://i.imgur.com/SULkJiC.jpg)
The Burj Khalifa is specially designed to conquer the wind, a goal that becomes more and more important as altitude increases. (The Burj is about as tall as the Taipei 101 with the Chrysler building stacked on top.) Over half a mile from the base to the tip of its spire, the tower redefines the term “supertall,” a name often applied to skyscrapers over 1,000 feet. The tower, which opened on January 4th, became the world’s tallest building, outdoing the previous record-holder, the Taipei 101, by a staggering 1,046 feet. 3 Today, wind engineering is an integral aspect in the design of any new tall building, especially the very tallest of them all: the Burj Khalifa.Īt 2,717 feet, the Burj Khalifa, formerly known as the Burj Dubai, rises like a bolt of lightening into the sky, dwarfing the surrounding skyscrapers. Since the 10-story steel-frame Home Insurance Building, the world’s first skyscraper, opened in Chicago in 1885, architects have had to think about wind stress, or “wind loading,” as they’ve built higher and higher.
![the life supertall tower creaks breaks the life supertall tower creaks breaks](https://michaelsavage.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-03-at-5.42.20-PM-1.png)
From the disconcerting to the dangerous, wind has always been an important consideration when constructing skyscrapers.