Its spire pierces the clouds, and its floors disappear into the sky, like steps to space.
The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is not just a building, but a monument to human audacity.
At 828 metres high, it is three times taller than the Eiffel Tower and 200 metres taller than New York's skyscrapers.
But behind the numbers lies an engineering madness that still baffles architects.
The construction of the giant required 330 thousand cubic meters of concrete - enough to fill 180 Olympic swimming pools.
Every day, 12,000 people worked on the site, lifting 55-ton steel beams in 50-degree heat.
The main problem was the desert soil: under the weight of the structure it sank, so the foundation was reinforced with 194 piles, each 50 meters long - deeper than the height of the Statue of Liberty.
The skyscraper is a vertical city. Its 163 floors house offices, restaurants, a mosque and even a swimming pool at a height of 555 meters.
The elevators move at a speed of 10 m/s, but it still takes 3 minutes to get from the underground parking to the observation deck.
Here, on the 148th floor, visitors can “buy” a cloud – a symbolic certificate with GPS coordinates of the airspace.
But the most amazing thing is the life support system. The building consumes 950 thousand liters of water per day, which are supplied through a separate pipeline from the Persian Gulf. Air conditioners cool 1.8 million square meters of space, and special glass reflects sunlight, reducing the temperature inside by 30%.
The Burj Khalifa record is already under threat. In Saudi Arabia, the Jeddah Tower is being built at a height of over 1,000 meters, and in Dubai there are rumors of a secret project for a skyscraper of 1,300 meters.
But for now, the pinnacle of human ambition remains in the UAE. However, even it seems a dwarf compared to the plans of Japanese engineers, who dream of a 4-kilometer tower. The only question is who will be the first to dare to challenge the laws of physics... and common sense.
Author: Kurchev Anton