For three years, the fate of Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Tower has hung in the balance. Originally conceived in the heady days of the 2000s, the project has gone through multiple false starts since 2008. Now reduced to a mere kilometer, the tower has finally been given a start-date for construction.
Workers at the tower's site, in Jeddah, started driving huge foundation piles 330 feet into the sand last year. But it was unclear if the building itself would ever emerge—or if, like Chicago's Spire, it would remain a gaping hole in the middle of the city. Here's what work at the site looked like in 2012:
According to BD Online, the $1.2 billion project is officially back on. Investors have set a starting date—April 27th—and have chosen a construction manager: the UK companies EC Harris and Mace, which will jointly run the project. Mace is the same company that managed construction of Renzo Piano's Shard, in London.
But there are plenty of unanswered questions about Kingdom. Amazingly, no one is quite sure how living at 3,000 feet will affect humans. It's also unclear how elevators inside the building will work, since the current weight of elevator cable makes it impossible to support above roughly 2,000 feet.
