The Kingdom Tower: Worlds Tallest Building In Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia unveiled plans to build the world's tallest tower — a mixed-use structure that will rise two-thirds of a mile high — in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah.Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal signed a $1.23 billion contract with Bin Laden Group for the proposed tower, which will take just over five years to complete. The building is the centerpiece of the planned Kingdom City development being built outside Jeddah by Prince Alwaleed's Kingdom Holding. 





"Building this tower in Jeddah sends a financial and economic message that should not be ignored," Prince Alwaleed told reporters. "It has a political depth to it to tell the world that we Saudis invest in our country despite what is happening around us from events, turmoil and revolutions even."

Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, a Chicago architectural firm, has been selected to design the Kingdom Tower, which will feature a Four Seasons hotel, serviced apartments, Class A office space, luxury condominiums and the world's highest observatory.






When completed, the 1,000-meter-plus (3,280-foot-plus) tower would replace Gulf neighbor Dubai's 828-meter (2,716-foot) Burj Khalifa as the tallest tower in the world. The Burj Khalifa was built by Emaar Properties for a total cost of $1.5 billion.





The exact final height is still a closely guarded secret, though it will be at least 173 meters (568 feet) taller than Burj Khalifa.
"It is not 1,000 meters. It is more, could be more by many meters... The figure is secret, only a small number of people know," said Prince Alwaleed, a nephew of Saudi King Abdullah.

Kingdom Tower will contain 59 elevators and 12 escalators.

The design for Kingdom Tower is highly technological and distinctly organic. "With its slender, subtly asymmetrical massing, the tower evokes a bundle of leaves shooting up from the ground - a burst of new life that heralds more growth all around it," Adrian Smith said in a press release.

The sleek, streamlined form of the tower was inspired by the folded fronds of young desert plant growth, Gordon Gill added in a statement. "The way the fronds sprout upward from the ground as a single form, then start separating from each other at the top, is an analogy of new growth fused with technology," he said.

Kingdom Tower will cost about $1.2 billion to construct, while the cost of the entire Kingdom City project is anticipated to be $20 billion.

The DC Avanti : Wannabe Indian Supercar?

"Every country which has written its name in the pantheon of automobile manufacturing has invariably distinguished itself with sports cars by its own nationals and I thought that India rightly needs to be in this exclusive club" said Dilip Chhabria as he unveiled his first, production-ready sports car.

Popularly known as DC, Dilip Chhabria has stunned the world with not just brilliant customization jobs on production vehicles, but also dramatic one-offs which would make anyone who owns them the envy of the entire automotive world. DC, and in particular his design firm, DC Design, has, over the course of the last several years, has developed unparalleled expertise in high-quality tooling and prototyping techniques to bring to life the most spectacular of automotive designs. And the car you see here, the Avanti, is the result of these skills.

The name, Avanti, is quite apt too, as not only as it reflects its Indian cultural roots, but in Italian, the language common to all the world-renowned automotive styling houses, means ‘to move forward’. And that’s exactly what DC is doing, moving forward from making mere one-offs, to making a proper production model. Yes, this absolutely stunning looking car, though only in the rolling sculpture stage at the moment, is slated for production. But this is only the half of it. The real shocking bit about the Avanti is that though it will only see a limited production run, like most supercars, it could be yours for a very un-supercar-like price of just Rs 30-lakh!

 

And don’t for one minute think that this is just a Toyota Corolla underneath with a slapped-on body kit – it’s a true-blue sports car with a two-seats at the front, an engine in the middle and the driven wheels at the back. The chassis itself is a spaceframe construction of square, rectangular and round sections to get the best structural rigidity not just from a concern of passenger safety, but to endow the car with great handling characteristics to match the sporty looks of the body shell as well. And in true sports car fashion, the Avanti will feature unequal length double wishbone suspension at all four corners with coil-over springs, ensuring that the sticky 255/45 section front and the 285/40 section rear tyres, shod on the massive 19-inch wheels, will make the optimal contact with the tarmac at all times.

My review:

What ever said and done, it is very evident from the pictures that they have implemented design features of other existing cars.

For example, the headlamp layout has a striking resemblance to the Ferrari 458 Italia. It looks like they've just switched the right and left headlamps and tilted it by 90 degrees. Take a closer look:

 

The tail-lamp layout also looks very similar to the new facelifted Mercedes CLS-series (2012).

  

The last similarity I spotted was the position of the fuel tank cap with that of the Bugatti Veyron.


  

Idiot wreaks Lamborghini Gallardo in illegal street race

You would be forgiven for thinking someone who owned a €180,000 Lamborghini would know how to drive it. This video proves that that's not always the case.

Racing a Lamborghini on a track can be a hairy experience and one not for the faint of heart. However, you can take solace in the fact that if you slip off the track you’re more than likely just going to end up in the gravel. That’s not the case if you’re racing on an open public motorway.

These goons decided an illegal street race on the public roads of somewhere in Asia, was a great idea to show how massive their… wallets were. Sadly, the driver of the green Gallardo forgot to bring his driving skills with him on the day and sent his car into the motorway’s concrete wall.

The green Gallardo overtakes the camera car but is then stuck behind another ‘civilian’ car travelling in the fast lane. It then attempts to undertake this civilian car at the same time that the orange Gallardo overtakes a car in the slow lane.

The two supercars come within inches of crashing into each other but the orange one manages to keep his cool and stay on the road, unlike the green one.

The €180,000 green machine is sent out of control and into the wall by the driver who stupidly overcorrected the spin.

It’s just another fail from an overzealous supercar driver, and a win for everyone else.