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The Jeddah Tower, which will be the tallest building in the world once it is completed, is approaching a major construction milestone next month, the team behind the project told Newsweek.
Designed by architects Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill, co-founders of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG), and constructed by the Saudi Binladin Group (SBG), once built, the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia will soar to approximately 3,281 feet high.
The Jeddah Tower will dethrone the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the current world’s tallest building, which stands 2,717 feet high. The Burj Khalifa was also designed by Smith while he was at the SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) architectural firm, before he co-founded AS+GG.
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Speaking to Newsweek in London at the Vertical Urbanism (VU) Summit of the Council on Vertical Urbanism (CVU) this week, ahead of a panel discussion held there by the team behind the tower on its latest development, architect Ben Johnson, director at AS+GG, said the tower’s next major milestone will be reaching its halfway point, a height of around 1,640 feet.
Johnson said the building is projected to reach this point around Thanksgiving, according to the contractor. It will be reached “certainly within this year,” he said, noting “we're almost there.”
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Structural engineer John Peronto, managing principal at Thornton Tomasetti and project manager for the Jeddah Tower, also told Newsweek at the summit that the building has now hit its 121st floor and “125 will be the halfway mark.”
Sharing images of the Jeddah Tower taken a few days earlier when it reached the 121st floor, Ian Norman Miller, SBG senior executive project director, who is on the construction site daily, told Newsweek: “We’ve reached 484 meters [around 1,587 feet], just another 16, four floors to go” before the halfway milestone mark.
The SBG director said, “Lately we've been working at a rate of four floors a month. So, I do anticipate that milestone will be achieved [around Thanksgiving].”
Asked whether it’s still on track for completion around August 2028, as mentioned in earlier months, Johnson cautiously said: “Nominally, yes, it is still on track.”
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Johnson also pointed out that the definition of “complete” has “kind of a wide window,” noting that structural completion and topping out differ from the building being completed and occupied. However, he said the progress and pace of the construction have been “aggressive no matter how you measure it, but so far they are holding to that [the completion date of 2028].”
Peronto clarified that the structural top out is expected to be completed by the end of 2028, noting it will be “somewhere around that Q4 [fourth quarter] time is what I understand. But I think there's been some refinement to the schedule that they're working on.”
The construction of the next world’s tallest building continues amid a call for the improvement of existing buildings in the face of the growing environmental impact of new construction.
Among the proponents of this is none other than Gill, the Jeddah Tower’s architect, who told Newsweek earlier this year that height is no longer the primary goal when asked about the next architectural benchmark he’d like to achieve.
According to Gill, the future of architecture lies in rethinking what we already have, not building higher structures. He previously told Newsweek: “Sustainability is what matters to me the most…to get to the point where we're contributing with buildings and turn them into assets, versus looking at them as deficits.”
Around half of America’s 125 million buildings are at least 50 years old, according to the American Institute of Architects (AIA). The AIA says that repurposing existing buildings can avoid 50 to 75 percent of the carbon emissions associated with new construction, by reducing the “embodied carbon” released from the manufacturing and transporting of building materials.
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More Major Milestones to Come
Speaking to Newsweek at the VU Summit ahead of the team’s panel discussion, architect Peter Weismantle, director of supertall building technology at AS+GG, recalled being at the site of the Jeddah Tower back in June, when it surpassed Chicago’s Willis Tower. He said the contractor has “a paper on the wall about 8-feet tall that has the world's 100 tallest buildings,” which is used to note when the Jeddah Tower hits another milestone. “So, it's working its way up into the heights,” Weismantle said.
Earlier this month, the Jeddah Tower hit another milestone, surpassing the world’s tallest all-residential tower–New York City’s Central Park Tower–which is just over 1,550 feet tall.
After the halfway mark, there are a few more major marks to come, including reaching the “sky terrace,” the viewing platform level.
“As we get up to level 130, 140, we start adding in all of the steel structure that supports the sky terrace…the sky terrace is enormous,” Norman Miller said.
According to the SBG director, the sky terrace, which will be at around 2,066 feet level, was “originally designed as a helipad 18 years ago, and now it’s become the world's highest and largest outdoor observation deck.”
“It's such a phenomenal structure," Norman Miller said, noting that "the steel that supports that deck starts 20 floors below."
He said this work will begin next year and continue as the building gets higher, before arriving at another milestone structure known as the sky raft by the end of next year. The SBG director explained the sky raft is essentially a slab of concrete that’s around five meters thick and “marks the beginning of the pure spire” portion of the tower.
Norman Miller said the entirety of next year will entail working on any structures tied to the visitor experience levels. The following year will then be about building the spire, which starts at around 2,198 feet level, making the tower nearly as tall as Malaysia's Menara Merdeka Maybank, formerly known as the Menara Merdeka 118, the world’s second-tallest building, according to the CVU.
The SBG director said 2025, when construction of the tower was restarted following a pause of around six years, was focused on “remobilization, get everything started.” He said 2026 was “the big production year,” adopting a bit of a “factory production line mentality.”
“Then next year, we're getting into these incredible structures that John Peronto designed that nobody else has built. I mean, this is really getting into the first-of-its-kind construction,” Norman Miller said, noting that 2028 will be a “long sprint to the top with the spire.”
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Weather Challenges Remain
Weather challenges have impacted the progression of the Jeddah Tower and are likely to continue amid El Niño, the team behind the building said.
El Niño is one of two opposite climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean (the other being La Niña) that go against normal trade wind conditions. Trade winds are prevailing winds that circle the Earth near the equator.
“El Niño continues to strengthen, with a strong-to-very strong El Niño likely through January-March 2027, remaining greater than an 83 percent chance,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center said.
Johnson noted: “If you look at a construction schedule, the taller you get, the higher percentage of that is going to be subject to the weather. There could be 30 or 50 percent of your schedule accounting for some weather delay…and what they saw even this year was much more wind than they predicted. So, they had many more down days.”
Noting that the heat in Saudi Arabia is another challenge, Weismantle said El Niño “has impacted the world, and it's impacted Jeddah,” noting that “wind conditions significantly bumped up” from the last time there was a Super El Niño.
“As you get higher, the logistics start to change, because the winds are so much higher up [at that level]” and “they are forced by law to stop work if the wind exceeds a certain speed, Weismantle noted. "And it might be, you know, three miles an hour at the base, but it could be 30 miles an hour up at height.”
Norman Miller remained optimistic, noting that this year “very proudly, we achieved 49 levels in 52 weeks.”
Noting that the worst of El Niño is expected to unfold in the first half of next year, the SBG director said: “We're going to get through it and make some serious progress on the tower in 2027.”
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Contact Newsweek editors for this story: Marc Vargas and Anthony Murray.
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