All over the world
August 25, 2011 (Thursday)
Heebie-jeebies is an idiom used to describe a feeling of anxiety. It’s the feeling I get when I actually ascend to the high floors in skyscrapers. Although I don’t like the feeling in the pit of my stomach when actually looking down from one, I am still fascinated by tall buildings. The present era is a good one for such fascination, because they are being built today in many countries. Go to the skyscraper page, click on items of interest, and explore the world of high-rise. Yesterday’s blog was about the first one in 1884, and the tallest one today, over 2700 feet high, but “the skyscraper page” shows diagrams of all of them, even those under construction. It may not be interesting to everyone, but it is to me.
You will find a diagram there that shows the tallest buildings in the world in the year 2015. Our own One World Trade Center will be the fifth tallest in the world, will have 105 floors, be 1368 feet high at the observation deck, with an antenna spire extending to 1776 feet.It will be the tallest building in the United States.
In 1956, the great Frank Lloyd Wright proposed building a skyscraper one mile high. It would have housed offices, a hotel, residences, shopping facilities, and probably rooms for other uses. It was feasible at the time to build it, but it never went past the planning stage. The Khalifa Tower, the world’s tallest building today, was modeled after the mile-high design, but is half the height. It was called “The Illinois,” and you can look it up on Wikipedia.
The Babel folks were ahead of their time. What would they think if they could see us now?