Azerbaijan To Build One Kilometer-Tall Skyscraper

Architizer News

Azerbaijan To Build One Kilometer-Tall Skyscraper

February 9, 2012

Developers in Azerbaijan are planning to build a kilometer-high tower that would, obviously, be the world’s tallest. As News.az reports, Haji Ibrahim Nehramli, president of the Avesta Group of Companies, promises that the Azerbaijan Tower, as the project is being called, would rise 1,050 meters with 189 floors to dwarf both the Burj Khalifa (by 220 meters or 722 feet) and the Kingdom Tower currently planned for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (by 50 meters or 164 feet). That’s not all. The Avesta Group will be planting their tower on an artificial island in the Caspian Sea, at the foot of virginal beaches and crystalline waters .

The Azerbaijan Tower will be the crowning centerpiece of the Khazar Islands, a $100 billion city of 41 artificial islands that will spread 2,000 hectares over the Caspian. The buoyant metropolis is being planned for 1 million residents, who will be housed in endless rows of high-rises ranging for 25 to 60 stories in height with access to over 150 schools, 50 hospitals and daycare centers, plus numerous parks, shopping malls, cultural centers, university campuses, and even a Formula 1 racetrack. The city will be equipped with a robust network of “innovative” bridges and infrastructure that will link outlying islands to the urban core, while a large municipal airport will provide access to and from the radiant city.

To briefly focus on the tower itself–much could be said on the vacuity of the entire project–the admittedly comical form altogether shuns the slim, shard-like profiles that characterize the current crop of Brobdingnagian skyscraper design. Instead, it curiously alludes both to the platonic massings of Constructivist projects (via corporate High-Tech of ’80s and ’90s) and various paper arcologies of the last quarter of the past century, from the Metabolists to the Sims. Construction on the Azerbaijan Tower is set to break ground in 2015 and will continue onto completion in 2018-2019 at a cost of $2 billion. And like all of the city’s other structures, the tower has been designed to withstand up to a 9.0 magnitude quake. The Khazar Islands are scheduled to be ready by 2022. Click through for more images!