The One-Mile High Skyscraper

It's on the way, and will be built within 23 years, apparently.

The only question is where:

In October, at the premier international conference of skyscraper builders, the first speaker announced without a hint of irony or doubt that by 2030, somewhere, a mile-high skyscraper would be built. Five thousand two hundred and eighty feet. One-tenth of the way to the ozone layer. More than three times as tall as anything now stand­ing and exactly as high as the most fantastic towers ever dared conceived...

Indeed, sitting there in rows, a half-story below ground in an auditorium on the Chicago campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, were the very people who could build a tower one mile high: the foundation engineers who already knew how to pin such a thing to the earth, the structural engineers who could keep it standing in a 100-year wind, the architects who would give it form, the contractors who would know how to phase the behemoth’s con­struction—even the guys who would have to figure out how to wash the windows. And there are going to be a lot of windows.

A tribute to hubris? Maybe. Read the whole thing.

Hat Tip: RCP