First Things: The Malling of Mecca
By Michael Linton
Thursday, August 16, 2007

It’s big. No, I mean really BIG. And I’m not talking about the Burj Dubai, which when it reached 1,680 feet on July 21 became the tallest building on earth (and a thousand feet short of its completed height—yes, I said a thousand). I’m talking about that huge project on the other side of the Arabian desert, the hotel/prayer hall/shopping mall/Big-Ben-mantle-clock-on-steroids that’s being built next to the Great Mosque in Mecca, the Abraj Al Bait Towers. Look at it here. And here. See, I told you it was big.

Topping off at slightly less than 1,600 feet, the Abraj Al Bait will be only slighter shorter than the planned Chicago Spire (completed height: 2,000 ft). And it will be dwarfed by Dubai’s yet-to-be-begun Al Burj, which is called to be capped at 3,900 feet-plus (here and here). But these buildings, and the rest of the tall buildings that have been pushed up in the past twenty years, are all spires. They go up but not out. Not in Mecca. The Abraj Al Bait is almost as wide as the Chicago Spire is high. Six or seven residential towers (accounts differ; apparently the place is so big they lose track); a sixty-floor, two-thousand-room hotel; a convention center for 1,500 people; a prayer hall for another 3,800; a mall; parking garages; a transit station; and two heliports: The structure is a web of platforms and towers and bridges and halls that, by mass, exceeds any of the built or proposed taller spires. When the Bin Laden Group is finished with it in two years, the Abraj Al Bait may be the biggest building in the world. Even now, the incomplete structure literally towers over the Mecca mosque. the rest photo