Saudi Arabia Built a $16BN Clock Tower

[Applause] this is one of the biggest and tallest buildings in the world but you've probably never heard of [Music] it the MAA Royal Clock Tower is a Triumph of engineering at 35 times the size of Big Ben it has the world's largest clock with an estimated cost of $16 billion US it's one of the most expensive buildings ever constructed and at 600 M High it contains what is to this day the highest occupied man-made space on the planet seeing the tower rise above the city of Mecca it's hard to get a true sense of its unbelievable scale this building is in fact so huge that we need to take a moment to show it in comparison to the tallest building in Europe the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere the tallest building in Asia and of course the tallest building in the world in whatever City you place it from Sydney to La this clock tower would utterly dominate the skyline construction firms from over 10 different countries worked on the skyscraper including a German firm which designed the clock but because of its location in Mecca many of the engineers and Architects couldn't visit the site after all only Muslims are allowed in the Sacred City Mecca is very conservative there's a a passport control there's like a border going into another country some of the construction team including glazing experts from Poland and Germany converted to Islam so they could work on the projects the company Reva is near stutgart in in Germany and their owner he converted to Islam during that project to be able to come on site and and see for himself what's going on and what's happening this is the wild story of how one of the world's most unique and ostentatious skyscrapers was built the Maca Royal Clock Tower isn't just a hotel it can't be it's located in the heart of one of the most culturally significant cities in the world this is Mecca every year up to 3 million Muslims travel here to complete a pilgrimage known as the har those completing the har circle around the cabba seven times it's an ancient ritual that every Muslim must complete at least once in their life this site is thousands of years old extremely delicate and constantly crowded and just a few hundred meters away across the road was where this enormous Hotel was set to be constructed it's pretty much the exact opposite of a straightforward construction site it's right in the center of Mecca City inside the first Ring Road which is really the most congested area in Saudi Arabia and the center of Islam or Muslims want to go there you have the Holy mosque with the Caba in the middle the religious tourism Market is the second largest source of income for Saudi Arabia after hydrocarbons it contributes some 122 billion annually to the Kingdom's economy that means that Mecca has the largest number of hotel rooms in the Arab world far surpassing Dubai it's perhaps then not a huge surprise that this enormous Hotel would be constructed here and due to the nature of it sitting so closely to the Cava and in this very let's say sensitive environment the client reached out to us and wanted to elaborate with us ideas on bringing more meaning to the building the hotel needed to be more than just a commercial building because of its location it needed to be something spiritual so we started thinking about what such a building could stand for and then one of the ideas that was created in those several meetings and brainstorming was that the main tower could function as the mined of Mecca at the time and it was planned would have been the highest building in the world the hotel was originally supposed to be just just 450 M High which would still have made it the tallest building in the world at the start of its construction in 2002 when the decision was taken to transform it into a grand minet the height was extended to 600 M Bush Khalifa was not built yet was also in planning and they of course then once it was clear that this Tower will be 600 M they raised to 800 M took the record for that one but turning this hotel into an enormous minet wasn't enough the client wanted even more time plays an important role in Islam there is of course the call to prayer that happens five times a day the Athen is the first call to prayer and is usually made from the top of the minet the idea of then making this building into a clock tower as well came very [Music] naturally now this clock would establish a new second time standard in addition to grenage me time all over the world Muslims would be able to know the precise atomic time in Mecca that would allow Muslims to begin holidays and special occasions like Ramadan simultaneously regardless of where they are on Earth but there was just one pretty massive problem half of the building was already built by the time the Saudis wanted to extend the Heights and at that clock tower half of this hotel was completed the foundations were well and truly laid and had been designed for a 450 M Tower not a 600 m one that limited the weight of the building to just 82,000 tons for contrast Shanghai Tower which Rises to a comparable 632 M weighs 575,000 tons so we went into checking the foundations how were the foundations laid out how were they calculated what forces were they allowed to hold and we saw that they have a lot of reserves in at the typical measure in Mecca that all the buildings have um have a lot of reserves just for the sheer fact that there's so many people moving through the city and they want to be on the absolute safe side and then together with a German structural engineer Maya Luda and partner we started developing then an ultra lightweight structure that could be placed on top of this concrete Tower the engineers and designers needed to create a tall lightweight but strong structure to put on top of the existing Hotel fortunately history had already solved that problem rewind the clock to 1889 and Gustav Eiffel was planning to build the tallest man-made structure in time for the world's fair to build it high and fast and to ensure it didn't sink under its own weights he came up with the now iconic raw IR framework structure this allowed the tower to sort to new heights and redistributed its weight downwards to its base the engineers of the clock tower began sketching their design by placing the Eiffel Tower on top of the existing Hotel they used high strength steel and concrete instead of raw iron but kept the idea of a framework structure that grew more slender as it Rose like the trunk of a tree they also kept the same engineering principles from the Eiffel Tower they would then build their clock and minettes around that framework structure the lightweight design was then placed on five transfer slabs on top of the hotel there were of course a number of limitations that came with this approach the distance between floors for example had to be far higher than normal behind the clock one floor level is about 12 M 12 13 M you could not go with typical floors then the weight would have been exceeded and then also the floors are cut out there's a big void in in those floors the voids which made the floors way less were then incorporated into the design and used to display large exhibits and artworks so it works well with the exhibition but that was actually also the reason to reduce the weight of the of the building now throughout this video you're going to see a very different type of on-site health and safety and labor culture to the one that many of you are familiar with and that we at the B&M advocate for but we've made the decision to bring you the footage in any case to tell the extraordinary engineering story of this project with the structure worked out it was time to turn their attention to building the world's biggest clock the architect of the tower worked with perro a German company that had been designing clocks since 1860 there was a lot of different design iterations that went into the clock mechanism the clock hands how do you operate such a big clock especially in that height the clock hands uh were the one of the biggest challenge because of the size of the clock and its immense height the first challenge was figuring out how to keep the hands from blowing away in the Wind a number of designs were considered including having the tips of the hands Guided by a peripheral track similar to how a Ferris Wheel Works or a roller coaster but that idea turned out to be too heavy it also had too many moving parts that could malfunction and would eventually need replacing you would also see the track underneath ruining the facade we didn't like the idea to have a a slit a circular slit around the facade so the you needed something lightweight and simple it was decided the hands would be made of carbon fiber and they would be controlled by a centrally installed clock drive that could hold both of them the hands themselves measure 23 M and 17 M respectively for comparison Big Ben's hands are 4. 2 M and 2. 7 M with a fantastic team of the engineers we uh find out that we could use a special carbon fiber to make this clock and kivver so we have this 22 M long clock hand Min clock hand which is completely kiv of course they have counterweights on the other end to balance the wind pressure on this gigantic clock face was also tremendous not just on the hands but also on on the facade the clock face was designed to be slightly concave to Shield the hands from the wind which at this height could reach up to 200 100 km an hour the concavity of the clock was in order to keep the clock hands within the profile of the building so that's why we have this dished form for the clock there are four clock drives actually five the fifth one was also put up on the platform as a spare and we also have a spare set of clock hands they are so big that you can actually access them and walk in them we have a special maintenance switch that actually Parks them both in a horizontal position once this connection is made a human being can slide through them at least it can be done quite easily you don't have to build a scaffolding as 500 M High the designers conducted a number of tests to figure out the colors of the clock it was especially important to work out how it should be lit up at night so it could be most legible the obvious idea let's back the facade but was directly dismissed because technology and quality and definition of the architectural details after several trial runs under different weather conditions and with different color combinations it was decided that instead of black and white the clock face would be green and white and that led lights would be used now green and white was chosen because of how the human eye works when green light refracts in the eye it focuses on the image plane of the Rea creating a Sharper Image these color combinations would ensure the clock face could be seen clearly from more than 8 km away each LED pixel placed on the clock face was installed 105 mm from the next one that's so that from a distance it would appear as a single green surface staggeringly more than 2 million LEDs were used to illuminate the tower in total these LED lights were also specifically developed for the task it took about a year I think till we finally were happy with the outcome the problem is that if these LEDs get very hot their lifetime is reduced dramatically we have a hot climate there the problem was to find the right casting as a cooling body for the individual LEDs now while this painstaking attention to detail certainly added to the $16 billion cost for the Saudi royal family spending on the finer details has been worth it for a long time a Saudi Prince once purchased Salvador Mundy the most expensive painting in the world at $450 million us these super wealthy figures see this fine art as an investment one that's even outpace more traditional assets like stocks or real estate but even if you don't have a royal checkbook then don't worry because you can still unlock the high powerered world of art investing yourself thanks to today's video sponsor Masterworks over 900 thousand members have signed on to the art investing platform because no art expertise is required previous investable offerings from Legends like Picasso Kors and Banky have sometimes sold out within minutes since so many of the B&M subscribers have signed on so far you can still skip the weight list and start investing today with the QR code on screen the link in the description or by visiting masterworks.

io important regulation A disclosures at masterworks. io [Music] the order for the tiles was so immense that the Venetian company producing them had to invent a new way to automate the process just to get it done this is a very good company that was chosen for their quality but at that time the particular the gold tiles were manufacturing an amount of 15 to 20 met a month and we were in necessity of 250 300 Square me a month uh to catch up with the construction we developed together with them a robotic system so also there from manual operation to a mixed technology of Robotics and manual the tiles themselves had to be rigorously tested to ensure they could withstand the extreme weather at the top of this building everything has been tested in lab or also weather fire tests and all the possible tests were made now much of the tower was pre-fabricated in Dubai a city that kind of knows a thing or two about Mega structures the 98 million tiles were sent here and put on the facade piece by piece all by hand more than a 100 people worked on the mosaics and only the best most Flawless tiles were selected these finished pieces of the facade were then broken down and taken across the desert in trucks in a 3-day journey to Mecca where they were reassembled the clock face itself was also built in Dubai first so they could see what it would look like firsthand this was done partly to test the structure but also because many of The Architects and Engineers working on the building couldn't travel to Mecca themselves to see it finished this approach allowed them to make any necessary adjustments before the clock face was finally installed we had to erect a quarter of the clock so we had to rebuild a main structure the substructure of the clock and the clock for a quarter of it it too was then dismantled and sent to Mecca the very top of the structure was also prefabricated in Dubai this Cresent Moon structure would reach for the sky and house the highest prayer room in the world the CR there is AF Moon that is a typical element that put on top of the miner the Crescent itself is the biggest carbon fiber structure ever built it contains three floors with the prayer room a meeting room and an office there is an elevator climbing all the way up to the top of the Spire from there the there are I remember something like 15 18 meter of a spiral staircase leading you to the Crescent finally the time came to lift the prayer room to its final place at the top of the tower it had been severed into several parts so it could be trucked to Mecca but there was just one problem where the prum had to be lifted up to was so high the crane couldn't reach it there's a spiral stair that goes through the spine of the cres or these let's say that the neck of the Cresent and um a friend of mine and myself we always went up that spiral there to take a break went there to smoke a cigarette it was beautiful you sit there's nothing around you and we knew okay from the program that the Cresent will come in within the next two weeks and then we looked on the tower and said that's a bit weird that the tower crane at the time was only then reaching with the tip kind of to that platform with very limited time left they had to raise the crane to its absolute limits the tower crane was then at a height of 200 200 plus Metter and um then quite a heavy load on it the one segment of this Crescent was seven 7 to 8 tons the capacity of the grainland got to its limit because height was I mean everything was at at its limit the height was just enough the capacity that the weight of the Cresent was exactly on the limit of the crate then came the wind 600 m above the ground riggers strapped into harnesses some on the structure others on the tower bracing themselves against the forces the cresant soon began spinning out of control I think two or three guys that really got sick because it was rotating it was really one of the most stressful days on side the team on the viewing platform had to use ropes to study the structure and bring it into place the poor crane driver I think he was going nuts because on the walkietalkie and people from down all yelling be care watch this watch this and it's turning and it's doing this and whatever took quite a while took longer than anticipated but they managed with the prayer room in place the tower was officially topped out to this day it's still the highest occupiable space on any man-made structure the bur Khalifa's highest occupied floor is at 585 M while Shanghai Towers is at 583 both pale in comparison to this prayer room sitting 600 m above Mecca then we had the opening ceremony where the king actually came to Mecca and then pressed the red button and all the lights went on and that was a great moment that was really really good I mean it's like three years of Hardcore pressure and stress and it all came to a success but was a great moment one of the best moments in my life that's for sure [Music] the clock tower now stands as a symbol of Mecca in the 21st century a place steeped in history with an important role in the lives of millions of people today there isn't another building like it and there probably never will be I think it's totally different from any other even the most spectacular buildings of extreme height they will compete with this shape and this function it's the only tower that gives its own time signal for Muslims worldwide anything which is of a unification purpose in the these days is very important and uh that may be the real value of this structure despite shattering so many records this building is still remarkably unknown in the Western World at the beginning I was a little disappoint all said I managed to understand that maybe it's even a good for the building in the Contemporary architecture the building is not even finished and it's already on the magazine or on internet people talk for one month and then it's forgotten so I assume this building is slowly slowly metabolized by the city is becoming an icon and slowly slowly will become in the time uh an potential building I think the the building in itself will remain an icon for Saudi and it will remain an icon for the the whole Islamic world because of of course many Muslims have worked on the building there were at times up to 15,000 177,000 construction workers on that complex all of the Muslim and all from different countries all over the world so there is pretty much every country has kind of a a story a connection to that building which you do not have in typical buildings the biggest clock for me personally has not that importance this big clock has offered this opportunity to explore materials technology to have new space behind so it's a completely different building from a stereotype uh Skys script You know despite working on the project for several years many of the lead Architects have never seen the building in real life oh I I I couldn't I and uh there is one thing they actually they can do they can imagine quite well so of course to stand there look at walk around would be fantastic but let's say my head is quite well represented and imagin I can say that I didn't convert the closest I ever got physically was 20 kilm which is already inside the confines of Mecca my driver didn't realize that he had a nonbeliever were on board he stopped in the middle of the motorway and made a u-turn and drove me back out again this building is so gigantic you can see it from 50 miles away or even further we're now seeing so many new projects being announced in Saudi Arabia from giant linear cities to Desert Arenas all with fresh skepticism as to whether they can be achieved and while that of course remains to be seen the Macar Royal Clock Tower is in many ways the first Saudi Mega project whatever comes next it remains a towering accomplishment in its own rights and within all likelihoods stand the test of [Music] time this video was sponsored by Masterworks you can learn more about that at the link below don't forget that we're inspiring the next generation of Builders through our investment into brick borrow a fantastic Lego subscription service you can learn more and get started today over at brick.