How High Is High? How High Is Too High?

The Towering Inferno was one of the big "disaster" movies from the 1970s, starring everyone from Steve McQueen to Paul Newman to Fred Astaire to O.J. Simpson (really.) It's about a 135-story (fictional) building that catches on fire and all the resulting chaos, death and destruction that ensues. At the beginning, fire chief Steve McQueen tells architect Paul Newman that "there's no way for us to fight a fire above the 7th floor." At the end, Newman wearily looks up at the smoldering wreckage and says, "Maybe they should just leave it the way it is. A kind of shrine to all the bullshit in the world."

I think of that movie every time I hear of another "world's tallest building" making its way up to the sky; specifically today because of news that construction will start next week on the Kingdom Tower, to be built in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It's planned to be a full kilometer in height with 200 floors, although I understand the floors above 160 or so will not be continuously occupied. The current "world's tallest building", the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, has 160 floors, although, again, the highest floors are unused.

So how high is high? How high is too high? Would you want to live or work on the 150th floor? How long does it take an elevator to get up there? How long would it take the paramedics to get up there if you started feeling heart palpitations one night during dinner and had to call 911? How long does it take to run down the stairs if you ever did, in fact, have a fire? All good questions, possibly without good answers but it doesn't appear to matter. The buildings keep going up, up, up.