Building the World’s Second Tallest Skyscraper

oh my God this is the tallest I've ever been on a [Music] building Malaysia Malia I'm on the roof of the second tallest building in the world this is Meda 118 the new tallest building in quala limpa and a new national symbol of Malaysia it's an incredible feat of engineering but there's one very important yet often overlooked feature of buildings like this that makes them viable and that is what I'm here to discover now when you think about tall cities places like New York Dubai and Hong Kong will all jump to mind but quala Loa

is up there with the best of them Malaysia ranks fourth in the world for the number of skyscrapers it has and 148 of them are right here in quala there's the qual Lumpa Tower the amazing exchange 106 centerpiece of the new tanak exchange and of course the iconic petronus Towers which were the tallest buildings in the world between 1998 and 2004 but all of those feel like mere Bungalows compared to Meda 118 I've never journeyed to the top of a skyscraper this high before and despite my slight fear of heights oh my God getting the

chance to explore this project has only deepened my love and respect for construction if we've got the shock can I please come down now when the Spire of M 118 was completed in 2022 it took its height up above 600 M making it officially one of only four megatall skyscrapers on the planet it's 680 M High 118 stories tool and it'll house around 10,000 people what does 10,000 people really feel like I hear you ask well to try and show you I've come down here to book at bang which is the Beating Heart of quala

there's so much happening here there's traffic scooters people everywhere there's a monar running across my head big buildings big screens it's bustling it's chaotic now imagine all of this taking it putting it inside a small box inside a very tall building and that brings us right up to the age-old problem with skyscrapers you see tall buildings are built around a structural core which as well as keeping the whole thing standing provide a great vertical access route up through a tower here you'll find the plumbing power other services is and crucially the elevator shafts and you

really really can't overstate the importance of elevators to making our tour buildings viable you're not going to want to go to level 118 if that means taking 118 flights of stairs where are we looks like we're in the teens now around the core is your usable floor area that's where you put your hotels offices pen houses or anything else you want in your building the problem comes with building tool the higher you go the more floors you create and the more people you have wanting to move up and down your structure putting in enough elevators

to service the all means your core gets bigger and your usable floor area is reduced and after a while the business case just doesn't stack up it's really not worth building any taller so for a very high building to make sense Engineers need to get clever and find ways to keep that core from getting too big now you could put the elevators on the outside of the building like this one I'm currently moving at 8 m a second flying up the side of this skyscraper and the City of quo limpa is falling away behind me

it's an incredible and slightly terrifying feature but to really address mobility in a building this tall and this big you need some serious Tech I've come to meet basil caros Stella B hi he works for Cony the elevator company that helped make this enormous building viable and that invited us in sight for a closer look I me it's a massive massive building it sort of dwarfs everything around it how does people flow work in a building like this how do you get all the people that work and visit here in and out I mean that's

a very important question because certainly when you you look at people moving in this building that becomes quite critical for the experience they have and when you consider that there's 10,000 people in this building it's quite important to work exactly how they're going to move now con installs elevators escalators and all kinds of systems that help energy efficient people flow everywhere each day their Tech moves over a billion people across this planet but the world's second tallest building forced them to take elevator engineering to new heights here they create a system that effectively splits the

building into five zones each zone is served by a shuttle elevator which shoots people up the building from the ground floor and into their Zone at a speed of 10 m second from there a series of local elevators can take them on to the specific floor they want to reach say you work on Level 94 lucky you each morning you would take an Express Elevator directly to level 76 before changing into a local car that serves the individual floors in that zone it means you get up to level 94 and those killer views well before

your morning coffee gets cold this approach means you can effectively stack more elevator shafts on top of each other within the building preserving valuable floor space as you go up while maintaining a good experience for everyone in sight it's a tried and tested way of making Mega Tool structures like this commercially viable and Cone were brought in early in the design process to implement it working with Architects and Engineers on how the core would be shaped but at Meda 118 the push for super efficient people flow didn't stop there because there's another very simple way

to double up capacity what are double deck elevators and how do they work okay from a simplistic level a double deck elevator is essentially think of it as two elevators on top of each other which are attached once you've reached your local Zone an AI enabled destination control system splits users into two groups it sends passengers traveling to odd number floors into the lower deck of the elevator while those heading to even floors are sent to the upper deck these double deck elevators make up an incredible 37 of the 89 elevators used in Thea 118

if you didn't have this system you would need a lot more elevators so all of a sudden you can see that a lot of the the revenue let's say that for each square foot you lose becomes quite significant cuz you need more shafts in that cor your core gets bigger you get less floor space exactly there's 35% real estate savings so in essence more elevators less real estate now as you might imagine pulling a double deck elevator full of people up the world's second tallest building takes some serious kits so where are we now so

now we're in the machine room these are our mx1 100s these are the largest machines that we have in our range and they're designed for these buildings of this magnitude essentially each machine is 7 ton and it is sitting above the shaft of each double deck elevator so when you consider what these need to do in terms of the work fully loaded double deck elevator is going to be around 8 tons and in addition to that you've got the weight of the cables and the ropes and it needs to do that at 10 m/s and

they happen to be the fastest elevators in the whole of Malaysia I mean when you see them you can't help but be struck by how huge they are and how much they weigh I've got to ask how did you get them up here it's not someone them carrying up the stairs that's a it's a very good question and and clearly the elevators aren't in place to put them in either no so the important thing is because of their size we need to coordinate very closely with the main cont contractor because these machines need to be

brought up to this level before this level is closed off otherwise you won't get them in here without pulling them completely apart so they we use the tower crane for that and essentially it's dropped off before this floor is completed so these huge seven T machines I can see the lifting rings on top of them the tower crane from the top of the building Picks Them Up lifts above the streets of quala and into here and that's happening all out the way all the way up exactly that's just one of the extreme Feats that construction

teams faced when building this far into the sky the remarkable height of Meda 118 meant that this construction site sometimes found itself above the clouds just getting about such a massive project before its fast elevators are installed can present a serious challenge normally during construction people in materials are brought up and down by slower external elevators called Construction hoists but there's fertile ground for efficiency here too as a skyscraper Rises con's jump lifts can be fitted inside the lower parts of completed elevator shafts in the main core it means construction teams and their materials can

move around faster saving time and money four jump lifts were used on Meda 118 and helped Ferry 4,000 workers around what was one of the world's largest vertical construction sites the structure completed in 2023 and they're now fitting out the building interior and when you're up here you can't help but be blown away by the scale of the engineering you know I'm currently standing 116 stories above the surface of the Earth it's an epic feat of construction but you're also hit by the question of why why build something this High Why build up into the

clouds and the answer is an interesting one for decades K Luma has looked to the skies to try and create a sense of identity but even with that in mind the story of Meda 118 is one that stands Head and Shoulders Above the Rest to really understand that story I met with tenu dat abdulaziz he's the CEO of P&B medc Adventures the owner and builder of the Tower so what does Meda 118 represent from Malaysia was Meda 118 Tower represents a new iconic Landmark for the city of Kumo and um one interesting design feature if

you look at the silhouette of the building we have a Spire at the top of the tower and that represents the outstretched hand of the first Prime Minister when he said Moda and Moda means Independence many people uh would have known qupa for the Patronus Towers they used to be the world's tallest building now Meda 118 has come along what do Landmark buildings like this mean for the city's identity I think it would give the city some kind of meaning in the sense that if you look at all over the world you have Eiffel Tower

for example it is really associated with Paris and Bush Khalifa with Dubai yeah and K of course we have had Von inter for a long time and so when Med comes into the picture I think it gives back our Global [Music] identity this city has an incredible architectural Heritage you can find ancient temples sitting right next door to ultramodern and skyscrapers but those two are rarely atds it makes perfect sense that a building a skyscraper no less is what was chosen to help symbolize where Malaysia is going Meda 118 takes a huge moment in this

country's history and uses it to create a powerful multifaceted and modern vision for the future if this project doesn't show the awesome power of construction and what its amazing teams are capable of then I don't know what does [Music] this epic video was sponsored by con you can learn more about how its elevator systems made Meda 118 possible and how it's helping to shape the future of cities at the link below and as always guys if you enjoyed this video and you want to get more from the definitive video channel for construction from the channel

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