Saudi Royal Family Planning Mile-High Building

Daily Mail: The Saudi Royal family today unveiled plans to construct the world's tallest building - which will be an incredible one MILE high.

Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia will be 1.6km tall (one mile) when it is completed and consist of hotels, offices, luxury apartments and a shopping centre. The structure will be twice the height of the world's current tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and FIVE times as tall as Britain's highest building, The Shard.

It will take a staggering 12 minutes to reach the top of the £12 billion ($19.6 billion) building in the escalator. The megastructure will boast a staggering 12 million cubic square feet of interior space - 12 times more than Number One Canada Water in London's Canary Wharf.

It is being financed by the Saudi Royal Family-owned Kingdom Holding Company - which is the nation's largest company. KHC, which has shareholdings in Apple, McDonald's and Amazon, has employed American company Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture who designed the Burj Khalifa.

Skyscraper specialists Emaar, which built the Burj, are understood to have won the contract to construct the Kingdom Tower, which will be built outside the Red Sea port city of Jeddah as the centre piece of a new 80,000 population city. But the announcement has been criticised with one design expert describing the idea of another 'phallic tower' as 'futile'.

Rory Olcayto, deputy editor of The Architects' Journal, said: 'The race to build the highest skyscraper is quite futile - where do you stop? There's always a lot of British know how driving these projects which shows how important UK architects are on the world stage. But these buildings are missing the point and are a symbol of an old fashioned way of thinking.'

'It's much better to look at something like the 3D China Central Television Headquarters in Beijing rather than a thrusting phallic tower.'