Photo © James Ewing | OTTO
Photo © Nick Merrick | Hedrich Blessing
I asked William Baker, the SOM structure guru who figured out how to make the Burj Khalifa stay up, how he would respond if a hypothetical developer with limitless resources came to him and said: Okay, time to quit screwing around with ten stories there and 100 feet there. Let’s build the mile-high tower. “Yup,” he answered. “Okay.” (Baker is from Missouri, and he is frugal with words.) “How about a mile and a quarter?” I pressed. “Yeah, we’d figure it out.”