Clock of Makkah Tower is ready in 2012
Makkah Watch Tower
Abraj Al Bait Makkah
Makkah clock royal tower hotel - makkah
Clock Tower Saudi
Clock in Makkah
makkah clock tower royal hotel
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| Clock of Makkah Tower |
Address :
Makkah Clock Royal Tower
King Abdul Aziz Endowment,Abraj Al Bait Complex
Makkah,
Saudi Arabia
P. O. Box 762
The Makkak Clock Tower is 95 Floors.
IT will open at 2012
| Makkah Tower Antenna spire | 601 metres (1,972 feet) |
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The clock’s four faces are 151ft in diameter and will be illuminated by 2million LED lights along with huge Arabic script reading: “In the name of Allah”. The clock will run on Arabia Standard Time which is three hours ahead of GMT.
Muslims around the world could be setting their watches to a new time soon when the world’s largest clock begins ticking atop a soaring skyscraper in Islam’s holiest city of Makkah.
Saudi Arabia hopes the four faces of the new clock, which will loom over Makkah’s Grand Mosque from what is expected to be the world’s second tallest building, will establish Makkah as an alternate time standard to the Greenwich median.
The clock is targeted to enter service with a three-month trial period in the first week of the holy month of Ramadan on or about August 12, according to the Saudi state news agency SPA.
It boasts four glimmering 46 metre-across (151 feet) faces of high-tech composite tiles, some laced with gold, sitting more than 400 metres (1,320 feet) over the Holy Haram compound.
The tower’s height will reach 601 metres (1,983 feet), SPA said. On its website, Premiere Composite, which is responsible for cladding the top section, including a shimmering spire topped by a golden crescent moon, puts the planned height at 590 metres (1,947 feet).
That would make it the world’s second tallest building — ahead of Taiwan’s 509 metre (1,670 feet) Taipei 101, but well behind the Burj Khalifa, the 828 metre (2,717 feet) skyscraper inaugurated in Dubai in January.
Some 250 “highly qualified Muslim workers” were completing welding work on the clock’s frame, SPA said.
More than six times larger in diameter than London’s famed Big Ben, the clock faces, with the Arabic words “In the Name of Allah” in huge lettering underneath and will be lit with two million LED lights.
Some 21,000 white and green coloured lights, fitted at the top of the clock, will flash to as far as 30 kilometres (18.7 miles) to signal Islam’s mandatory five-times daily prayers.
On special Muslim occasions, 16 bands of vertical lights will shoot some 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) up into the sky.
“Everyone is interested to see the clock, despite the lack of sufficient information about it, and its mechanism,” said Makkah resident Hani al-Wajeeh.
“We in Makkah hope to be the world’s central time zone, and not just have a clock to look at, to show off,” he said.
The developer of the massive seven-tower Abraj al-Bait complex had kept the details of the clock a secret, but it is visibly in place now, adorned with the green crossed sword and palm symbol of the Saudi state.
Mohammed al-Arkubi, the manager of the Royal Makkah Clock Tower Hotel in the building below, said the installation of the clock, its faces made by the German-owned Dubai company, Premiere Composite Technologies, has been “a huge operation.”
The clock reflects a goal by some Muslims to replace the 126-year-old Universal Time standard — originally called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) — with Makkah mean time.
At a conference in Doha in 2008, Muslim clerics and scholars presented “scientific” arguments that Makkah time is the true global meridian. They said that Makkah is the centre of the world and that the Greenwich standard was imposed by the west in 1884.
Big does not begin to describe the Abraj al-Bait complex just across the street from the south gate of the Grand Mosque, the Muslim world’s most sacred site.
Built by a government-controlled fund, the complex sits seven huge towers atop a massive podium. Six are between 42 and 48 stories, and in the middle is the clock tower, appearing nearly twice as tall as the others.
Moreover, the entire complex, with 3,000 hotel rooms and apartments, a five-story shopping centre and gigantic prayer and conference halls, will give it 1.5 million square metres (16.1 million square feet) of floor space, according to architects and construction industry reports.
