The tower was designed by Chicago high-rise specialists Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, whose other credits include the Willis Tower, formerly the Sears Tower, in Chicago, and New York’s One World Trade Center.
#Burj khalifa vs dubai creek tower plus
Not surprisingly, the tower also accumulated a host of other superlatives en route, including the building with the most floors (163, plus an additional 46 maintenance levels in the spire), the world’s highest and fastest elevators (those to the observation deck, which travel at around 10m per second), plus highest mosque (158th floor) and swimming pool (76th floor). The Burj also returned the record for the world’s tallest structure to the Middle East for the first time since 1311, when the towers of Lincoln Cathedral surpassed the Great Pyramid of Giza, which had previously reigned supreme for almost four thousand years. Among the superlatives it took were those of Taipei 101 in Taiwan (formerly the world’s tallest building at 509m), the KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota (the world’s tallest extant man-made structure at 629m), and the Warsaw Radio Mast, at Gąbin in Poland (previously the tallest man-made structure ever erected, at 646m, before its collapse in 1991). The Burj opened in early 2010 after five years’ intensive construction, finally topping out at a staggering 828m and comprehensively smashing all existing records for the world’s tallest man-made structures, past and present. But conceived as the centerpiece of an entire development, there is a sort of self-reinforcing aspect to that.”Īnd the world’s tallest building does, of course, exemplify Dubai’s unofficial mantra: “build it and they will come.” And they did.Rising imperiously skywards at the southern end of Sheikh Zayed Road, the needle-thin Burj Khalifa is the world’s tallest building. As an individual building, I don’t think it would have actually turned a profit, at least not very quickly. “If they had built the Burj Khalifa without that strategy, I think it might have been a white elephant for a very long time. “Placing a spike in the ground in the middle of the desert, and making that predominately something that is only accessible by car, is highly questionable in terms of sustainability,” says Safarik.īut he acknowledges that skyscrapers like the Burj Khalifa have been successful as the focal points of wider developments. Yet building tall can have an environmental impact, especially when towers are not part of a dense urban area with snappy public transport. “In the Middle East, it really has more to do with announcing the role of that country, or that person in some cases, as having arrived on the world stage.”
And these days a skyscraper is about as permanent a thing as you can build,” he says. “There is a certain degree of an attempt at legitimacy by building objects of permanence. That, too, is part of the Gulf states’ obsession in joining the (almost) mile-high club, says Daniel Safarik, editor of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat journal. Skyscrapers are also the ultimate status symbol.
“I think that’s really why people are trying to build tall in the Middle East.” “The tower itself was expensive, but the value to the developer is not necessarily the tower itself but the value of the surrounding land,” he says.
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