Burj Dubai history has now risen

UAE. Dubai announced Burj Dubai to the world with the claim, ‘History Rising’. Six years on and history has most certainly ‘risen’.

Burj Dubai will soon be transformed into a vibrant community for thousands of residents, employees, hotel guests and tourists. Up to 12,000 people will live, work and play inside the world’s tallest building.

The tower is the focal point of the 500-acre master planned community Downtown Burj Dubai, which is widely described as the most prestigious square kilometre on earth.

Burj Dubai is the development’s crowing glory in every sense, a building that has pushed the boundaries of design and engineering further than many thought possible.

Excavation work for the tower began soon after the announcement of its launch, with more than 60 contractors and consultants joining forces on a project of unprecedented scale and ambition.

When construction work was at its most intense, more than 12,000 people from over 100 countries were working every day at the Burj Dubai site. In total, Burj Dubai took 22 million man hours to build.

Mr. Mohamed Alabbar, Chairman, Emaar Properties, said Burj Dubai was a shining example of global collaboration. “Burj Dubai shows just what can be achieved when people from all over the world come together to strive for a common purpose.”

Strong foundations
Standing at more than 800 metres (2,625 ft), Burj Dubai captivates audiences with its height. But its construction underground is equally worthy of fascination. More than 45,000 cubic metres (1.59 million cubic ft) of concrete, weighing more than 110,000 tonnes, make up the tower’s steel-reinforced foundations with 192 piles running to a depth of over 50 metres (164 ft).

Inspired by nature
Work on Burj Dubai’s superstructure began in March 2005, with the foundation work alone taking 12 months. The distinctive triple-buttressed outline of the Burj Dubai was inspired by the desert lily Hymenocallis.

Wind factor
Extensive seismic and wind tunnel testing was carried out to perfect the design of the tower. The triple-buttressed shape of Burj Dubai allows it to manage the effect of wind vortices generated around the tower, as well as changes in atmospheric pressure between its base and spire.

Rock solid
The main construction material of Burj Dubai is reinforced concrete, specially designed to withstand the staggering pressures inherent in the world’s tallest building.

In total, Burj Dubai employs a record-breaking 330,000 cubic meters (11.6 million cubic feet) of concrete; 39,000 metric tonnes of reinforced steel; 103,000 sq m (1.1 million sq ft) of double glazed glass; and 15,500 sq m (166,800 sq ft) of embossed stainless steel.

Climbing to the sky
Once the lengthy construction work of its foundation was complete, the vertical ascent of Burj Dubai was surprisingly fast. The first 100 levels of the tower were completed only 1,093 days after excavation started. A level was added every three days before the uppermost levels of the tower were reached.

In November 2007, the concrete for the highest reinforced core walls of Burj Dubai was pumped from ground level to a height of 601 metres (1,978 ft), breaking the previous record for concrete pumping held by Taipei 101. The pressure generated during the pumping work reached nearly 200 bars.

A glass act
Work on the glass and aluminium exterior cladding of Burj Dubai started in May 2007 and was completed in September 2009. Nearly 400 skilled engineers were assigned to the project. At the outset, around 20-30 cladding panels were installed each day. The daily rate of installation reached 175 panels as the project neared completion. Burj Dubai has set a new world record for the highest installation of an aluminium and glass façade, at 512 metres (1,679.8 ft).

A staggering total of 24,348 panels cover a curtain wall area of 132,190 square metres (1.4 million sq ft). But the Burj Dubai’s shimmering exterior is designed to minimise heat transmission into the building itself, therefore saving energy. Condensation from the panels is also collected and used for landscape irrigation.

Pinnacle of achievement
Burj Dubai’s spire may resemble a needle at ground level, but in reality it is a colossal structure made up of 4,000 tonnes of structural steel. Nor is it exclusively ornamental, housing as it does communications equipment for the tower.

Community spirit
With a total built up area of around 6 million square feet, Burj Dubai is set to become a living, vibrant community in the heart of Dubai. Around 2 million square feet inside the tower is dedicated to luxury residential apartments, while more than 300,000 square feet is allocated for office space. That’s in addition to the sections of the tower taken up by the world-first Armani Hotel Dubai and the Armani Residences Dubai.

Countless artworks by prominent Middle Eastern and international artists, including sculptures and various contemporary installations, adorn the interiors of Burj Dubai and line Emaar Boulevard throughout Downtown Burj Dubai.

Life of luxury
A total of 57 elevators and eight escalators serve people living, working and enjoying their leisure time inside the tower. Burj Dubai has four swimming pools, a cigar lounge, residents’ lounge, the fine dining restaurant ‘At.mosphere’, and a variety of health and fitness facilities.

Moreover, the tower’s 124th floor observation deck, ‘At the Top, Burj Dubai’, offers 360-degree views of the city and is open to the public.

Burj Dubai features ‘The Offices’, a 12-storey annex of prime office space; ‘The Club’, a four-storey health and fitness centre; and ‘Armani/Pavilion’, an outdoor entertainment venue that opens onto the Burj Dubai Lake and The Dubai Fountain, described as the world’s tallest ‘performing fountain’.

Heart and soul
Demonstrating that Burj Dubai is more than just a building, its creators have perfected a written narrative that evokes the tower’s soul.

Visitors to the ‘At The Top, Burj Dubai’ observation deck can read the ‘I am Burj Dubai’ legend once they reach the ‘From the earth to the sky’, section of the tour.

Its opening stanza reads: “I am the power that lifts the world’s head proudly skywards, surpassing limits and expectations. Rising gracefully from the desert and honouring the city with a new glory, I am an extraordinary union of engineering and art, with every detail carefully considered and beautifully crafted...”

“I am the heart of the city and its people, the marker that defines Emaar’s ambition and Dubai’s shining dream. More than just a moment in time, I define moments for future generations…”

From the ‘‘From the earth to the sky’’, one can view Level 124 and the summit of Burj Dubai at a near vertical angle.

Burj Dubai Renamed After UAE President

The main story's at the Washington Post, "Dubai opens half-mile-high tower, world's tallest." And it turns out the building's been renamed. From the Wall Street Journal, "Burj Dubai To Be Called Burj Khalifa Bin Zayed After UAE Pres." But I actually wanted to share a cool architecture review from the Los Angeles Times, by Christopher Hawthorne, " The Burj Dubai and architecture's vacant stare":

One of the odder, more complicated moments in the history of architectural symbolism will arrive Monday with the formal opening of the Burj Dubai skyscraper. At about 2,600 feet high -- the official figure is still being kept secret by developer Emaar Properties -- and 160 stories, the tower, set back half a mile or so from Dubai's busy Sheikh Zayed Road, will officially take its place as the tallest building in the world.

Designed by Adrian Smith, a former partner in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Burj Dubai is an impossible-to-miss sign of the degree to which architectural ambition -- at least the kind that can be measured in feet or number of stories -- has migrated in recent years from North America and Europe to Asia and the Middle East. It is roughly as tall as the World Trade Center towers piled one atop the other. Its closest competition is Toronto's CN Tower, which is not really a building at all, holding only satellites and observation decks, and is in any case nearly 900 feet shorter.

Monday's ribbon-cutting, though, could hardly come at a more awkward time. Dubai, the most populous member of the United Arab Emirates, continues to deal with a massive real estate collapse that has sent shock waves through financial markets around the world and forced the ambitious city-state, in a significant blow to its pride, to seek repeated billion-dollar bailouts from neighboring Abu Dhabi. Conceived at the height of local optimism about Dubai's place in the region and the world, this seemingly endless bean-stock tower, which holds an Armani Hotel on its lower floors with apartments and offices above, has flooded Dubai with a good deal more residential and commercial space than the market can possibly bear.

And so here is the Burj Dubai's real symbolic importance: It is mostly empty, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Though most of its 900 apartments have been sold, virtually all were bought three years ago -- near the top of the market -- and primarily as investments, not as places to live. ("A lot of those purchases were speculative," Smith, in something of an understatement, told me in a phone interview.) And there's virtually no demand in Dubai at the moment for office space. The Burj Dubai has 37 floors of office space.

Though Emaar is understandably reluctant to disclose how much of the tower is or will be occupied -- it did not reply to e-mails sent this week on that score -- it's fair to assume that like many of Dubai's new skyscrapers it is a long, long way from being full. In that sense the building is a powerful iconic presence in ways that have little directly to do with its record-breaking height. To a remarkable degree, the metaphors and symbols of the built environment have been dominated in recent months by images of unneeded, sealed-off, ruined, forlorn or forsaken buildings and cityscapes. The Burj Dubai is just the latest -- and biggest -- in this string of monuments to architectural vacancy.

The combination of overbuilding during the boom years, thanks to easy credit, and the sudden paralysis of the financial markets in the fall of 2008 has created an unprecedented supply of unwanted or under-occupied real estate around the world. At the same time, rising cultural worry about environmental disaster or some other end-of-days scenario has produced a recent stream of books, movies and photography imagining cities and pieces of architecture emptied of nearly all signs of human presence.

At the opening of the Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest skyscraper, there were 10,000 fireworks, a dancing fountain, traditional Emirati dancers, skydivers and an impressive light show — but the biggest surprise of the evening came from Dubai’s ruler, Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

Shortly after making his signature entrance in his white G55 Mercedes, number plate 1, Sheik Mohammed stopped to make a brief speech, saying that the tower, which has so far been known as Burj Dubai, would be renamed Burj Khalifa, after the president of the United Arab Emirates and emir of Abu Dhabi, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahayan. It is perhaps the most expensive naming rights deal in history and likely a reward for Abu Dhabi’s $10 billion bailout of Dubai in December after the emirate admitted it was struggling to deal with more than $80 billion of debt.

Once the initial shock had settled, the audience was then treated to a dramatic fireworks and light show around the mammoth structure. A series of skydivers branded in the country’s national colors dropped from the sky to kick off the celebrations, followed by a video showing the construction of the tower and its exact height of 828 meters (2,716 feet), which had previously been kept under wraps.

Spectacular fireworks lit the length of the tower, while the Dubai Fountain, the world’s largest water feature, danced and played traditional Arabic music. The event was a reminder of what Dubai does best. But what is likely to stick in the mind of those watching is that Abu Dhabi had paid for the festivities.

Towering follies the Dubai architecture you couldn’t make up

The kilometre-high skyscraper, the underwater hotel, the cloud on stilts ... Steve Rose mourns the eye-popping erections that should never have been commissioned

Pundits have been lining up to say "I told you so" over the bursting of Dubai's construction bubble, so now it's my turn. I did tell you so, a year ago. But what now? In architectural terms, Dubai has surely been the story of the decade. We're just not sure if it's a comedy, a tragedy or some surreal, hallucinogenic fairy tale.

On the other hand, the Dubai experiment has undeniably expanded the realms of what it is possible to build. Before the Palm Jumeirah and its ilk, or The World, who would have contemplated works on such a scale? Reclaiming land from the sea is nothing new, but only Dubai had the imagination to make pretty patterns with its coastline, to shape the earth to such a colossal degree that you need Google Earth to appreciate it.

Other countries have evidently been eyeing Dubai's coastline, too. In Russia, for example, Eric van Egeraat has designed Sochi Island, an artificial resort island in the Black Sea. Bahrain is developing a similar type of offshore resort, and Abu Dhabi is making good use of its previously undeveloped islands, such as Saadiyat Island, which will soon house a very different collection of wonders to Dubai in the form of new museums and galleries designed by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel and Tadao Ando. Even Boris Johnson's recent proposals for a new airport in the Thames estuary had a touch of Dubai about them.

Foreign architects have had a riot in Dubai, at least until recently. It's been the place where you can get away with anything. No matter how outlandish or oversized the idea, no one seemed to be saying no, and somebody else was always paying. As a result, the emirate has been waging some sort of architectural arms race with itself, each new development trying to outdo the last, while the rest of the world looked on with a mix of disdain and envy.

The Dubai dream was ultimately unsustainable on many levels, environmental as well as financial, and it's safe to assume that most of the crazy ideas proposed for the city will never happen now, given Dubai's dire credit situation. So here are some of the craziest highlights from a future that will probably never arrive – but, you never know, still just might.

Nakheel Harbour and Tower

Bad timing for SOM's Burj Dubai, which is due to open on 4 January 2010, just when a conspicuous symbol of Dubai's hubris was needed. But in the Dubai spirit of one-upmanship, plans were afoot to build an even taller skyscraper with an even shorter name: Al Burj. Originally designed by Pei Partnership, the tower was taken over by Australian architects Woods Bagot, and renamed Nakheel Harbour and Tower after its backers, the state-owned property group Nakheel, which is at the heart of Dubai's current woes. The sentiment behind this stupendous tower seemed to be: "I see your 800-metre-high Burj Dubai, and raise it to over 1km. How d'you like that?"

Trump International Hotel and Tower

Surely a frontrunner in any competition for the ugliest skyscraper the world has ever seen, this 60-odd-storey atrocity, designed by Atkins, was supposed to be the centrepiece of the famous Palm Jumeirah and super-luxurious addition to the Trump brand. It looks like it was inspired by one of those 1980s vases you find in a pound shop. Mercifully, construction has been on hold for a year or so.

Dubai Towers

In the same way the peacock's tail evolved into a flamboyantly useless appendage, Dubai skyscrapers have had to resort to ludicrous contortions to stand out. From the "ignore them, they're just trying to get attention" school of design comes a quartet of bendy skyscrapers supposedly inspired by the movement of candlelight – or perhaps Jedward's hair.

Hydropolis Underwater Hotel

Why reach for the sky when you can plumb the depths? This German-designed scheme would offer 220 bubble-shaped transparent suites, 66 metres below the surface, so guests can enjoy a privileged view of Dubai's spectacular coastal dredging operations.

The Dynamic Tower

A nice idea: each of this tower's 70 floors revolves independently around its central core, so everyone lives in a revolving apartment and gets a 360-degree view of Dubai's cranescape. And from the outside, the building changes shape all the time. And it's all powered by green energy from wind turbines and solar panels. All perfectly possible, architect David Fisher assures a sceptical world.

The Dubai Opera House

Not even Dubai had the stomach for French superstar Jean Nouvel's idiosyncratic formal experiment – a strange cross between an oil rig, a greenhouse and a psychedelic light show. Nouvel's pretentious accompanying text didn't help: "It is a little like the clouds. Each person can see what attracts them, what makes them question. The architect plays only the role of provocateur, claiming innocence." Nouvel is at least building the new Louvre, in neighbouring Abu Dhabi, which promises to be stunning.

The Cloud

A poetic but preposterous scheme imagining a resort landscape of lakes, palaces and floating gardens, raised 300 metres in the air on slanting columns. The brainchild of Lebanese architect Nadim Karam, it's been described as "a bridge suspended between dreams and reality". Why not put a gigantic pie on stilts instead?

Waterfront City

A whole city for 1.5 milliion inhabitants on an artificial island twice the size of Hong Kong. Rem Koolhaas's OMA were behind the plan. Reckoning that nobody in the Gulf watched Star Wars, he put a replica of the Death Star as its centrepiece – or was that his idea of architectural satire?

Dubailand

A vast landscape of leisure, twice the size of Florida's Disney World, proposed for the interior of the emirate. Highlights include four theme parks, five golf courses, life-size replicas of some of the world's landmarks, a zillion hotels, a Beauty Museum, and, of course, another "world's largest shopping mall".

Dubai Debt Debacle Validation of "Skyscraper Index

In light of the current concern over Dubai’s debt, the inevitable questions are beginning. Might the market have seen this coming?

Sure, looking back on it, it seems like there were probably some red flags.

For example, that indoor ski slope, in hindsight, looks a bit, shall we say, frothy. And yes, a particularly prescient observer might have cited the creation of that string of palm-shaped islands off Dubai’s coast, as a manifestation of irrational exuberance.

But if you were looking for a reason to get worried about Dubai over the past few years, you needed only look at the Burj Dubai — the world’s tallest skyscraper — according to the “skyscraper index.”

Credited to a 1999 report penned by Andrew Lawrence, then an analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort, the skyscraper index argues that there is a correlation between the construction of the world’s tallest buildings and the impending end of business cycles.

Back in 2006, BNY Mellon’s Chris Sheldon, director of investment strategy, applied the skyscraper indicator to Dubai:

Groundbreakings for the worlds tallest buildings typically have taken place after a long period of sustained economic growth. Optimism is high, credit is easy to obtain, and the sky is the limit. A new worlds tallest building also has proven to be a predictor of a booms end. Returning to Dubai, the Burj Dubai, at 2,313 feet tall, will be 40% higher than the current record holder, Taipei 101, which was completed in 2004.

A story in the Journal in August pegged the completed height of the Burj Dubai, or Dubai Tower, at 2,684 feet. Interestingly, another Dubai skyscraper, called the Nakheel Tower, was supposed to be even taller than the Burj Dubai. But construction was suspended back in January, as the company worked to adjust the plans “‘to better reflect the current market trends and match supply with demand.”