At the building’s opening, Dubai announced that the skyscraper would bear the name of Abu Dhabi’s ruler, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan. This past November, Dubai ran out of money, was unable to make payments on sixty billion dollars’ worth of debt, and had to be rescued by a ten-billion-dollar bailout from Abu Dhabi, the conservative, oil-rich emirate next door. But, while the building was going up, growth in Dubai ground to a halt, leaving much of the new real estate unoccupied and unsold. When the tower was first planned, by Emaar Properties, a real-estate entity partly owned by the government, it was called Burj Dubai, which means Dubai Tower-just in case anyone might have missed the fact that the world’s most high-flying, come-from-nowhere city was also home to the world’s tallest building. Dubai doesn’t have as much oil as some other emirates, and saw a way to make itself rich by turning an expanse of sand beside the Arabian Gulf into an all-in-one business center, resort, and haven for flight capital. Certainly, it’s not as if there weren’t enough land to build on in Dubai, or any need for more office or residential space, after a decade-long construction spree that makes the excesses of Florida look almost prudent. Even if you put the Chrysler Building on top of the Empire State Building, that still wouldn’t equal its height.Īs with most super-tall buildings, function is hardly the point of the Burj Khalifa. But the Burj Khalifa represents a quantum leap over these midgets. For decades, skyscrapers have been topping each other in only small increments: Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers (one thousand four hundred and eighty-two feet) are thirty-two feet taller than Chicago’s Sears Tower (or Willis Tower, as it is now called) the Shanghai World Financial Center is about a hundred and thirty feet taller than the Petronas Towers Taipei 101, in Taiwan, is fifty feet taller than the Shanghai tower and so on. Unlike Wright’s design, to which it bears a startling resemblance, this building is very real-all one hundred and sixty stories (or two thousand seven hundred and seventeen feet) of it. The Burj Khalifa, in Dubai-the new holder of the title of World’s Tallest Building-is no less extravagant a media gesture. Although it was unbuildable, it grabbed more headlines than any real building could have, and it gave the illusion that Wright was in command of a type of building that he had always disdained. An elegant spire, pencil-thin, it was a cavalier dismissal of the gaggle of boxy office buildings that were turning most of America’s urban centers into a blur. Frank Lloyd Wright, who never much liked cities, understood this perfectly when, in 1956, he unveiled a fantasy known as the Mile High Illinois, a five-hundred-and-twenty-eight-story tower that he proposed for downtown Chicago, overlooking Lake Michigan. Someone will always build a bigger one, but that doesn’t diminish the intense allure of height, which can make a building famous whether or not there is anything else to recommend it. Photograph by Robert PolidoriĮrecting the tallest building in the world is a pursuit both pointless and exhilarating. The Burj Khalifa, now the world’s tallest building, is two thousand seven hundred and seventeen feet high-more than a thousand feet taller than its nearest rival and roughly twice as high as the Empire State Building.
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