The 828-meter tower broke all previous height records - not only for the buildings themselves, but also for any structures erected by man, including radio masts with a height of more than 600 m, located in different parts of the planet (the tallest building was still the 509-meter Taipei skyscraper " Taipei 101 ").
A project by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and architect Adrian Smith, who quit his job and set up his own workshop since the start of construction in 2004, develops the structural façade tower typology, the “chimney building” developed in the 1960s by an engineer SOM by Fazlur Khan. More precisely, a reinforced concrete structure was used from the main "pipe", reinforced with "pipes" - buttresses. Hence - the three-part Y-shaped plan "Burj Khalifa". The main innovations of the project are laid down at the level of details, for example, window sash profiles. The fact is that one of the main tasks of the architects was to combat the winds, which are always very strong in the zone of the upper floors of the tower, because it is located above the lower strip of clouds. Therefore, the texture of the facade acts in an air environment like the roughness of a shark's skin, allowing this animal to overcome the resistance of the water when moving quickly.
The height of the building (828 m, 160 floors) was kept secret until the opening. According to engineers, this did not immediately become an advertising gimmick: already during the construction process, it turned out several times that the skyscraper could be made higher than planned. The main obstacle to endless upward growth was not a technical, but an economic factor: the need to sell a huge amount of space, in the case of Burj Khalifa - mainly residential (the total area of the building is 557.5 thousand m2). Supposedly, this is why the tower has such a slender silhouette - to reduce the usable space inside.
In any case, Burj Khalifa in its appearance differs for the better from most of its realized rivals: Petronas Towers (452 m) in Kuala Lumpur, Taipei 101 (509 m) in Taipei, World Financial Center (492 m) and the Jin Mao Tower (421 m) in Shanghai. Rejecting the use of "national" motives, SOM architects have created at the same time a universal and fresh image that conveys the energy of striving upward to the firmament. There is a kind of romance in it, reminiscent of a time when humanity has not yet lost faith in progress.
But all the wonderful associations are spoiled by the fact that this skyscraper does not even serve as a symbol of the wealth and power of any country or corporation (as is usually the case with large-scale structures) - it is nothing more than a huge advertising sign of the (failed?) Plan to transform the emirate of Dubai into the world center of business and tourism and attracting wealthy people from all over the world as residents. Rather than being an expression of important accomplishments, Burj Khalifa has become a vehicle for future prosperity, along with many other incredible projects - artificial islands, new cities and more.
The local press calls the skyscraper the "Tower of Pride", but what pride are we talking about if the emirate clearly did not calculate its strength and is in such tight financial circumstances that it was forced to deprive its most significant building of its name ("Burj Dubai"), renaming it in honor of the President of the UAE and the Emir of neighboring Abu Dhabi: Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed El Nahyan recently granted a $ 10 billion loan to Dubai. So the modern Tower of Babel from another frontier of human striving forward and upward has easily turned into an ordinary "real estate object", just the central structure of a multifunctional complex with a total area of 2 km2 - sheer little for the Emirates.
