![]() And the Burj Khalifa easily meets - and exceeds - and exceeds - that standard, soaring in both height and design quality above Dubai’s often-ludicrous collection of architectural cartoons. What matters, in the long haul, is the artistry that separates skyscrapers that are merely yardstick-tall from those that make of their tallness a smashing aesthetic virtue. When the now-beloved Empire State Building opened in 1931, so few of its floors were rented out that it was labeled “the Empty State Building.” Building booms and busts come and go, as do the temporary wearers of the world’s-tallest-building crown. And such a dismissal would ignore previous supertall sagas. In the Great Recession, when sustainability supposedly has supplanted spectacle as architecture’s guiding principle, the bling of the Burj Khalifa offers a convenient target for those eager to consign the pre-Crash Age of Excess to the ash heap of history.īut it would be shortsighted to conflate the messy circumstances surrounding the Burj Khalifa’s completion with the tower’s exhilarating and surprisingly refined architecture. Pundits also ridiculed the tower’s abrupt name change - from Burj Dubai (Arabic for “Dubai Tower”) to Burj Khalifa in honor of Sheik Khalifa-bin-Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, who bailed Dubai out of its 2009 debt crisis. “Completely unsustainable,” jibed Britain’s Guardian. “Purely a vanity project,” said the German urban planner Albert Speer, Jr., in Spiegel. Shortly after its spectacular January 4 opening ceremonies, critics pegged it the Hummer of skyscrapers. Such is the considerable achievement of Adrian Smith, FAIA, and his former colleagues at the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in the gargantuan yet persuasive Burj Khalifa, which rises half a mile above the desert in the once-unstoppable, now-humbled Persian Gulf playground of Dubai.Īt the staggering height of 2,717 feet (easily more than two Empire State Buildings), this shimmering, spiraling mixed-use tower inevitably raises the question: When is big too big? To some, this giant of giants - its spire alone is more than 700 feet tall - clearly overshoots the mark. He or she can only ensure that they are proud and soaring things, not Frankenstein-esque, XXL-size monstrosities. The architect does not control whether or where such behemoths are built. Their backers invariably are motivated by ambition and ego. ![]() Iconic skyscrapers, especially those that strive for the fleeting title of “world’s tallest building,” are rarely the progeny of cold logic. ![]()
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