Dubai skyscraper to tower over current giants
The Burj Dubai, projected to be completed in 2008, will be the world's tallest building. The building's construction will cost $900 billion.
By JIM KRANE
The Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO , March 31-- For now, the world's tallest building-to-be is just a flower-shaped concrete tattoo on the desert sands, but its pilings are already in place, plunging 160 feet into the earth. When it's finished, visitors will swoon over this city from 123 stories high, if not more.
An Emirates official follows a site engineer during a tour to visit the compeleted foundation of Burj Dubai, the world's proposed tallest skycraper. Developers aren't saying how high the US$870 million (euro674 million) Burj Dubai will top out, but observers say it will be above 2,300 feet (700 meters). (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)In fact the Burj Dubai will be much higher, the developers say, dozens of stories taller than skyscrapers in Taiwan, Chicago or anywhere else. But they are keeping the exact height a secret to flummox competitors in the world's furious race for the title of tallest skyscraper.
"We're going to records never approached before. Not only will it be the tallest building, it will be the tallest manmade tower," said Robert Booth, a director at Emaar Properties, the Dubai construction firm developing the spire-shaped, stainless-steel-skinned tower.
Booth said jokingly that once completed in 2008, the $900 million Burj will sport a movable spire to keep observers from ever gauging the true height.
"Only the chairman will know how tall it is," he joked.
He refused to reveal the total number of stories, but a mock elevator at the site held a button for a 189th floor. The building's 10 foot sway in the wind means designers need to prevent whiplash in the ultra-long cables hauling up 50 elevators.
The craze for height has hit hardest in industrializing Asian countries like Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, which boast seven of the world's 10 tallest buildings. The current tallest, at 101 floors, is the Taipei 101 in Taiwan, though Toronto's CN Tower is 180 feet higher, largely because of its huge antenna.
The Persian Gulf city of Dubai has staked its fame on engineering audacity such as its vast archipelagoes of artificial holiday islands, and the Burj, Arabic for "tower," is one of its more extreme mega-projects.
New York built skyscrapers because land was scarce; Dubai is doing it to get on the international map.
"It's image, clearly," said Richard Rosan, president of the Washington-based Urban Land Institute. "There is no practical reason for having a building this tall."
On paper, the Burj looks something like a giant space shuttle about to be launched into the clouds.
Booth took reporters to the open-air 37th floor of a neighboring building, a vertigo-inducing experience in itself, and chatted breezily while standing perilously close to the abyss.
"Can you imagine what it's going to be like on the 137th floor?" he said. "You can't be scared of heights to do this job."
Developers say the silvery steel-and-glass building will restore to the Middle East the honor of hosting the earth's tallest structure, a title lost in 1889 when the Eiffel Tower upset the 43-century reign of Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza.
Designers have planned for catastrophes, manmade and other, said Greg Sang, Emaar's project manager for the Burj. Sang believes the concrete-core building would withstand an airliner strike of the sort that brought down the steel-frame World Trade Center.
"Concrete is much more robust than steel when you hit it. It's also much better at resisting fire," he said.
The tower owes its shape to American architect Adrian Smith, of the Chicago firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Smith also designed Shanghai's 1,378-foot Jin Mao tower, the world's fourth tallest.
Workers from the chief contractor, South Korea's Samsung, are already swarming over the slab, shaped in three rounded lobes like a local desert flower.
A hotel will occupy the lower 37 floors. Floors 45 through 108 will have 700 private apartments that were sold in just eight hours, the developer said.
Corporate offices and suites will fill most of the rest, except for a 123rd floor lobby and 124th floor observation deck with an outdoor terrace for the brave. The spire will also hold communication equipment.
As for the title of world's tallest, Sang expects the Burj to hold it for a few years. "But someone, somewhere will come along and build a taller building. It's just a matter of time and money."
Story Produced by: Craig Dawson
