Distance also emphasizes the Burj’s slender, elegantly tapering outline, which has been variously compared to a shard of glass, a latter-day Tower of Babel and, according to Germaine Greer, “a needle stuck in the buttock of the Almighty”. The astonishing scale of the Burj is difficult to fully comprehend – the building is best appreciated at a distance, from where you can properly appreciate the tower’s jaw-dropping height and the degree to which it reduces even the elevated high-rises which surround it to the status of undernourished pygmies.
The shape of the tower has often been compared to that for Frank Lloyd Wright’s visionary (but unrealized) plans for The Illinois, a mile-high skyscraper designed for Chicago, while chief architect Adrian Smith has said that the tower’s Y-shaped footprint was inspired by the flower Hymenocallis – although perhaps more important is the way the three buttresses supplied by the arms of the “Y” help support such a tall building constructed on such a relatively small base.
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These tiers are gradually stepped back as the building rises, forming a series of 27 terraces, before the central core emerges to form the culminating spire – a plan which makes the optimum use of available natural light, as well as providing the best outward views. The building consists of a slender central square core, surrounded by three tiers arranged in a Y-shaped plan. The tower was designed by Chicago high-rise specialists Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, whose other credits include the Willis Tower, formerly the Sears Tower, in Chicago, and New York’s One World Trade Center.
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Not surprisingly, the tower also accumulated a host of other superlatives en route, including the building with the most floors (163, plus an additional 46 maintenance levels in the spire), the world’s highest and fastest elevators (those to the observation deck, which travel at around 10m per second), plus highest mosque (158th floor) and swimming pool (76th floor). The Burj also returned the record for the world’s tallest structure to the Middle East for the first time since 1311, when the towers of Lincoln Cathedral surpassed the Great Pyramid of Giza, which had previously reigned supreme for almost four thousand years. Among the superlatives it took were those of Taipei 101 in Taiwan (formerly the world’s tallest building at 509m), the KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota (the world’s tallest extant man-made structure at 629m), and the Warsaw Radio Mast, at Gąbin in Poland (previously the tallest man-made structure ever erected, at 646m, before its collapse in 1991). The Burj opened in early 2010 after five years’ intensive construction, finally topping out at a staggering 828m and comprehensively smashing all existing records for the world’s tallest man-made structures, past and present. Rising imperiously skywards at the southern end of Sheikh Zayed Road, the needle-thin Burj Khalifa is the world’s tallest building.
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