Renamed 160 story building opens with a flair.
Construction began in 2004, at the height of an economic boom.
Clad in 28,000 glass panels, the tower has 160 floors and more than 500,000 sq m of space for offices and flats.
The tower also lays claim to the highest occupied floor, the tallest service lift, and the world’s highest observation deck – on the 124th floor. The world’s highest mosque and swimming pool will meanwhile be located on the 158th and 76th floors.
#24 – The CN tower is not considered a building, it’s a free standing structure.
#29, Crazy Smart… “So enjoy kids, you bought it.”
Well not exactly… You bought Arab oil and they bought American engineering. Seems like good commerce.
Re: #31, green, the CN tower is a building. It wasn’t considered a building ONLY by the jealous twits who didn’t like being ‘one-upped’ when it was built.
building: a relatively permanent enclosed construction over a plot of land, having a roof and usually windows and often more than one level, used for any of a wide variety of activities, as living, entertaining, or manufacturing.
#12 It doesn’t hurt to be named for the leader of Dubai. In the words of Mel Brooks, “It’s good to be the King.”
What is so damn special about Dubai anyways that they need to have the world’s tallest building?
#31 – “#24 – The CN tower is not considered a building, it’s a free standing structure.”
WTF? Do you understand what “free standing structure” actually means? It means a building/structure that’s not held in place by a mess of guy wires. The CN Tower in Toronto was the world’s tallest until Dubai had nothing else to blow all its money on.
Americans just get pi**ed off when Canada bests them at anything, and charts like the one above (which is from the CTBUH based in Illinois) always seem to “forget” Canada when reporting things like this. The CN Tower is 553.3 m, and the only thing(s) bigger (other than the Dubai tower) are radio antennas, and you can’t fit people into them. Period.
So the super rich Muslims can have a tall edifice, but America can’t. And they can blow up ancient statues in places like Egypt. But they can have huge portrays of their fearless leader, in public display. Seems to me their attitude can’t be justified by some interpretation of Islamic law, when abroad. When they don’t follow it at home! So why don’t we get to crash a plane into their pretty building. Naaagh!
This skyscraper doesn’t make much sense being in a desert, accept to show off (which is supposed to be against one of their moral laws, I think). We mainly build tall buildings in american cities, because the real estate is so expensive. Cheaper to build upward, than outward. But in Dubai, they’ve got miles of space to build outward. They could have more easily built an eight hundred meter long, one story building. And really, should that last hundred meters of spire, count. It looks to be the world’s tallest antenna, on top of a skyscraper. Just to make the thing over 800m. While they’re at building useless things in the desert (with borrowed money). Why not build the tallest extended middle finger, on a gigantic hand? I suggest they build the tallest penis shaped structure, but I think Taipei beat them to it.
Beautiful building, nice architecture.
i want one….
BTW Nice Burj Dubai basejump video
(2008 / 650 metres height) at;
33 Skeptic. 36 Canuck.
“The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the organization that determines the title of the “World’s Tallest Building”, recognizes a building only if at least fifty percent of its height is made up of floor plates containing habitable floor area. Structures that do not meet this criterion, such as the CN Tower, are defined as “towers”.”
Wikipedia
http://tinyurl.com/2hznuw
It reminds me of buildings in science fiction and video games… like Half Life 2.
From the article:
“We weren’t sure how high we could go,” said Bill Baker of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the building’s structural engineer. “It was kind of an exploration… a learning experience.”
What, they kept adding on until things started creaking and swaying? Any building I’m in, I want the builders to be certain it’s not to tall…
Well actually Dubai doesn’t have any oil. It got its wealthy from the same moneychanging and Ponzi scheming that Wall Street did.
They had to get a bailout from an oil rich neighbor when the scheme fell flat and people realized building empires in the desert was a dumb idea.
John, Forget my last video #38 … Burj Khalifa base jump record is broken! 🙂 Feel free to re-blog 😉
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGD7xX960PQ