Burj Dubai is the tallest skyscraper that has ever been built. It is located in the United Arab Emirates, and is 828 metres tall.
Construction started in 2004 and even though the interior was unfinished, the building officially opened on January 4 2010. According to the constructors, a South Korean firm, the skyscraper cost about $1.5 billion.
Shortly after the opening ceremonies the tower was renamed Burj Khalifa, after the president of the United Arab Emirates, who gave Dubai about $10 billion to pay its debts.
Up to the completion of Burj Dubai the Taipeh 101 in Taiwan was the world’s tallest building. It reaches over 500 metres into the sky.
The tower is composed of three elements arranged around a central core. The modular, Y-shaped structure, with setbacks along each of its three wings, provides an inherently stable configuration for the structure and provides good floor plates for residential.
The “Y” shaped plan was designed to help reduce wind forces on the tower, as well as keeping the structure simple and foster constructability.
The new tower has 160 floors. Built with concrete and embedded steel plates the base gets smaller as the building gets taller. The top of the tower can sway 1.5 meters. Temperatures are about 7’C lower than the base.
Construction experts say that building the tower has been the greatest engineering achievement ever accomplished.
Burj Dubai is the centre of a gigantic new development area with about 30,000 new homes, 9 hotels, 6 acres of parkland, a 12 man-made lake and the largest mall in the world.
For Dubai the skyscraper is a symbol of strength and prosperity, even though the emirate is living beyond its means and spending too much money.
Although most of the luxurious space has already been sold, Dubai will have problems selling all the apartments in the tower because there are many empty luxury flats and houses in the city already.
Source: Britannica & English Online
