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Digital Publisher of the Year | Tuesday 05 January 2010 | Dubai feed
Advertisement Website of the Telegraph Media Group with breaking news, sport, business, latest UK and world news. Content from the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers and video from Telegraph TV. Enhanced by Google Home News Sport Finance Lifestyle Comment Travel Culture Technology Fashion Jobs Dating Games Offers UK World UK Politics Celebrities Obituaries Weird Earth Science Health News Education Topics News Blogs News Video USA Barack Obama Europe Asia China Middle East Africa and Indian Ocean Australia and the Pacific Home News World News Middle East Dubai Burj Dubai: The new pinnacle of vanity For all the ambition of its construction, Dubai's new Khalifa Tower is a frightening, purposeless monument to the subprime era, says Stephen Bayley.By Stephen Bayley Published: 6:37AM GMT 05 Jan 2010
Comments 46 | Comment on this article
Link to this video"L
By Stephen Bayley Published: 6:37AM GMT 05 Jan 2010
Comments 46 | Comment on this article
Link to this video"Less is only more where more is no good." I wonder how many guests squinting into the Gulf's blue skies before the sublime, coruscating, vitreous surfaces of the blasphemously vertiginous Burj Dubai at yesterday's opening ceremony knew Frank Lloyd Wright's sardonic remark.
Wright was the Welsh-American architect – part bardic mystic, part technophile, complete megalomaniac – who proposed in 1956 the Illinois Sky City in Chicago. This was an outrageous, mile-high building: 528 floors, each with a height of 10 feet.
Wright's business was to shock and awe all mankind while doing what he could to épater la bourgeoisie at the same time. In 1956, there was neither the technological, nor indeed the financial, possibility of Wright's Sky City being built. It was a fantasy designed to impress. So, too, is Burj Dubai – or Burj Khalifa, the Khalifa Tower, as we must now call it, after it was renamed yesterday in honour of the president of the United Arab Emirates.
And Wright was its inspiration. Burj Khalifa is the work of the grand old Chicago architectural firm of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, world leaders in design of supertall buildings. SOM, as it is known, has drunk very deeply of Wright's intoxicating brew of techno-mysticism and physical daring. But, touchingly and significantly, Fazlur Khan, SOM's engineering genius whose experiments ultimately made Burj Khalifa possible, was born not in a big Western city but in Bhandarikandi, Shibchur Upazila near Dhaka.
Khan invented a new way of building tall. In the Middle Ages, masonry structures could not reach higher than the great European cathedrals: both the practicalities of hauling stone skywards with only wooden winding gear and wooden scaffolding, plus the structural requirement for unfeasibly thick walls to create stability, limited the masons' reach for Heaven.
Then, in the late 19th century, steel-framed buildings were developed in Chicago: giving the load-bearing job to structural metal made masonry redundant. Walls were there only to keep out the weather and the conventional skyscraper was born.
So Fazlur Khan created the unconventional skyscraper. Reversing the logic of the steel frame, he decided that the building's external envelope could – given enough trussing, framing and bracing – be the structure itself. This made buildings even lighter. The "bundled tube" meant buildings no longer need be boxlike in appearance: they could become sculpture.
Khan's amazing insight – he was name-checked by Obama in his Cairo University speech last year – changed both the economics and the morphology of supertall buildings. And it made Burj Khalifa possible: proportionately, Burj employs perhaps half the steel that conservatively supports the Empire State Building.
Fazlur Khan died in 1982, just a few years after he had completed Chicago's Sears Tower (then the world's tallest building), but Burj Khalifa is the ultimate expression of his audacious, lightweight design philosophy. And it is at the extreme outer limits of our understanding of structures. Some say scarily so.
There are three seismic fault zones in the UAE area, although Dubai itself is thought to be at low risk because of its particular soil structure. Yet if I were enjoying the view from, say, the 140th floor, I would not be able to help musing with a frisson of alarm that the geologically unstable Iran was not too far away. Indeed, minor tremors are often felt in Dubai.
The engineers say this is no threat, since the Burj's structure is inherently stable: its tapering profile and cautious weight distribution mean the heights may be psychologically demanding for the timorous but are, at least in theory, secure.
The summit, they say, where the residential floors are only eight metres across, is as secure as a knitting needle set in concrete. Indeed, Burj Khalifa dispenses with a pendulum-like mass-damper, which some supertalls use to moderate incidental movements.
Yet three years ago there were reports that concrete floor slabs had already cracked after suffering significant deflections. New Civil Engineer reported that carbon-fibre was urgently being used in remedial attempts to strengthen the floors. An expert told the same journal "things have to be pretty bad" before you start repairing a half-built building.
The contractors admit that Burj has already settled by several inches. True, all buildings settle and flex, otherwise they would crumble or snap, but – call me feeble – I'd be alarmed to watch standing waves in the lavatory bowl in a howling desert storm as my bundled tube creaked and shimmied its way into the shifting sands and Hades beyond.
There are other daunting technological and practical problems with such a building. Aerospace engineers will imagine the most horrible thing that could possibly happen to a wing and then design it to withstand several times as much force. But aerospace engineers are working in an older technological tradition than designers of supertall buildings: certainly, the tapering profile of Burj Khalifa helps diminish the effect of the wind, but variables and unknown unknowns remain. We have only small knowledge of how such an extreme structure responds to wind-induced dynamic torque.
Then there is the more prosaic matter of lifts, or how to shift a lot of people a vertical kilometre without a jetpack. At the World Trade Center (whose rather different lightweight design might have contributed to the vastness of the calamity) the lifts were organised into three sectors, breaking the journey. Burj Khalifa uses a similar staggered device: vertical ascents (at a nauseating 26mph) are divided into sections; passengers de-lift in a sky lobby – or what I would call a sweaty paranoia centre. Fire? Don't even think about it … or dive into the Jacuzzi.
But even more interesting than the technology is the art. Just as the great heroes of first generation Modernism were architects, artists and designers – Moholy-Nagy, Rodchenko, Tatlin – who came not from the cosmopolitan centres of Europe but its feral fringes, so the supertalls of the new century are being built in the Gulf and Asia, not in Coventry or Dortmund. And to a design principle created by a visionary Bangladeshi engineer avid to exploit his own idealised version of the American architectural dream.
In 1999, a research director at Deutsche Bank called Andrew Lawrence published an irreverent, but deadly accurate, paper called the Skyscraper Index. Here, Lawrence proposed a link – cause or symptom, could be either – between very tall buildings and economic crises. Thus, New York's Metropolitan Life building was finished just before the 1907 depression. The Chrysler Building was a contemporary of the Wall Street Crash and AT&T's preposterous Chippendale pedimented horror of 1984 by Philip Johnson only just preceded the company's inglorious unbundling.
It's all a matter of hubris. When in 1973 Gordon Metcalf of Sears opened the new Chicago building Fazlur Khan had created for him, he most incautiously said the biggest retailer in the world deserved its biggest building. Standing beneath Khan's mighty, cross-braced structure, Metcalf could not even see Kmart coming, let alone online shopping. Sears departed on a journey of value destruction and became a much smaller retailer with a very large building. (In a footnote to the history of corporate vanity, the Sears Building was recently rebranded the Willis Building.)
Burj Khalifa is the architectural equivalent of this same vanity, elevated to propaganda. Corporations want, or wanted, supertalls to exploit what Tom Wolfe called "kerbflash", that liminal effect which a dramatic architectural profile achieves. And now, rapidly developing, if structurally parlous, economies such as Dubai use architecture as advertising in much the same way as AT&T or Pittsburgh Plate Glass once did.
Height is an expression and a metaphor of ambition, but – equally – as Freud knew, falling is a universal fear. Dubai's economy will probably recover, but the Burj Khalifa will very likely be the last of its kind this particular Emirate builds.
Paradoxically, Burj Khalifa is not a truly modern building. It is a hangover of a demented spending binge. It is a subprime Great Pyramid. It is queasy nostalgia for a version of the future that looked old-fashioned a generation ago. It is kitsch retro fantasia, a glassy memorial to something not so much forgotten as never known.
Sublime to the point of being frightening, Burj Khalifa is archaically greedy with energy and resources. It is a modern building in the sense that – like Zaha Hadid's new MAXXI museum in Rome – it was built for vainglory rather than for purpose. Vast in size but small in meaning, Burj is a lot more stuff, but less idea.
I have a vision of it now, several years hence, its glossy surfaces dulled by sandstorms, embarrassing stress-fractures in its shiny, arrogant face. It will be an ancient monument surprisingly soon. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.
Comments: 46
If the same tower was built in Britain then you would never hear the end of it. Take the London eye for instance, its a giant ferris wheel. British people are all just jealous. Anyway sort out your own problems in your recession hit nasty cold and grim land.
I am lucky, I for one have sat on the top of this thing and it is a beautiful , gracefully proportioned building. Of course it is an exercise in wasteful extravagence but what work of art isn't? The sad thing is, if it isn't already, it will probably become the tallest white elephant which would be a pity.
I am lucky, I for one have sat on the top of this thing and it is a beautiful , gracefully proportioned building. Of course it is an exercise in wasteful extravagence but what work of art isn't? The sad thing is, if it isn't already, it will probably become the tallest white elephant which would be a pity.
I would hate to be between floors, near the top, if and when the electricity is cut off.
To Khan: Re: Brit jealousy that Asians etc. are better off without them. Get a grip man!
Krishna @ 09.07am. And, they sure go bankrupt BIG!.
Please note that occidental countries like UK, France, Spain, Italy, are entirely filled with arrogant buildings (at the time they were built) which quickly became purposeless and require costly maintenance. The Eiffel tower, built to be the tallest building ever has barely more usable surface than the ground it is built on...talk about purposeless vanity. The giant Versailles is mostly cold and empty... and most french say furiously than Burj Dubai is pure vanity, the Babel tower. This is so pathetic.
You people (European and Americans ) don't even try to the amount you spend on military which is 1.2 trillion dollars every year, Your military budget is 80% of world's total military budget. So why don't you start with this topic if you really want some change.
I disagree with Daniel’s comment that this is a “nice article”. Einstein advised that “everything should be made as simple as possible” while my English professor warned that “big words disguise small minds: complexity creates confusion”. The first paragraph sums up the article’s style: "...sublime, coruscating, vitreous surfaces of the blasphemously vertiginous...". Really? Is the author trying to impress his illiterate girlfriend? Rima’s hope that fewer “people [presumably Westerners] will now picture Arabs as nomads herding goats” seems to miss the mark on Western stereotypes. Sadly, Rima, goat herders would be an improvement on the West’s current view. As for the Burj’s architecture, I do not know enough about structural engineering or Middle Eastern aesthetics to comment. Structurally, I presume that if a building survives time and the elements (never mind its own weight) it is better than a building that collapses. Aesthetically, from a European perspective, proportion and beauty are more important than size. If the Burj were a quarter of its height, would its beauty garner the same attention? The Mona Lisa is 77cm x 53cm, the Sistine Chapel ceiling is 40m x 13m, and I have never heard an art critic declare that the Sistine Chapel is better because it is bigger.
Sears Tower isn't cross-braced as the article claims. It's the Hancock building in Chicago that has the cross-bracing & is about 1100 feet tall. It's a single tube, also engineered by Fazlur Khan several years earlier. Sears Tower has nine bundled tubes, each 90 feet square & only two of the tubes go all the way to the top.
Mr. Bayley's comments read like the ugliest of The Fountainhead's Ellsworth Toohey, exercising self promotion via the use of literary references and thesaurus derived adjectives meant to impress the easily impressed. Mr. Bayley's biography reads much like Mr. Toohey's, all critic and no creation. How about congratulations for an achievement without parallel - audacious, extreme, a pinnacle of what man knows how to do today, and could not do yesterday. Like the Concorde, the Burj makes the absolute extreme seem conventional, and is all the more glorious for doing it with seemingly little effort. If one understands the magnitude of the challenge, one recognizes the size of the achievement.
One thing with Dubai;They Think Big - They Aim Big - They Achieve Big - A testimony to their Rulers Vision - A person with a clear & concrete mission - surely this is the 8th wonder of the world - eager to see what next from Dubai - we know they are unstoppable.
this thing is going to be a terrible money pit. the cost of upkeep will be funny to watch. this was built for no real purpose other than to show off. i give it ten-15 years before it becomes an unsustainable and virtually empty. then it won't be long before it must be torn down as it cracks apart from lack of upkeep.
BABEL! we were thinking it, just not daring enough to be saying it / Here in Japan, the TV news treat this as being a ridiculous endeavor in any economic climate. Interesting how failed their economy became after all this, and how "big brother next door" bailed them out of their debts. / Vanity & INSanity together.
Stephen Bayley clearly knows a lot about vanity. This is one of the most pompous, factually incorrect pieces of drivel I have ever read.
I am surprised that a paper like the Telegraph could actually have an article like this on its pages and website...it reeks of envy and is derogatory is every possible manner. Journalists like him should stick to facts rather than show their personal prejudice against a marvel that is Burj Khalifa
It is very nice and impressive building I like it very much And the biggest in the world who have Tover
I was ignorant of the slave labour the first time I visited Dubai. When I found out I felt guilty drinking a coffee in Starbucks there. Not only do they work for 5$ a day, having been tricked into paying for a visa and having to work their way home, the Indians often protest on the streets because their pay is months late. One man a day dies on building sites in Dubai from heat stroke. Shame on you Dubai.
Its a mirage... In the long run, the desert wins... This is a good article and follows the thread from the significant account :'The dark side of Dubai' by Johann Hari. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html Appreciate the perspective that cuts through the advertising smoke screen.
Moslems around the world should stop and think about the myth of Moslem brotherhood. While Dubai spends billions in vanity, many millions of Moslems around the world starve to death or live in subhuman conditions - including those in Palestine. If Moslems thought about it, it would be the end of AlQaeda and Taliban because they would understand that Moslems are Moslems' greatest enemy.
Great article. Very informative and well written too. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with the readers.
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