Burj Dubai tower

After a disastrous end to 2009 for Dubai investors, the sun-soaked emirate will be attracting attention for all the right reasons today as it officially opens the world's tallest building.

The Burj Dubai tower, a needle-shaped skyscraper which stands more than 800 metres tall and can be seen from 95 kilometres away, will stand as a gleaming testament to Dubai's glory days before the recession ground its construction industry to a halt.

Boasting the world's first Armani hotel on the bottom floors, the Burj Dubai Tower also houses 900 Dubai residences, 37 floors of office space, a fine dining restaurant and an observation deck.

The structure easily surpasses its closest rivals, the KVLY-TV mast in Blanchard in North Dakota, U.S, which measures a lofty 628 metres-high and the Guangzhou TV & Sightseeing Tower in China, which falls short at 610 metres.

The Burj Dubai - literally meaning 'Tower Dubai' - brings records galore to the UAE. As well as being the tallest building in the world, it also has the most stories and highest occupied floor of any building in the world, and ranks as the world's tallest structure. Visitors can look out from the highest observation deck in the world on the 124th floor.

"We weren't sure how high we could go," said Bill Baker, the building's structural engineer. "It was kind of an exploration...a learning experience."

The tower itself is reported to have cost $1.5 billion  - £925 million - and the owners report that nearly 100 per cent of the apartments are sold out. However, the majority of the building's office space has not been taken up and the hotel is not actually finished yet.

Nevertheless, the celebratory opening will take place today with Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Maktoum attending the event. The ceremony will be followed by a spectacular laser and firework display.

From tomorrow visitors will be able to experience a taste of the high life by ascending to the 124th floor in the longest lifts in the world which will take two minutes to travel 504 metres.


Beyond the tower's offerings, the Armani Hotel itself will have eight restaurants, a spa, a luxury chocolate shop and florists as well as an Armani galleria.

But those who cannot afford to stay in rooms designed by Giorgio himself can get a taste of glamour by buying a ticket for the observation deck which will be open from this month.

Strangely, the owners of Burj Dubai, Emaar Properties PJSC, do not want the public to know its exact height, specifying only that it is above 800 metres.

"It's still a secret," said William Baker of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP, the tower's structural engineer.

"The client will only let us say it's more than 800 metres tall. It's part of the mystique of the project."

 

Despite not giving away its exact height, the owners still offer enough facts and figures to make the mind boggle.

The tower's glass and steel exterior would apparently cover 17 football fields if laid out flat and will take some poor workers between six and eight weeks to clean.

The concrete used in the core of the building could build a pavement 1,283 miles long and the cooling system produces enough condensation to fill 20 Olympic swimming pools a year. It's a good thing those eco-conscious developers will be using the waste to water the grounds.

Work on the Burj Dubai began in 2004 and continued rapidly. At times, new floors were being added almost every three days, reflecting Dubai's raging push to reshape itself over a few years from a small-time desert outpost into a cosmopolitan urban giant packed with skyscrapers.

By January 2007, thousands of laborers, many of them brought in on temporary contracts from India, had completed 100 stories.

To ensure the tower doesn't twist or break during bad weather, it is built in a Y-shape, with three 'wings' evenly distributing the building's weight.

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