Just when you thought you knew what the world's tallest building was, prepare to be blown away. The Arab emirate's colossal, multibillion-dollar skyscraper, Burj Dubai/Khalifa, opens for business Monday, stretching 168 stories, with 24,348 glass panels, and 2,716 feet into the desert sky. This building literally has it all. Burj Dubai boasts a towering list of superlatives including: the world's tallest building, the world's tallest free-standing structure, the world's highest occupied floor, the world's highest outdoor observation deck (on the 123rd floor), and the world's longest-traveling elevator (1,640 feet, traveled in two minutes). Burj Dubai is so tall, that the outside air temperature at the top can be as much as 15 degrees cooler than at ground level.
Counting the spire and its podium together, Burj Dubai contains 5 million square feet of floor space, which is actually less than Chicago's Willis (formerly Sears) Tower, the former champion that now ranks No. 5 in the world. (The other tallest buildings, in order, are Taipei 101 in Taiwan, Shanghai World Financial Center in China and Petronas Towers 1 and 2 in Malaysia, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the world's arbiter of building height.) Its design inspired by a desert flower, Burj Dubai is built in a "Y" footprint with three wings; each buttresses the others. At the center is a six-sided concrete hub tying it all together. Included in the structure is the tower's seven-star Armani Hotel, with 160 guest rooms and suites across 10 stories. The 430,000-square-foot hotel, designed and furnished by Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani, features eight restaurants, a spa, swimming pool, library, fitness center and business center, as well as 30,000 square feet of conference and banquet space on "mirror-smooth marble floors," according to the Armani corporate Web site. Armani also has 160 permanent residence suites in the tower, along with a number of high-end shops and boutiques.
Burj Dubai is the extremely tall centerpiece of a massive development that includes five hotels, a huge shopping mall, at least 150 restaurants and 1,200 shops. Entertainment options include the ski resort, an Olympic-size ice skating rink, a 4.6 million-gallon walk-through aquarium, a SEGA game theme park and KidZania, an 80,000-square-foot play village for children. Set in a 30-acre lake that seems incongruous if not impossible in the Arabian desert is the 900-foot-long Dubai Fountain, with nozzles that shoot 22,000 gallons of water as high as a 50-story building. It was designed by the same company that built the fountains at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Nevada. The entire Burj district -- tower, mall, hotels, restaurants -- shares a single cooling system, bringing significant energy economies. Also, engineers took advantage of Dubai's torrid heat and humidity by having the skyscraper's chilled-water piping double as a condenser to produce thousands of gallons of fresh water for irrigation, according to George Efstathiou, Burj Dubai's lead architect and managing partner for the Chicago, Illinois, architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
