Burj Khalifa — skyscraper
Image by JESHOOTS-com from Pixabay

Burj Khalifa

  • 2 min read
  • 25.197° N 55.274° E

Interesting facts

  • During Ramadan, residents above the 150th floor break their fast a few minutes later than those at street level, because they see the sun set later.
  • The air at the top of the tower is thought to be about 6 °C cooler than at its base.
  • The tower rests on 192 concrete piles, each 1.5 metres wide and 43 metres long, buried more than 50 metres deep.
  • Builders pumped concrete to a then world-record height of 606 metres during construction.
  • Construction used about 330,000 cubic metres of concrete and 55,000 tonnes of steel reinforcing bar.
  • The façade is clad in more than 26,000 reflective glass panels, and cleaning all of them takes a team of 36 workers three to four months.
  • The steel spire alone is made of more than 4,000 tonnes of structural steel.
  • The building supplies an average of about 946,000 litres of water a day through some 100 km of pipes.
  • At the peak of construction in 2008 about 7,500 skilled workers were on site, and the whole project took some 22 million man-hours.
  • The tower cost an estimated US$1.5 billion to build.

Why it is worth it

At 829.8 metres to the tip of its spire, the Burj Khalifa has been the tallest building on Earth since it opened in January 2010, taking the title from Taipei 101. It rises out of Downtown Dubai beside Sheikh Zayed Road, and it was conceived less as an office tower than as the anchor of an entire new district: the Dubai Mall, an artificial lake, hotels and residential blocks were all planned around it. Construction started in January 2004 and the exterior was finished in October 2009. During the build it was called Burj Dubai; it was renamed at the opening ceremony after Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE, whose federal government had helped Dubai through the debt crisis that followed 2008.

The design came from the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Adrian Smith as chief architect and Bill Baker as structural engineer. The plan is a three-lobed Y around a buttressed central core, a shape chosen to make the most of apartment and hotel space while the wings brace the tower. As it climbs, the building steps back 27 times in a spiral, so that the wind never meets the same profile twice and the vortices that would make it sway are broken up. Smith has said the three-wing plan owes something to Lake Point Tower in Chicago, and the motif is often read as a desert flower; the park at its base was designed around the same idea, the Hymenocallis lily. The top 244 metres are a steel spire with very little usable space; the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has noted that the spire alone would count as a skyscraper.

Inside, the lower floors hold the Armani Hotel, the middle section around 900 private apartments, and the upper levels offices and the viewing floors. The main observation deck, At the Top, is on the 124th floor at 452 metres; a higher deck opened on the 148th floor in 2014, and in 2019 The Lounge raised the building's highest public space to 585 metres. On a clear day the views reach far out over the Gulf and the desert. The double-deck lifts travel at up to 10 metres per second, and at ground level the Dubai Fountain, a 270-metre choreographed fountain, plays on the lake in front of the tower.

Getting there

The tower stands in Downtown Dubai, about 1.4 km from the Business Bay district. Dubai International Airport (DXB) is 11.4 km away; Al Maktoum International (DWC) at Dubai South is about 35 km. The nearest metro stop is Burj Khalifa/Dubai Mall on the Red Line of the Dubai Metro.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

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From the encyclopaedia

The Burj Khalifa is a megatall skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Designed by the SOM architectural firm, it is the world's tallest structure, with a total height of 829.8 m and a roof height of 828 m (2,717 ft). It has been the tallest building in the world since its complete inauguration in 2011, surpassing Taipei 101, which had held the record since 2004.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

25.19722, 55.27417per Wikidata