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HIGH & MIGHTY
There is a theory, which has proven remarkably prescient, that the beginning of the construction of the tallest building in the world is an inevitable harbinger of recession. There is no more exquisite illustration of this notion than the Burj Dubai. Standing at 818 metres (2,684 feet) and 162 storeys, this is architecture to crick your neck. Tapering as it rises to a needle-thin spire, the building seems to embody its own vanishing point, to disappear into the sky before it even ends. Its stepped form faintly evokes the art deco style, which defined the first generation of super-tall structures in New York. In the late 1920s, the Chrysler and Empire State buildings raced each other to become the tallest in the world and were only completed after the 1929 crash when they subsequently remained half empty for decades. Similarly, the newly built World Trade Centre towers were left empty and unlet in the dire stagflation of the mid-1970s which saw New York City bankrupt, crime-ridden and at its lowest ebb. The celebrations of the passing of the baton to Asia with the completion of the Petronas Towers saw the collapse of the Asian markets in 1997. And so with the Burj Dubai. As I write this, the papers are still stuffed with shocking headlines about Dubai developers’ desperate requests for moratoriums on interest repayments and the jittery markets caused by the uncertainty of the emirate’s financial position. The collapse in the Dubai bubble has been as spectacular as its emergence.
Yet none of these headlines can detract from the fact that, while it is perhaps entirely unnecessary, the Burj Dubai is a thing of real beauty. In the endless expanse of PR blather about its height and its importance and subsequently in its becoming a cipher for Dubai’s now defunct mission to have the biggest, tallest and most expensive of everything, the tower’s extraordinary architecture has been lost.
The Burj Dubai’s plan is derived from an Islamic motif, the petals of a stylised flower and its structure builds on advances the architects, SOM, made in the construction of the exquisitely functional Hancock Tower in their hometown of Chicago. The principle is of a series of parallel structures tied together in bundles around a central core. The method makes for a more rigid but far less heavy tower than the traditional system of a monolithic block, as was used in the World Trade Centre towers. It also leads to an elegant, tapering form that seems to owe at least a part of its aesthetic to the stepped-back, Aztec-influenced profiles of the classic New York and Chicago skyscrapers. There was a moment, as the tower was rising, when its silhouette against the night-time sky was among the most beautiful sights in the Middle East, a slender needle of deepest black pricked with a constellation of exposed construction lights. It was an awesome structure, Babylonian in its ambition and so tall it became impossible to judge its scale even against the curtain of looming towers lining the horrible Shaikh Zayed Road.
Unfortunately, when the cladding was added, it slightly spoilt it. While the tower’s profile remains as elegant and compelling as it did, its sheathing in bland, homogenous curtain walling has stripped it of much of its power, its brute presence. Like Brueghel’s representation of the Tower of Babel, which has become our image of that spiralling, doomed mythical structure, the finest moment of the Burj Dubai was in its incompleteness, its seemingly infinite potential to pierce the sky.
The needle of the Burj Dubai seems to have punctured the bubble, the insane inflation of speculative building which has seen Dubai grow from a desert settlement of less than 60,000 at the end of the 1960s to an extravagant metropolis of 1.5 million today and one which was (at least a few months ago) forecast to host over six million tourists a year by 2010.
The Burj Dubai is beginning to appear the perfect symbol of hubris. The skyscraper was memorably described by Cass Gilbert, architect of New York’s 1913 Woolworth Building, as “a machine to make the land pay” but this idea of an infinitely extruded device to maximise site value in concentrated areas of high real-estate costs (from island Manhattan to island Hong Kong, where land is limited) has long faded in favour of its adoption as a symbol. Dubai, more than any other place has used the skyscraper to define its desirability, architecture became not a servant of business but its symbol (this tiny state must be a success, just look at all the skyscrapers).
Ultimately, in the heart of a desert where lack of space was never an issue, the architecture became a billboard to define its own image, to sell itself, to differentiate it from all the other towers. Height is simply the easiest differentiator, the simplest difference. Dubai’s raison d’être was its property bubble, boosterism exempflied. The tower’s opening this month looks set to become the exclamation mark at the end of the bubble. Yet, as all the great skyscrapers have demonstrated, in time, the monument can extricate itself from the absurdity of its creation. As it rose, there were many proposals which aimed to top it, mile-high towers and lunatic spoilers. Yet this tower, overscaled, outrageous, decadent yet undeniably elegant and breathtaking in its ambition, looks destined to be the tallest to be built for a generation. It may yet survive to become more than a symbol.
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