Arabian Heights

In New York in March 2003, Amirault and Booth met SOM partners Adrian Smith, Bill Baker, and Efstathiou for an initial interview. Soon after that, Emaar invited SOM—with its long history of skyscraper design, from Lever House to the Sears Tower to the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site—to enter a competition for a new 1,800-foot residential building in Dubai. Also invited were Kohn Pedersen Fox, Cesar Pelli and Associates, Carlos Ott, and Denton Corker Marshall. They gave the firms two weeks to make a proposal.

“SOM was the unanimous winner, and everyone’s favorite design,” Amirault wrote to me. “It had the heroic, romantic massing qualities of the great New York skyscrapers, but had a modern skin and was technically state of the art. They also picked up subtle references to Islamic architecture in the arched plan shapes, which appealed to our Emirati staff [who] worried that the building would look like it could belong anywhere.”

The first week of the competition, SOM came up with the original design; the second week, they made the drawings. Smith, the lead designer (he has since left SOM to open his own practice, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill), says he knew what he wanted to do from the start. At that initial meeting, he says, “We showed them projects we’d done: the Jin Mao tower in Shanghai, Sears, Hancock, 7 South Dearborn, and some other schemes that didn’t get built. And one of the comments they made was that they really liked the Tower Palace 3’s Y-shaped plan—they thought it looked great for residential.” (They were referring to the Seoul tower Smith designed for Samsung, a project that briefly held the title of the world’s tallest residential building.)

Smith agreed with them. “I knew what I wanted to do right off the bat: step back and spiral it up,” he says. The final design, as it turned out, would resemble the original idea fairly closely: a tapered tower, with asymmetric steps to protect against wind forces, with three legs at the base.

The tapering effect is an attractive look, but it’s also a structural tactic. “The biggest force on the building is wind,” explains Efstathiou, who is managing partner at SOM and is overseeing the project from start to finish.

“When you start changing the profile of the tower as it goes up, you start confusing the wind forces; they never get organized. So our design keeps changing profile, and the wind never achieves a harmonic movement.”

In addition to the tapering, the SOM team designed a buttressed core—a six-sided core within the three-footed Y shape. “Take buildings, for instance, that are long and rectangular—slab buildings,” says Bill Baker, the chief structural engineer on the project. “Those buildings are strong in the long direction, but challenged in the short. So we took three and put them together, essentially, so two wings are catching the wind and the third is holding the other two guys up.”

The challenge facing Smith was to design a 2,000-plusfoot tower that, because of its desert site, lacks much in the way of an urban context or cultural references. He started with the onion dome shape, widely used in traditional Islamic architecture. “But I didn’t want it to be overt,” he explains. “So I tried to use it in plan, but not in section. The onion dome is always done in section, seeing it against the profile of the sky. I didn’t use it in that way, except when you’re close to the building and you look straight up. I was hoping people would see it that way and say, ‘Ah!’”

For his part, Baker had been spending some of his time thinking about issues of scale, looking at everything from Galileo’s comparisons of human bones and dinosaur bones to the botanist D’arcy Wentworth Thompson’s studies on why organisms are structured and shaped the way they are. Later, after finishing the structural design, he was asked to lecture on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile-High Tower, which led him to do a comparison to satisfy his own interest. (“His building would have twisted, I think,” Baker said, adding that Wright’s tower did have similar scaling to the Burj.)

Emaar took two weeks with the proposal, then announced that they liked the design and wanted to begin a conversation about fees. Efstathiou flew to Dubai to negotiate a price (which he declines to reveal). The deal was done at Vu’s, a bar that sits on the 51st floor of one of the Emirates Towers, a pair of buildings finished in 1999—still the 13th and the 27th tallest in the world—and which, at least while the Burj remains unfinished, are sometimes referred to as the most prestigious addresses in the Middle East.

Efstathiou was ecstatic and called Chicago to break the news. “Most of our buildings are well-known, very visible, but this one is the most visible ever,” Efstathiou said. “This only happens once.”

According to Efstathiou, redesign began almost immediately after making the deal. On his next trip, he says, he heard the same words he would hear repeatedly over the next four years. Can we go a little bigger?

There is some disagreement over who, or what, drove the height increases—Smith says Emaar wanted to reserve the ability to make the Burj taller if another, bigger building were announced, but the developers were satisfied initially with 1,800 feet, or 550 meters; it was he who wanted to make it bigger. “It wasn’t finishing properly at 550,” he told me. “I needed more height to complete the stepping and the reduction of the tower’s mass as it went up.”

Efstathiou says the impetus came from Emaar. “We start doing the working drawings. And they say stop again: ‘We want to go a little higher.’ The other thing that was happening,” he continues, “I can’t even talk about the number, but we’re getting close to Mohamed Alabbar’s lucky number, and so why not go to that number? We’re above 700 meters at this point, I can tell you. And then you look up a little higher, and you say, ‘Look, a half-mile’s not that far away! What about a kilometer? We could go to a kilometer!’”

(They’re both right, says Amirault: Smith and Alabbar both wanted to make the top third of the building more slender, “and our chairman wanted to get to a higher figure than the earlier 705-meter design.”)

What is certain is that the building just kept getting taller. “So we finally,” Efstathiou concludes, “came to a number, and we’re almost done, and then they say again, ‘Can you crank that spire up?’” Emaar asked about height increases as recently as December 2006, he says, with construction already over 100 floors.

Despite its celestial reach, back down on the ground, the Burj has not escaped its share of political controversy. Last March, laborers working on the Dubai Mall rioted over wages and working conditions, causing an estimated $1 million in damages. None of the laborers working on the Burj itself took part, apparently, but because it is part and parcel of the same huge project, the riot called unwanted attention to the building.

What the riot mainly did was galvanize human-rights groups to criticize Dubai’s treatment of its workforce. There are 4,000 laborers working day and night on the Burj itself, 20,000 on the whole project. These workers come almost exclusively from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—some 80 percent of Dubai’s residents are foreign, and the heavy work is done almost entirely by temporary workers from South Asia. Laborers are paid around $4 a day; skilled carpenters make a little less than $8.

The fact that Dubai has hundreds of thousands of poor immigrant workers building the city from the ground up hardly distinguishes it from a host of world cities throughout history. But although no nation is eager to display its lowest social and economic rungs for public scrutiny, the attention here has been so skillfully focused on the wealth in the sky that these issues tend to be largely ignored. This is another marketing triumph, of course—Dubai has capitalized on, and to some extent manipulated, a version of the West’s imaginary East, essentially the picture of Arab chieftains in white robes and sandals, talking on cell phones encrusted with diamonds.

It’s no surprise, then, that the marketing language for the Burj Dubai is overheated. Even the sign outside the worksite announcing the current floor level (it changes by about a floor every three days) proclaims: “HISTORY RISING.” As Emaar and, by extension, Sheikh Mohammed have it, the Burj Dubai is an inspiration for mankind, a beacon of progress; it is the endpoint of a story that stretches from the pyramids through the great cathedrals of Europe to the skyscrapers of America; it’s the beginning of a new story, the crowning of Dubai as a prince of cities. The development is, simply enough, the “most prestigious square kilometer on the planet.”

Part of the genius of Dubai’s self-assertion is its coupling of modernity with myth: The form of its opulence is at once a business model and a fabulous dream. And mythmaking has, obviously, been a large part of the marketing of the Burj Dubai itself: an instant landmark; sign and symbol of a new global emphasis. (Although Emaar claims, for instance, that Adrian Smith took his inspiration for the building design from a six-pointed desert flower, Smith admitted in 2005 that the flower idea had come after he had completed the design—that it was, essentially, a marketing tool.)

So far, the marketing has worked. Before even the first floor was built, every residential unit had been sold over two evenings of an invitation-only sale. Well before the building is finished, Emaar has reportedly made back its investment.

And Dubai, you could say, has made back its investment as well. Its campaign of construction was supposed to compete with the great cities of the world. But already, it has begun to compete mostly with itself. Another Emirati developer, Nakheel Properties, is preparing a tower project. Still in the design concept stage, some reports have announced that it will be called Al Burj, and that it will reach 4,000 feet into the sky.

“I think it will probably happen, once Burj Dubai is up,” Smith says. “They’ll wait to see how high it is, and then start building higher.”

Dan Halpern has written for magazines including The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times Magazine.