![]() ![]() “There are a number of reasons people try to build very tall. But such supertall buildings rarely pay off financially the Burj itself has had trouble filling up. Tom Cruise even scampered up its side in the film Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol. Now it anchors what’s known as Downtown Dubai, with a massive shopping mall, five-star hotels and office towers. The Burj stands in what was a decade ago a quiet area on the wrong side of town. Still, the drive to build upward continues, in part because supertall buildings can transform an entire city. “These buildings are massive efforts,” Smith says. ![]() Kingdom Tower’s workers spent more than a year simply digging a foundation strong enough to support its structure, which will have 157 occupiable floors and use about 80,000 tons of steel. Financed by the Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the tower will anchor a new suburb of Jidda, called Kingdom City, which the Saudis hope will draw millions of pilgrims traveling to nearby Mecca and Medina.Īlthough Smith says there were few dramatically new technical challenges involved in reaching this height, supertall buildings do not come cheap: the Burj’s final cost was about $1.5 billion. Its vast interior will have 59 elevators-five of them double-deck so they can stop at two floors at once-that will travel at speeds designed to prevent ears popping. When it opens in 2019, it will be the first building ever to exceed 1 km. Then there is Smith’s most extreme project yet: Kingdom Tower in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. Yet Smith will design offices all the way up, rather than pad out its final height-as the Burj and many others do-with a needle-like spire and top floors too narrow for use. Though the new building’s height is a secret, he says the Burj will remain taller. When Smith met TIME in Dubai one evening in June, he had just come from signing a deal across town to design what will be world’s tallest office building (the Burj’s 163 floors have apartments and the Armani Hotel), which will anchor a new mega-development near Dubai’s boat marina, timed to open when the World Expo is held here in 2020. Smith hooked clients in China and the Persian Gulf who were eager to have him try to break his record. The timing was good: Burj Khalifa, which he designed while at SOM, was being built, and oil-rich countries like the United Arab Emirates had plenty of money to spend. He spent decades at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in Chicago, where he began by working on the 459-m (base to tip) Hancock Tower before leaving to start his own firm in that city in 2006. More than a half-century on, Smith is nowhere near done. He says he has held a passion for tall buildings since at least the age of 13, when he began sketching 40-story towers-buildings that would have been hugely tall in the 1950s. Smith offers no gushing commentary about his buildings, preferring the results to speak for themselves. About the only thing that marks the soft-spoken Midwesterner as a “starchitect” is his trademark all-black outfit. Smith is among a small club of architects who design record-tall buildings-though you wouldn’t know if from meeting the 70-year-old. “For that, you need an iconic building.”Īnd if you want that iconic, sky-scraping skyscraper, Adrian Smith is your man. “If you want to be a serious city, you have to show you are serious,” says Alejandro Stochetti, a director of Smith’s company, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture. More than the expression of intricate engineering, the supertall towers have become an outsized shortcut to global importance. Currently, there are about 10 buildings under way that will be higher than 500 m, which is higher than the world’s tallest building in 2003, Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Twin Towers. By 2012 there were nearly triple that number. Just 15 years ago, buildings higher than 200 m were extraordinary, and there were only 263 of them in the world. The scramble to build higher has accelerated so fast in recent years that skyscrapers that awed us last century barely warrant a mention today. From its base to the tip of its spire, the Burj is 830 m-almost double the height of the Empire State Building.Īnd yet the Burj will likely hold on to its title for only a few more years at most. ![]() Five years after it debuted with Dubai-style gaudiness, including a giant fireworks display, the Burj has become a magnet for the roughly 1.5 million people a year who shell out $54 for tickets to the observation deck, perhaps to contemplate how this gravity-defying building stays upright. ![]()
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