DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – If ever a skyscraper was burdened with great expectations, it is the Burj Dubai, the colossal, half-mile-high tower designed by Chicago architects that opens today! This high-rise isn’t simply meant to shatter height records. It is supposed to be a national icon, a symbol for a madly exuberant, now debt-ridden, city-state that mixes the manufactured spectacle of Las Vegas with the helter-skelter growth of Houston.
The building sits at twice the size of The Empire State Building and can be seen from 60 miles away!
Rising improbably from what was desert just six years ago and housing an Armani hotel, about 1,000 condominiums, small offices for jetting-setting magnates and an observatory for the masses, the $1.5 billion Burj Dubai is by no means immune from this emirate’s maddening “build now, plan later” mentality. It is far easier to reach by car than by foot, and even the roads leading to it are a maze. A nearby rail stop on Dubai’s new transit line will open Monday, but that is about as green, or energy-saving, as this project gets. In addition, little effort has been made to have the skyscraper culminate long urban vistas, as the Eiffel Tower does so magnificently in Paris.
