Burj Khalifa
The tallest structure and building in the world at 828 meters, with 163 floors organized around a tripartite Y-shaped plan that draws on the geometry of the Hymenocallis desert flower, reducing wind loading as the tower rises through a series of setback tiers. The building combines residential apartments, the Armani Hotel, corporate suites, and the observation deck At the Top on the 124th floor in a single vertical mixed-use complex. The mechanical systems — particularly the water distribution and pressurization required for a building of this height — required engineering solutions invented specifically for the project.
The Burj Khalifa is the defining engineering monument of the 21st century's first decade and the fullest expression of the ambitions of the Gulf states to build globally recognizable architectural symbols. Its construction validated the high-performance building systems — wind engineering, structural damping, vertical transportation — that will be necessary to build the supertall and megatall towers that climate-driven density requirements will demand in the coming decades.
Completed in 2010 at the nadir of the global financial crisis that had devastated Dubai's real estate market, the Burj Khalifa was funded by the neighboring Emirate of Abu Dhabi — reflected in its renaming from Burj Dubai to Burj Khalifa after a bailout. Dubai's transformation from a small fishing village to a global destination in fifty years is the most rapid urbanization in history, and the Burj Khalifa is its most literal monument.
Advances in CAD and structural analysis software allowed architects to design and engineers to calculate complex curved surfaces that were previously impossible to build. Frank Gehry's use of CATIA aircraft software for the Guggenheim Bilbao and Zaha Hadid's parametric approach to fluid form both depended entirely on computation, opening a period in which the expressiveness of architecture was limited only by fabrication budgets rather than geometric convention.