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As an emblem of the change of decade, there is nothing more deliciously poignant than yesterday's opening of the $4 billion, 818-metre latest tallest building in the world, the Burj Dubai. It wraps up all the fantasy and excess, the hubris, recklessness and spectacle of the past 10 years into a single, glittering, photogenic, headline-friendly package.
This silver needle is Dubai's most beautiful building (which is admittedly not hard), and it doesn't just inch ahead of its rivals to be the tallest: it utterly spanks them. It is 60 per cent higher than the now-deposed Taipei 101 tower. Like the Empire State Building, it is unlikely to be surpassed for a generation.
Also like the Empire State Building, which opened early in the Great Depression, and which for years was known as the Empty State Building due to its lack of tenants, Dubai's icon of vitality coincides with financial collapse. Indeed, record-breaking towers are often harbingers of doom: Chicago's Sears Tower of 1974 opened during the Seventies oil shock; Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers (1997) accompanied a collapse of Asian currencies.
The poetry of the Burj comes from its mismatch of symbol and reality. With unblinking optimism expressed in every blade of steel, it proclaims Dubai's dynamism, but anyone who reads the news knows that the emirate is not quite as lively as it used to be. The tower is a pratfall on a heroic scale. The Burj is also testimony to mankind's ability to confuse buildings with the uses they are supposed to serve. We think that if we build buildings that look powerful, we will be powerful, and history is littered with structures that proclaimed unending imperium of one culture or another, at the point when that imperium was about to fade. The British built a capital in New Delhi 10 years before they left India. The completion of the Parthenon coincided with the war that would destroy Athens' supremacy.
Businesses and governments fall for the lure of putting up buildings as proxies for action or to create illusions of stability. The New York Times has built a gleaming white tower on Manhattan at a time when its fortunes are more troubled than ever. The completion of the splendid Lloyd's Building in the Eighties coincided with disastrous losses for Lloyd's underwriters. It's hard to believe that the current immense investment in school buildings will necessarily lead to better education. We will need good teachers, too.
Individuals suffer similar illusions with their own homes, and architects often tell of couples who commission images of domestic bliss, like new kitchens and conservatories, when what they really need is a divorce.
As for Dubai, its great financial bubble would not have been possible without the illusion created by construction. Because cranes were swinging and towers built, it was easy to imagine that they contained money-making businesses, even if they were in fact empty.
The Burj Dubai is an end rather than a beginning. It is the end of a global construction binge that won't come back immediately. Hopefully it will end the idea that the skyscraper, an invention more than a century old, is the acme of modernity. But it won't end the delusion that architecture is a short-cut to solving our problems, as that one is millennia old.
Reader views (3)
It's good to have the world's tallest building in the world.
It's amazingly beautiful, yet looking deeper, the upper top most levels are simply storage area they're too small to be used as practical space.It houses a 7-star hotel that designed n furnished by Giorgio Armani. I could imagine how awesome it is~
Hope to be there one day.
- Maximillion Zhen Ron, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 07/01/2010 16:31
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My name is Ozymandias, king of kings
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair
- Ahenobarbus, Orpington, 06/01/2010 23:07
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Ultimate wow of all pinnacles. What a symbol of beautiful landmark! This is the most beautiful and elegant the tallest building has been/will be ever built.
- Mr. Kamal Indiana, england, 05/01/2010 15:34
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