In the Land of Zoot, Dubai Takes Things to a New Level

On January 4, 2010, Dubai, one of the seven Emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates on the Arabian Sea, revealed to the world, in full spectacle, not only the world’s tallest skyscraper, but the world’s tallest man-made structure ever at a stunning sky-topping 2,717 feet (828 meters). Something current Chicagoans may not either know or remember: the one and only Frank Lloyd Wright designed and proposed over five decades ago a similar tower, to be built in Chicago and called “The Illinois”, that would have dwarfed even the Burj Khalifa. More on that later.

Known as the “Burj Dubai”, or Dubai Tower over the five years of its construction, Dubai offered homage to Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, ruler of Abu Dhabi, largely responsible for the recent, huge infusion of billions of dollars into debt-ridden and real estate rich – until recently so – Dubai, by renaming it in his honor on opening day. Dubai has become, in the last two decades, the playground of the uber-rich, embarking on an unprecedented building spree that includes, among other things, islands built in the shape of palm trees with homes and condos for exclusive vacationers and a fully enclosed year-round snow skiing resort http://www.skidubai.com/.

Construction started September 21, 2004, and the ultimate height of the tower was clothed in secrecy until the “unveiling” of the tower on January 4 – to a spectacular show of lights, fireworks, music, and general celebration. There’s an interesting time-lapse animated video showing the phases of construction on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Burj_Dubai_Evolution.ogv

Its height is truly remarkable – some 1,000 feet taller than any previously built skyscraper, and nearly 700 feet taller than any structure ever erected, including the still-extant KVLY-TV http://valleynewslive.tv/info/info_tower.html mast in Blanchard, North Dakota, USA, at some 2,063 feet (628.8 meters), a guyed mast television tower erected in 1963 in 33 working days by a crew of eleven. By contrast, the Burj Khalifa took more than five years to build, with over 58,900 cubic yards of concrete used to construct the concrete and steel foundation, featuring 192 piles, each pile buried more than 164 feet (50 meters) deep. Another 431,600 cubic yards of concrete and 55,000 tons of steel rebar were used in the tower’s construction. A staggering twenty-two million man-hours were required over the period of construction – think of that any way you like – like the entire population of, say, Australia http://www.australia.com/ working for an hour, or one poor sot working 22,000,000 hours - that’s 916,667 days, or 2,511 years non-stop.

The Burj Khalifa was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, which also designed the Willis Tower http://www.willistower.com/ (formerly the Sears Tower) in Chicago, Illinois and 1 World Trade Center in New York City, among numerous other famous high-rises. The building resembles the bundled tube form of the Willis Tower, but is not a tube structure. Its design is reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's vision for The Illinois, a mile-high skyscraper designed for Chicago.

Speaking of The Illinois, Frank Lloyd Wright, near the end of his long career and long life, proposed and designed that skyscraper as his answer to the New York skyline that he decidedly did not find appealing. He wanted to have, for his beloved Chicago, a colossal structure that would far outreach anything proposed before – or, frankly, since. Comparing the eminent architect’s design drawings to the Burj Khalifa, one can easily discern the striking similarities. No wonder that design architect Adrian Smith, himself a Chicagoan and the lead designer of the Burj Khalifa, looked back to Wright’s design motif to bring into the present that which Wright could find no support for in the past.

At a stunning 5,280 feet, The Illinois was intended to be built in Chicago, was to include 528 stories, with a gross area of 18.46 million square feet. The mile high tower was never built. Frank Lloyd Wright intended his Mile High Illinois skyscraper to be the focal point of Broadacre City, the theoretical city, he began planning in the 1920s. Because the Broadacre project was an exploration of horizontal space, a one-mile-high skyscraper might at first seem out of place—but by the 1950s Wright had decided that some cities were “incorrigible,” and that even Broadacre City could use a tall building as a cultural and social hub. The foundation of Wright’s building was a massive column, shaped like an inverted tripod, sunk deeply into the ground. This supported a slender, tapering tower with cantilevered floors. In keeping with his belief that architecture ought to be organic, Wright likened this system to a tree trunk with branches. He planned to use gold-tinted metal on the facade to highlight angular surfaces along balconies and parapets and specified Plexiglas for window glazing. Inside the building, mechanical systems were to be housed inside hollow cantilevered beams. To reach the building’s upper floors, Wright proposed atomic-powered elevators that could carry 100 people.

To be sure, Wright’s vision was not realized in 1956, when he proposed it, nor, really, in 2010, with the Burj Khalifa. Wright’s plan was even more outlandish and spectacular than the Burj Khalifa – and certainly now the Burj is planting seeds in the minds of budding architects and designers about things to come. With a half-mile tower standing in the sun against the critics in 2010, who’s to say that Wright’s vision might not come to fruition in another generation….