The Burj Dubai and architecture's vacant stare

One of the odder, more complicated moments in the history of architectural symbolism will arrive Monday with the formal opening of the Burj Dubai skyscraper. At about 2,600 feet high -- the official figure is still being kept secret by developer Emaar Properties -- and 160 stories, the tower, set back half a mile or so from Dubai's busy Sheikh Zayed Road, will officially take its place as the tallest building in the world.

Designed by Adrian Smith, a former partner in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Burj Dubai is an impossible-to-miss sign of the degree to which architectural ambition -- at least the kind that can be measured in feet or number of stories -- has migrated in recent years from North America and Europe to Asia and the Middle East. It is roughly as tall as the World Trade Center towers piled one atop the other. Its closest competition is Toronto's CN Tower, which is not really a building at all, holding only satellites and observation decks, and is in any case nearly 900 feet shorter.

Monday's ribbon-cutting, though, could hardly come at a more awkward time. Dubai, the most populous member of the United Arab Emirates, continues to deal with a massive real estate collapse that has sent shock waves through financial markets around the world and forced the ambitious city-state, in a significant blow to its pride, to seek repeated billion-dollar bailouts from neighboring Abu Dhabi. Conceived at the height of local optimism about Dubai's place in the region and the world, this seemingly endless bean-stock tower, which holds an Armani Hotel on its lower floors with apartments and offices above, has flooded Dubai with a good deal more residential and commercial space than the market can possibly bear.

And so here is the Burj Dubai's real symbolic importance: It is mostly empty, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Though most of its 900 apartments have been sold, virtually all were bought three years ago -- near the top of the market -- and primarily as investments, not as places to live. ("A lot of those purchases were speculative," Smith, in something of an understatement, told me in a phone interview.) And there's virtually no demand in Dubai at the moment for office space. The Burj Dubai has 37 floors of office space.

Though Emaar is understandably reluctant to disclose how much of the tower is or will be occupied -- it did not reply to e-mails sent this week on that score -- it's fair to assume that like many of Dubai's new skyscrapers it is a long, long way from being full. In that sense the building is a powerful iconic presence in ways that have little directly to do with its record-breaking height. To a remarkable degree, the metaphors and symbols of the built environment have been dominated in recent months by images of unneeded, sealed-off, ruined, forlorn or forsaken buildings and cityscapes. The Burj Dubai is just the latest -- and biggest -- in this string of monuments to architectural vacancy.

The combination of overbuilding during the boom years, thanks to easy credit, and the sudden paralysis of the financial markets in the fall of 2008 has created an unprecedented supply of unwanted or under-occupied real estate around the world. At the same time, rising cultural worry about environmental disaster or some other end-of-days scenario has produced a recent stream of books, movies and photography imagining cities and pieces of architecture emptied of nearly all signs of human presence.

And so in the same week that you could read the news that the Sahara Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas has entirely sealed off two of its three towers (and its buffet!) for the holiday season, citing slow demand, you could head to the multiplex to watch the movie version of Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road," in which a father and son wander through a post-apocalyptic landscape where buildings for the most part have been reduced to burned-out shells.

And it's not just "The Road": The Roland Emmerich destruction-fest "2012" and the upcoming Denzel Washington vehicle "The Book of Eli" are full of similar images; Jason Reitman's "Up in the Air" moves its characters through a series of downsized companies where abandoned desk chairs swim in empty space.

 

Or you might discover online a group of photographs called "Empty L.A.," part of a series completed recently by Matt Logue, showing a number of recognizable intersections and stretches of freeway in and around the city where people, cars and other signs of life have been scrubbed away, presumably through digital manipulation -- and in the same trip around the Internet find a Q&A in Entrepreneur magazine with a man named Mike Enos, who runs a firm that encloses foreclosed houses, half-built hotels and other objects in plastic wrap and reports a surge in business since the economic collapse last year.

This movement in the direction of emptiness is profoundly difficult for contemporary culture -- and particularly American culture -- to grapple with. Occasional recessions and other setbacks aside, we assume that our national trajectory always moves toward fullness, that our cultural progress can be measured by how much new square footage we've created and occupied.

But that process has completely reversed itself in many of cities hardest hit by economic crisis. Detroit, as Rebecca Solnit put it in Harper's Magazine, "is now so depopulated that some stretches resemble the outlying farmland and others are altogether wild." And as P.J. Huffstutter reported recently in The Times, Hantz Farms is planning to buy and plant as many as 5,000 acres of land within the Detroit city limits.

In Los Angeles, there are parking lots where great towers, planned during the exuberant middle of the last decade, were supposed to be. At Rick Caruso's Americana at Brand complex in Glendale, every one of the development's 100 condominiums sat empty during 2009, even as shoppers browsed in the stores below. Occupancy wasn't allowed until more than half of the units had been sold, a mark that was finally reached in December.

As super-tall buildings go, the Burj Dubai is elegant. Smith is an unusually talented shaper of skyscraper form, as he proved at Shanghai's 88-story Jin Mao Tower, which he designed before leaving SOM in 2006. The Burj Dubai's profile, which Smith says is inspired by a range of local influences including sand dunes and minarets, grows more slender as it rises, like a plant whose upper stalks have been peeled away.

But the extent to which the building had to battle worries about the wisdom of its construction even before it was finished -- the way it seemed doomed, at least in financial terms, while it was still going up -- may be unique in the history of skyscraper design. In that sense it seems impossible to write about the Burj Dubai without at least mentioning the Tower of Babel, which also, if the biblical story and various historical sketches are to be believed, combined a tapering, corkscrew design with heaps of overconfidence.

Dubai's economy will recover, at least in some chastened form. But the hyper-confident Dubai that Smith's tower was designed to mark and call global attention to is already dead, as is the broader notion, which the emirate came to symbolize over the last decade, that growth can operate as its own economic engine, feeding endlessly and ravenously on itself.

If the Burj Dubai is too shiny, confidently designed and expertly engineered to be a ruin itself, it is surely the marker -- the tombstone -- for some ruined ideas.

-- Christopher Hawthorne

Top photo: The Burj Dubai. Credit: James Steinkamp.

Middle and bottom: Images from the series "Empty L.A." Credit: Matt Logue.

Comments

[Karen Anderson]

What a sad state of affairs! This building represents the greed of Dubai and nothing more. They want to build bigger and better buildings without realizing that this city-state has nothing to offer but bawdiness. Oil will disappear in 50 years and what is left is a man-made disaster of an arrogant state. The Indians and Filipinos who worked there (or should I say slaved away without basic human rights) are also the losers but the biggest loser remains, the Dubai Arabs better known for their flashy cars, gawdy discos and arrogant attitudes towards the foreigners.

A friend of mine just returned from Dubai; she was shocked to see empty malls and restaurants. A soulless city cursed by the slave laborers of the 21st century much like the Pyramids.

Donal was generous when he said that this will become a fishing village in not-to-distant future. The mighty desert is awaiting a huge meal.

[joan mills]

Why did you fail to include Marshall Strabala, SOM senior associate designer, for design credit of the Burj Dubai. He lead the design team of 45 architects. He and SMith were integral to the design and process.
He and Smith have left SOM.
Interesting, Marshall Strabala, continues to amaze the world with his supertall designs. He is now the designer of 3 of the 10 tallest buildings in the world.
Burj Dubai, Nanjing Greenland Financial (topped in 2010) and the fabulous Shanghai Tower (topped in 2014)

[Richard McDonough]

It is quite a gorgeous building, SOM are to be proud. Compare it's Cathedral like aspect with the ersatz buildings that are seen on the approach in the morning paper's photograph and it takes on even greater grandeur.
The beige school of ersatz things could be in any of the new towns in Southern California, Irvine, for instance, having the look of deliberate impermanence, this while the tower speaks of a long and glorious future.
The "death" of the economy is a bit premature to declare. To do so only shows the inability of the minds of some to see beyond today's reality.

[jleeee]

People can say all the negatives we have been conditioned to associate with the Muslim world, but no one can deny that the Burj Dubai is one beautiful building. And Dubai will turn into a fishing village when Las Vegas turns into a desert pit stop, which is to say, never.

[Lawrence Shore]

An excellent solution for the utilization of hard-to-find desert space.

[Joe Brasi]

It's actually quite ugly. Greed and ego are often ugly.

In one decade the ugly uneeded thing will fall.

[Levinson & Axelrod]

Enjoyed reading this article as well as some of these comments. Thanks!

[dubious]

Hey i got a superb idea!!!!....Why not let the 40,000+ SLAVE LABORERS occupy the tens of hundreds of rooms they so hellishly built for the FAKE ONES!!!...that way it'll give off the ill--usion of NO VACANCY!!!...god knows they slaved miserably hard and earned it!!!..

[jr]

the writer is right,dubai is a joke,it is useless,who wants to go to the desert,but most of all vanity and Greed has got the whole world.
when you try to live beyond your means it will fail.people have forgotten GOD and we are done,i don't see this economy turning around and the tower of Babel really fits. RIP

[Olie]

The Burj Dubai is an example of what can be accomplished when people choose to work towards a common goal. Not only is it a work of art but its also functional!

[Donald Frazell]

Everything must have Purpose to last and be of use. What exactly is this?

[Graham]

My internet company looked at Dubai as a place to set up our global head office. They have a IT free trade zone within the Emirate.

We scrapped the idea when we tried to access a number of US websites such as the benign www.rense. com who for years has printed articles of the impending Dubai crash.

Many sites were banned. Furthermore, the emirates hi tech infrastructure stinks.

Dubai censors the internet and they fancy themselves as a hi -tech Mecca. They've got to be kidding. These white elephant towers will stay that way whilst companies like ours steer clear of the place.

Bye bye Dubai.

[Jack]

The Burj Dubai reminds me of the Jack in the Bean Stalk fable. Someone threw money out the window and look what sprouted! The Burj Dubai!

The top is inhabited by a blood thirsty banker wanting his money back, Waiting to crunch on Jack's bones. Sheik Mo is Jack.

[Karen R. Kelley]

Go ahead and build it up. God is giving everyone a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate which side they are on. And if it is a place bereft of his blessing, like Sodom and Gomorrah, he will smash it! I know which side I'm on. I'm a simple farmer in a poor town in Maine USA. I strive to be just like Jesus and the manger is where it's at. Not perched in some extraordinary office towering over a gleaming city that will one day look like a gutter. Back side of a cow will always look the same.

[Sandy Crack]

What an honest and reasonable article regarding this 'Tower of Babel' - at last. Thank you. The UAE media is suffering massively from overblown sycophancy. Bring on the shrink wrap, I say. And let's not forget these buildings are built using near-slave labour.

[TerraHertz]

Well, it is a beautiful building. Tempting to suggest allegories about 'building dreams on foundations of sand' but let's wait a year or two and see how this works out in practice.

One thing we do know from experience - if the building owners take out special insurance covering 'multiple terrorist attacks', after which the place is shut down over a few weekends for 'maintenance work', then one day none of the Israelis show up for work, it would be wise to keep a safe distance.

Speaking of 'foundations of sand', I wonder if that's got anything to do with keeping the exact height a secret?

[Heather Dodge]

"this seemingly endless bean-stock tower" - It's bean STALK, as in Jack and the Beanstalk. Here's the story, which may prove significant to the Burj Dubai tower over time.

The story tells of a boy named Jack who was sent to market one day by his mother to sell their last possession, the cow. As Jack was on his way he met a stranger who offered to trade five "magic" beans for the cow. Jack accepted the trade and returned back home with the beans in his pocket. Jack's mother was angered that he had not obeyed her instructions to sell the cow and threw the beans out of the window.

As Jack slept, the beans germinated in the soil, and a gigantic beanstalk grew in their place by morning. When Jack saw the huge beanstalk, he immediately decided to climb it. He arrived in a land high up in the clouds that happened to be the home of a giant. When he broke into the giant's castle, the giant quickly sensed a human was near:
Fee-fi-fo-fum!
I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Be he 'live, or be he dead,
I'll grind his bones to make my bread.

However, Jack was saved by the giant's wife and as he escaped from the palace, he took a bag of gold coins with him. Jack desired to seek out more treasures from the castle in the clouds and climbed once more up the beanstalk. This time he stole a hen which laid golden eggs. Again he was saved from harm by the giant's wife.

Jack disregarded being nearly discovered by the giant twice and decided to go up the beanstalk a third time. This time, he stole a magical harp that played by itself. The instrument did not appreciate being stolen and called out to the giant for help. The giant chased Jack down the beanstalk, but Jack managed to get to the ground before the giant did. Jack, seeing an axe on the ground beside him, immediately chopped the beanstalk down. The giant fell to earth, hitting the ground so hard that it split, pulling the beanstalk down with him. That was the end of the giant and the beanstalk.

[ordony]

they (the Arabs)brought down your towers,and now they build their own.
i understand the resentment

[s bullen]

" this seemingly endless bean-stock tower, which holds an Armani Hotel..."

beanstalk...

[xbjllb]

Anyone who thinks that building is unique has never seen a rendering of Frank Lloyd Wright's never-built mile-high skyscraper tower. The profile is a dead-on copy. Give credit where credit is due.