The UAE has entered the race to build the world's tallest building and has high hopes for Burj Dubai. Ben Smalley looks at the competition and Dubai's bid to beat them all.

Dubai is a city on the up - literally. Having already set a number of world architectural firsts, the pioneering city is poised to break the record for the world's tallest building through the construction of Burj Dubai - an iconic skyscraper destined to rise above all others.

The Petronas Towers in Malaysia are currently the world's tallest buildings at 452 metres (1,483 feet), followed by Chicago's Sears Tower at 442 metres (1,450 ft), although the tallest structure in the world is actually the Canadian National (CN) Tower in Toronto at 551 metres (1,815 ft) - but it is not officially classified as a building because it has no 'floors' to speak of.

There are a number of ongoing and proposed projects that plan to usurp the tallest building crown from Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers. The first to be finished will be Taipei 101, which is named after its number of floors and will be 508 metres tall (1,667 ft) when it opens later this year.

However, Taiwan's record may be short lived with the Shanghai World Financial Centre rumoured to be planning to add to its originally planned 492 metres to go that little bit higher when complete in 2007.

Both delay-ridden projects were started in the late 1990s, well before the September 11 attacks of 2001 exposed the vulnerability of skyscrapers to terrorist acts. In the aftermath of 9/11 questions were raised about the wisdom of building more skyscrapers, but those critics have been answered by the Americans themselves who plan to build an even taller structure on the site of the former World Trade Centre in New York.

The defiantly named Freedom Tower was selected as the winner of an architectural competition to replace the 110-storey Twin Towers, and will rise 539 metres (1,776 ft) into the sky when complete in 2009 - the height symbolically echoing the date of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The new office tower will be significantly taller than the 417 metres of the World Trade Centre, and will be 87 metres higher than the Petronas Towers, although the occupied portion of the building will top out at 455 metres (1,500 ft). Above that will be an 84-metre high (276 ft), lattice-like structure containing windmills generating as much as 20 percent of the building's energy.

Whether the New York building will take the record of being the tallest building is open to speculation as the lattice structure 'extension' may be ruled out of the equation for being non-occupied - just as the CN Tower was.

However, that may all prove inconsequential due to Dubai's entry into the race for the sky. Emaar Properties, the local company behind Burj Dubai (Dubai Tower in English) is playing its cards close to its chest and has yet to reveal exactly how high the skyscraper will be, other than saying it will be the world's tallest building and will 'dwarf all existing structures.'

A spokesman said: "Burj Dubai's height is a closely guarded secret but it will beat all records, and on a scale that will be a dramatic testament to Dubai's faith in the future."

Emaar initially said it intended to replicate the design for Grollo Tower, a 560 metre (1,850 feet) Australian project that Melbourne planning authorities axed in 1999. Since then, Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings & Merrill architectural consultants have completed a second design for Burj Dubai, although the final height has still not been announced - presumably to keep other title-seeking designers guessing about the tallest-building target they are trying to top.

According to Emaar, the new design draws its inspiration from the historical influences of the Gulf.

"The tower's base and geometry reflects the six petal desert flower of the region," the spokesman said. "The base of the Burj Dubai blossoms to allow the tower a graceful transition from the ground. The design maximizes views and the dome shaped plan profile accentuates a series of steps up the vertical height of the building."

Emaar spokesman said that the building will be mixed-use, combining residential and commercial aspects with a hotel, entertainment and leisure outlets, as well as the world's largest shopping mall - Dubai Mall - which promises to be larger than 50 international football pitches.

"This project will create a new architectural landmark - a city within a city," he said, adding that the development will spur overall growth in economic activity by feeding large, upcoming projects such as the Dubai International Finance Centre, as well as the existing Dubai Internet and Media Cities and Knowledge Village.

While gigantic skyscrapers in cities like New York and Hong Kong fuel the need for space in heavily congested urban areas where the only place to develop is up, the same cannot be said of Dubai, which has abundant empty space for development.
It would appear, therefore, that Burj Dubai is primarily being built for the global prestige of being the world's tallest building, although it is widely believed that it also serves a functional need in a prime development area of the city.

"It is a rational commercial response to the pipeline of large-scale infrastructure developments in the country which will bring a new professional community to the area," he said. "This community will create a significant new demand in terms of work, residential and leisure facilities and space - we are pre-empting that demand."
Dubai has long stood out as something of an architectural pioneer in the region forging ahead with landmark projects such as Dubai Marina (the world's largest man made marina), The Palm (the world's largest man made islands), and Burj Al Arab (the world's first seven star hotel).

Work has now begun to clear the site for Burj Dubai on the site of a former military base next to junction two of the Sheikh Zayed Road, which an Emaar spokesman said will become a new 'downtown' area of the city when the sky scraping building is complete in late 2007.

The construction of tall buildings was first made possible by a number of inventions, but Elisha Otis's successful introduction of the first safety-brake-equipped elevator in the 1850s, and the introduction of steel-frame construction, were key factors that enabled buildings to grow upward.

The term 'skyscraper' was first used during the 1880s, shortly after the first 10-20 storey buildings were built in the United States, and skyscrapers soon came to dominate American skylines at the turn of the 20th Century.

Architect Cass Gilbert's 241 metre (792 feet) Woolworth Building in New York became the world's tallest building when it opened in 1913, but was soon eclipsed in the 1930s by the construction of the 102-storey Empire State Building, which, more than any other building in the world, represents man's ambition to build towers that reach for the sky.

At the time it was built it broke all records - at 381 metres, it had 64 elevators (now 73) and was constructed in just one year and 45 days - and remains New York's best-known landmark. Even though it has long since been stripped of its world height record - there are now a number of taller buildings elsewhere in the world - it remains a symbol of New York itself and a huge tourist attraction.

And, just as the Empire State Building symbolises New York, Emaar believes Burj Dubai will come to represent Dubai on the global stage as the home of the world's tallest building.

"This architectural phenomena will be a global tourist magnet that skyrockets Dubai into the global limelight," the company spokesman said.