THE TELEGRAPH: For all the ambition of its construction, Dubai's new Khalifa Tower is a frightening, purposeless monument to the subprime era, says Stephen Bayley.
"Less is only more where more is no good." I wonder how many guests squinting into the Gulf's blue skies before the sublime, coruscating, vitreous surfaces of the blasphemously vertiginous Burj Dubai at yesterday's opening ceremony knew Frank Lloyd Wright's sardonic remark.
Wright was the Welsh-American architect – part bardic mystic, part technophile, complete megalomaniac – who proposed in 1956 the Illinois Sky City in Chicago. This was an outrageous, mile-high building: 528 floors, each with a height of 10 feet.
Wright's business was to shock and awe all mankind while doing what he could to épater la bourgeoisie at the same time. In 1956, there was neither the technological, nor indeed the financial, possibility of Wright's Sky City being built. It was a fantasy designed to impress. So, too, is Burj Dubai – or Burj Khalifa, the Khalifa Tower, as we must now call it, after it was renamed yesterday in honour of the president of the United Arab Emirates.
And Wright was its inspiration. Burj Khalifa is the work of the grand old Chicago architectural firm of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, world leaders in design of supertall buildings. SOM, as it is known, has drunk very deeply of Wright's intoxicating brew of techno-mysticism and physical daring. But, touchingly and significantly, Fazlur Khan, SOM's engineering genius whose experiments ultimately made Burj Khalifa possible, was born not in a big Western city but in Bhandarikandi, Shibchur Upazila near Dhaka.
Khan invented a new way of building tall. In the Middle Ages, masonry structures could not reach higher than the great European cathedrals: both the practicalities of hauling stone skywards with only wooden winding gear and wooden scaffolding, plus the structural requirement for unfeasibly thick walls to create stability, limited the masons' reach for Heaven.
Then, in the late 19th century, steel-framed buildings were developed in Chicago: giving the load-bearing job to structural metal made masonry redundant. Walls were there only to keep out the weather and the conventional skyscraper was born. >>> Stephen Bayley | Tuesday, January 05, 2010
