Burj Khalifa and the Tower of Ideas
By Raja Murthy
MUMBAI - Dubai's Burj Khalifa, which opened on January 4, might be a Tower of
Babel to critics, but the planet's tallest building has cracked technology
frontiers to enable more land-efficient urban dwellings, maybe even higher than
Burj Khalifa's 160 storeys.
It took 22 million man-hours, US$1.5 billion, 12,000 workers - including
thousands from South Asia - 30 companies such as the Mumbai-based Voltas and
expertise from 100 countries to make the Burj Khalifa the world's tallest
human-made structure, the highest urban residence and the highest view from the
top of a city.
Not everyone was impressed, though. The British newspaper
Telegraph, for example, snorted about the Burj Khalifa being a "demented
spending binge" and "a sub-prime Great Pyramid". They obviously forgot London
eyesores like the 135-meter high London Eye.
But if critics saw the Burj Khalifa as the latest proof of Babylonic pride
reincarnated in Dubai, one of seven emirates in the United Arab Emirates,
locals see it as a morale-booster to overcome Dubai’s financial crisis, despite
doomsday soothsayers. Developers Emaar Properties say the Burj Khalifa is a
symbol of global cooperation.
"Especially after the Burj Khalifa inauguration, residents believe that the
Emirates will not only prevail but come out strong in the future," says Hemant
Rao, a senior Dubai businessman and former lead guitarist of the Savages, a
pioneering Indian rock band of the 1960s.
Besides symbolizing hope, the Burj Khalifa tells a story of breaching
boundaries and making possible improbabilities. Where would we be today without
new ideas, persistent hard work to make them a reality and freedom from
routine? Perhaps still grunting in Stone Age caves, gnawing raw meat.
An idea 320 meters taller than its nearest competitor, Taipei 101 in Taiwan,
and nearly twice the size of New York’s Empire State Building, the 828-meter
(2,717 feet) Burj Khalifa merges architectural breakthroughs born out of an
unlikely union of Chicago and Bangladesh in the 1960s.
The Chicago-based Skidmore Owings and Merril, a leading global architecture
firm that won the worldwide design competition for the Burj Dubai-Khalifa, owes
its history, and its 900 awards, to the Bangladesh-born Fazlur Rahman Khan.
Khan has been dubbed the "Einstein of Structural engineering". His
revolutionary architectural designs gave the world super-tall buildings over
100 floors. Chicago named a street after Khan in 1998. Chicago-based United
States President Barack Obama mentioned Khan in his speech at Cairo University
in 2009, as an example of Muslims contributing richly to America.
The dapper Khan (1929-1982), who masterminded Chicago’s 100-storey John Hancock
Center and 110-storey Sears Tower, was born in Bangladesh's capital, Dacca, and
studied at the University of Calcutta in India.
In 1952, Khan went to the University of Illinois and finished a PhD in
structural engineering. In 1955, he connected with Bruce J Graham, chief design
architect in the Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM), currently head quartered at
Chicago's Michigan Avenue. Khan became a partner in 1966 and a US citizen in
1967.
In their breakthrough quest, Graham and Khan convinced other SOM partners to
buy a mainframe computer, a risky idea as it was very expensive new technology
in the 1960s. Khan began programming the system for structural engineering
equations and architectural drawings, the first major use of advanced computer
technology in design. The duo broke barriers.
For example, skyscrapers must be strengthened to withstand the stack effect or
powerful wind forces and temperature at high altitudes. Wind speeds can reach
160 km/hr at altitudes of over 700 meters in city centers. This means buildings
get heavier and costlier as they grow taller. So at that time, 30 storeys was
about the general economic limit.
Khan delivered the bundled tube-structural building system, to enable
cost-effective, materials-saving skyscrapers. His "tubular" buildings, like the
"trussed-tube" and "bundled tube", converted earlier external support systems
to the growing skyscraper into the skyscraper itself. It's like making the
banana peel as nutritious and tasty as the banana, to replace the fruit itself.
Such ideas from divergent sources blend creative breakthroughs not just in
architecture. For instance, Indian writer Arundhati Roy is a trained architect
who plans her writings like an architect.
"Writing is like architecture," Arundhati Roy told Salon magazine in 1997, the
year she won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things. "In
buildings, there are design motifs like patterns and curves that occur
repeatedly. These motifs help us feel comfortable in a physical space. And the
same works in writing, I found." She doesn't listen to music when writing. She
said she sees words, punctuation and paragraphs as graphic designs of language.
Leading Indian actress and director Aparna Sen asks moviemakers to study Tintin
comics and the genius of its creator Herge in his near-obsessively detailed
panels for ideas on how to structure scenes. Linear algebra and algorithms
power Google searches. An idea from a flower blossomed into the Burj Khalifa
soaring to the skies.
Skidmore Owings and Merrill drew the idea of the Burj Khalifa structure from
the Hymenocallis, a strikingly beautiful flower found mostly in Mexico and in
southern US states such as Texas. The Hymenocallis, of the Amaryllidaceae
botanical family, has thin white petals elegantly tapering outwards from a
central core mother bulb.
The Burj Khalifa tower has three elements arranged around a central core, with
the tower width changing with height to baffle wind forces by the changing
building shape. Twenty-six helical levels, or spiraling levels like
Hymenocallis petals, streamline the Burj Khalifa as it towers skyward, like
human aspirations and the pain-barrier breaking effort needed to soar beyond
mediocrity.
Hundreds of such sturdy, streamlined skyscrapers may fill land-starved,
over-populated cities circa 2040. Asia is already the world's skyscraper hub,
with Malaysia's 452-meter Petronas Towers, Taiwan's Taipei 101, China's
492-meter Shanghai World Financial Center and now Dubai's Burj Khalifa.
More sky towers are en route in Asia. The 632-meter Shanghai Towers is expected
to be complete by 2014, the 597-meter China 117 Tower in Tianjin has a 2012
deadline. The South Korean capital, Seoul, has the 620-meter DMC Landmark Tower
and the 640-meter Seoul Dream Tower should be ready by 2016. Rising populations
and building heights could more deeply influence each other in the future.
Developers Emaar Properties call the Burj Khalifa the world's first "vertical
city", with its 1,044 residential apartments including 144 Armani-designed
residences, 160 rooms of the Armani Hotel Dubai, corporate suites in 49 floors,
restaurants, shops and recreation facilities.
Such "vertical cities" will have elevator systems like perpendicular mini rail
networks. The Burj Khalifa runs 57 elevators, eight escalators, including a
65-meter wide, multimedia enabled "travelator" to ship people to the 124th
floor observation tower, at speeds of 10 meters per second, or about 60kms/hr.
A Sky Lobby at the 43rd, 76th and 123rd floors serve as station terminals for
divergent traffic from the world's fastest elevators.
Design, energy-saving construction methods and ideas used in Burj Khalifa are
already being used elsewhere, in buildings such as the emerging DMC Landmark
Tower in Seoul, as taller ideas propel towering changes to city life in coming
decades.
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