It’s also the reason the Burj Khalifa started coming together so fast. Though the city is now known for its glitzy lifestyle and wealth, when the project was first getting started, the area wasn’t much more than a plot of land with a few buildings scattered here and there. Today, the building is surrounded by other offices, shops, and restaurants including the Dubai Mall, which includes many designer retailers such as Hermés, Saint Laurant, Cartier, and Balenciaga, with other notable destinations like Burj Al Arab and Palm Jumeirah nearby. “I wanted that to be a little mysterious, but prevalent.” Where is the Burj Khalifa?īurj Khalifa is located in Downtown Dubai in the United Arab Emirates near the Dubai Fountain Boardwalk. Because of its various setbacks, when looking down at the building, a dome form appears, though when looking up from the base, the shape isn’t particularly visible. “So I thought, ‘I’m gonna use that, and I want to use it in an abstracted way where it’s not obvious,” Smith says of the dome shape. Thinking particularly about Islamic architecture, pointed arches came to mind as did the onion dome-though often associated with Russian Orthodox churches, this form has roots in Syria and Iran. “As I was developing the massing, I thought about the architectural elements that exist in the Middle East, not just Dubai, that people are familiar with,” he says. “And they called back the following week, and said, ‘That’s what we’re gonna do.’”Īfter winning the competition, the architect turned his attention to refining the building to better match the heritage of the Middle East. “I said that you ought to have about a two- or three-week ideas competition,” Smith remembers. Emaar representatives told the SOM team that they were looking to develop the tallest skyscraper in the world in Dubai, and asked for recommendations for selecting an architect. “We talked a lot about designing tall buildings, because they are so different from even a 60-story building,” Smith says. Smith and colleagues, including Bill Baker, a structural engineering partner at SOM, took the meeting and traveled from Chicago to New York for an informal yet informational conversation.

At the time, he was working at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill ( SOM) and had designed buildings such as Jin Mao Tower, a 1,380-foot tower in Shanghai and Zifeng Tower (formerly known as Nanjing Greenland Financial Tower), a 1,480-foot tower in Jiangsu, China. “They wanted to ask us about our experience with supertalls,” Smith tells AD. In the early 2000s, he was approached by Emaar Properties, the real estate company that developed the skyscraper. Within a three-week period, Adrian Smith sketched out the original designs that would eventually become the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa.

Tallest skyscraper ever