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Electrical problems blamed for closure of viewing platform but unknown if rest of tower is affected

The world's tallest skyscraper has unexpectedly closed to the public a month after its lavish opening, disappointing tourists headed for the observation deck and casting doubt over plans to welcome its first permanent occupants in the coming weeks.

Electrical problems are partly to blame for the closure of the Burj Khalifa's viewing platform, the only part of the half-mile high tower that has so far opened. But a lack of information from the spire's owner left it unclear whether the rest of the largely empty building – including dozens of elevators meant to whisk visitors to the tower's more than 160 floors – was affected by the shutdown.

The indefinite closure, which was imposed on Sunday, comes as Dubai struggles to revive its international image as a cutting-edge Arab metropolis, amid nagging questions about its financial health.

The Persian Gulf city-state had hoped the 828m (2,717ft) Burj Khalifa would be a major tourist draw. Dubai has promoted itself by visitors with over-the-top attractions such as the Burj, which juts like a silvery needle out of the desert and can be seen from miles around.

In recent weeks, thousands of tourists have lined up for the chance to buy tickets for viewing times often days in advance that cost more than $27 apiece. Now many of those would-be visitors, such as Wayne Boyes, a tourist from near Manchester, England, must get back in line for refunds.

"It's just very disappointing," said Boyes, 40, who showed up at the Burj's entrance today with a ticket for an afternoon time slot, only to be told the viewing platform was closed. "The tower was one of my main reasons for coming here," he said.

The precise cause of the £960m ($1.5bn) Dubai skyscraper's temporary shutdown remained unclear. In a brief statement responding to questions, the building's owner, Emaar Properties, blamed the closure on "unexpected high traffic", but then suggested that electrical problems were also at fault.

"Technical issues with the power supply are being worked on by the main and subcontractors and the public will be informed upon completion," the company said, adding it is "committed to the highest quality standards at Burj Khalifa".

Despite repeated requests, a spokeswoman for Emaar was unable to provide further details or rule out the possibility of foul play. Greg Sang, Emaar's director of projects and the man charged with coordinating the tower's construction, could not be reached. Construction workers at the base of the tower said they were unaware of any problems.

Power was reaching some parts of the building. Strobe lights warning aircraft flashed and a handful of floors were illuminated after nightfall.

Emaar did not say when the observation deck would reopen. Tourists affected by the closure are being offered the chance to rebook or receive refunds.

Questions were raised about the building's readiness in the months leading up to the January opening.

The opening date had originally been expected in September, but was then pushed back until sometime before the end of 2009. The eventual opening date just after New Year's was meant to coincide with the anniversary of the Dubai ruler's ascent to power.

There were signs even that target was ambitious. The final metal and glass panels cladding the building's exterior were installed only in late September. Early visitors to the observation deck had to peer through floor-to-ceiling windows caked with dust – a sign that cleaning crews had not yet had a chance to scrub them.

Work is still ongoing on many of the building's other floors, including those that will house the first hotel designed by Giorgio Armani, due to open in March. The building's base remains largely a construction zone, with entrance restricted to the viewing platform lobby in an adjacent shopping mall.

The first of some 12,000 residential tenants and office workers are supposed to move in to the building this month.

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Dubai's stunning 828m skyscraper is an ideal monument for an era of credit-fuelled over-consumption – irresponsible and unsustainable

Dubai defies logic. Skyscrapers rear up out of the pitiless desert where, a generation ago, there was only wind-blown litter. This city-state confected from subsistence has now witnessed the opening of the world's tallest building – the Burj Khalifa, steel-ribbed, glass-clad and completely unsustainable.

The 828m (2,717 foot) skyscraper boasts the world's highest swimming pool and mosque and is said to contain enough glass to cover 17 football pitches. Not since 1311, when the spire of Lincoln Cathedral first topped the Great Pyramid of Giza, has the tallest structure in the world been located in the Arab world. Some Arabs, not unreasonably, interpret criticism of the building as resentment at Dubai's presumption in setting itself up as a world city.

Stunningly designed by the Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrell, the Burj Khalifa is inspired not only by minarets and desert flowers, but also by Frank Lloyd Wright's 1956 plans for the Illinois Sky-City in Chicago. Neither the technology nor the money existed then to build such a structure. Now that it does, Dubai would like to see its audacious building as a metaphor for its role in the vanguard of globalisation, as a technocracy capable of yoking Islam and modernity.

The symbol, though, is already tarnished. Before and during construction, the building was called the Burj Dubai (Dubai Tower); its website still is. The surrounding area was to have been known as Downtown Burj Dubai. But at Monday night's launch, the name was abruptly changed to Burj Khalifa, in honour of the president of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan.

Last month, Abu Dhabi gave Dubai $10bn to stave off financial collapse. The name-change suggests the bailout may have come with conditions and that Dubai's blander, richer neighbour may now exert some influence over its anything-and-everything-for-sale mentality.

In the space of one year, Dubai has gone from having the world's best performing property market to one of the worst. The Burj Khalifa's developers insist that 90% of its 900 apartments are sold and its 300,000 square feet of office space filled. In fact, most of the apartments were bought at the height of the market by speculators. And while a way may be found, for the sake of face, to occupy the office space, elsewhere in Dubai large tracts lie empty.

It is impossible to get accurate information about this; Dubai is an opaque place, where the line between government and private enterprise is blurred. What we do know is that little attention was paid in the boom years to the social or environmental consequences of development. All but 10% of the population of Dubai are expatriates, whose interests really lie elsewhere. The government featherbeds its few citizens but offers its majority of foreign inhabitants little more than a dream of making money, encouraging a short-term approach to the place. Certainly, it wants no political or civic engagement from them.

Many of Dubai's construction workers live on starvation wages: £120 a month on average for a six-day week, with shifts of up to 12 hours. Housemaids can endure conditions approaching slavery. Laws exist to regulate working conditions and to prevent employers from seizing workers' passports, but they are not well enforced. Government figures are invariably owners, partners or shareholders in private companies. You only have to travel an hour into the desert to see the construction workers' shanty towns to get a sense of what life is like for those who are building Dubai's skyscrapers, but few do.

Construction workers on the Burj Khalifa have rioted on several occasions, including in March 2006, when 2,500 protested at the site, and again in November 2007. A Human Rights Watch survey found a cover-up of deaths from heat, overwork and suicide in the emirate. The Indian consulate recorded 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005, after which they were asked to stop counting.

Meanwhile, the Burj Khalifa's air-conditioning system is said to be the equivalent of melting 12,500 tons of ice a day, in a city that has the world's highest per capita carbon footprint. Dubai relies heavily on CO₂-emitting desalination plants. The Tiger Woods golf course alone requires 4m gallons of water a day. Short-term profits have repeatedly been put before sustainability.

There remains an outside chance that the emirate may yet become capable of combining development with equity, transparency and environmental sustainability. But at the moment, Dubai is built entirely on a capitalism whose nakedness is clothed only in bling. And if that continues, the Burj Khalifa will stand as a symbol of a meretricious, credit-fuelled era in which no one with any choice would wish to live.

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The world's tallest building may be a triumph of beauty and ambition, but the soulless cityscape surrounding it is another matter

We're going to need a new word. The Burj Dubai doesn't scrape the sky; it pierces it like a slender silver needle, half a mile high. It's only because Dubai never has any clouds that we can even see the tower's top. And, judging by the images released so far, the view is more like looking out of a plane than a building. It has made reality a little less real.

The facts and figures about the tower are equally surreal – like the one about how it could be eight degrees cooler at the top than at the bottom, or the one about how you could watch the sunset at the bottom, then take a lift up to the top and watch it all over again. It's a new order of tallness, even compared with its nearest rival, Taiwan's Taipei 101, which it exceeds by more than 300 metres.

But, beyond height, is there anything to celebrate here? From our current perspective, the Burj Dubai symbolises catastrophic excess – of money, confidence, ambition, energy consumption. And the fact that it will most likely stand empty for years to come has been noted with great satisfaction here in the west. But isn't this how we've responded to every tall structure of note, from Babel onwards? And even its many critics have to admit the tower is a rather stunning piece of architecture. Chiefly designed by Adrian Smith, formerly of skyscraper specialists SOM, and engineer Bill Baker, it is beautifully sleek and elegant, rising in a graceful series of silver tubes of different heights. It looks less like a single tower than a cluster of towers, an organic formation rather than a self-consciously iconic object. This is surely the best-looking tall building since New York's Chrysler and the Empire State buildings in the 1930s.

In environmental terms, the Burj Dubai is way too tall to justify itself, but there is at least some structural efficiency to the form. Its Y-shaped plan – three wings extending from a central core, like the roots of a tree – "confuses the wind", in the architects' words, while the core stops the wings from twisting (which would give top-floor occupants nausea). For super-tall buildings – and surely there will be more, one day – this "buttressed core" design is likely to become the prevailing form.

More worrying than the tower itself, however, is what's around it. In 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled a scheme for an elegantly preposterous mile-high skyscraper for Chicago, safe in the knowledge that he'd never have to figure out how to build it. It was undoubtedly an influence on the Burj Dubai. It even had a similar triangular structure. But Wright's intentions with his mile-high skyscraper were to create a concentrated human habitat, the better to halt Chicago's unstoppable urban sprawl, and free up ground space for parks, nature and leisure.

The Burj Dubai, by contrast, has become the tentpole for several more acres of anonymous, soulless, energy-hungry cityscape. You can apparently see for 60 miles from the top, but when you look down, the immediate landscape is the same schematic real-estate tat you see everywhere else in Dubai: vast shopping malls, bland office towers, sprawling residential developments semi-themed to resemble "traditional" Arabian villages, outsized ornamental fountains. The Burj Dubai might be a triumph vertically, but what about the horizontal?

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Burj Khalifa, Comment, Culture, Design, Dubai, guardian.co.uk

Rising almost a kilometre from the Arabian desert, the Burj Dubai, renamed Burj Khalifa at its official opening ceremony, is the world's tallest building

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Burj Khalifa, Culture, Dubai, Editorial, guardian.co.uk

The inauguration of the tallest building on Earth was supposed to be a show of defiance by Dubai's rulers after a property crash which threatened to shatter the Gulf emirate's reputation as a global economic power.

But tonight'sspectacular ceremony, which revealed the Burj Dubai's 828m height for the first time, became a moment of supplication when the decision was revealed to name it Burj Khalifa, after the ruler of rival but much richer emirate Abu Dhabi who came to the rescue when Dubai's finances descended into crisis last autumn.

As fireworks exploded up and down the 169 storeys, the move triggered speculation that the transfer of the naming rights may have been the price paid when Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates, approved direct and indirect bail outs totalling $25bn last year as Dubai's debt problems deepened and property values slumped.

The concession is likely to deflate Dubai's triumphalism in dwarfing the previous tallest building in the world, the 508m tower 101 in Taipei, and the 629m KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota, the tallest manmade structure of any kind. The state-owned developer's pride was such that the 124th-floor public viewing platform is inscribed with the legend: "I am the heart of the city and its people, the marker that defines Emaar's ambition and Dubai's shining dream."

One observer said naming the structure after the leader of Dubai's main rival for supremacy in the UAE would be like naming a new landmark in Glasgow after London. An Abu Dhabi state-controlled newspaper said it was "a name to reflect greatness".

Tonight after dusk a crowd of thousands of emiratis, Europeans and migrant workers from Asia jostled to witness the inauguration ceremony led by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum and attended by Sheikh Khalifa, who has in recent months sought to underscore the close relationship between the emirates. In an apparent nod to the city state's financial predicament, the festivities were subdued by Dubai standards, but still dazzling.

The world's biggest water fountain burst into life as a digital presentation listed the £925m building's achievements, which include the highest occupied floor in the world – at 160 storeys – and the highest swimming pool 260m in the air on floor 76.

There is talk of plans for a mosque on close to the zenith at floor 158, which would become the world's highest place of worship, though the world's highest bar will be a few floors down. The building is so tall you can see the sunset twice from it – once at the base and again after a 60-second lift ride to the viewing platform.

The Burj's developers had tried to use its inauguration to put a brave face on Dubai's financial crisis. "Crises come and go, and cities move on," said Mohammed Alabbar, chairman of the tower's developer Emaar Properties. "You have to move on. Because if you stop taking decisions, you stop growing."

About 90% of the space in the building is understood to be sold, but the value of many apartments is thought to have fallen by 50% from the market's high point.

The Indian healthcare entrepreneur Bavaguthu Raghuram Shetty owns one of the highest addresses on floor 100. He spent $13m buying the whole floor several years ago to turn the property into guest houses for friends and family. "We can see everything as if you are on the top of the world," he told a local paper. "I had no fear when I was up there. Even reaching my apartment takes less than a minute in the elevator."

The developer said it is confident in the safety of the tower. It has air-conditioned, pressurised and fire-resistant refuge floors at 25 store intervals and its reinforced concrete structure making it stronger than steel-frame skyscrapers.

"It's a lot more robust," said Greg Sang, Emaar's director of projects. "A plane won't be able to slice through the Burj like it did through the steel columns of the World Trade Center."

Ken Shuttleworth, a lead architect on the Swiss Re, London's skyscraper known as the Gherkin, applauded the building's aesthetic but said building very tall slender is the least economical method of constructing a tall building.

"Do you really need to build high in a desert?" he said. "You only build high when there is so much pressure on land that you have now choice. It can't make any sense financially so it is being done for status, a landmark on the horizon."

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Burj Khalifa, Dubai, News, The Guardian, World news

Fireworks display marks opening of world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa

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With two swimming pools and plans for the world's highest mosque, the $1bn 'superscraper' dwarfs the world's previous tallest building, the 508m Tower 101 in Taipei

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Burj Khalifa, Design, Dubai, Editorial, guardian.co.uk, Middle East, World news

Developer claims almost all the 1,000 apartments in the 818m high Burj Dubai have already been sold

The world's tallest building, the Burj Dubai, officially opens its doors tomorrow, leaving a colossal reminder of the hubris that
brought the emirate crashing in November.

The $4.1bn building is 818 metres (2,684ft) high, has more than 160 floors and will boast the world's highest observation deck. More than 50 lifts travelling at 25mph, will take two minutes to reach the top.

Developer Emaar Properties claims that almost all the 1,000 or so residential apartments in the tower have already been sold, in defiance of a property crash that saw prices drop by 50% last year. Laden with debt, Dubai was last month forced to accept a $10bn bailout from neighbouring Abu Dhabi.

During Dubai's boom years, developers built increasingly outlandish schemes including the "seven-star" hotel Burj Al Arab and a 22,500 sq m ski resort on the edge of the desert. Work on an archipelego of man-made islands in the shape of the world's land masses has been suspended due to the financial crisis.

The Burj is more than 300 metres higher than its nearest rival, the Taipei 101. The tallest tower in the United States, the Willis Tower in Chicago (formerly known as the Sears Tower), is 442m high. Rival developer Nakheel announced plans to trump the Burj with a tower reaching 1km, but with its parent Dubai World admitting last year that it was unable to repay its debts, the plans are likely to remain on the drawing board.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Burj Khalifa, Business, Culture, Dubai, Dubai World, Global economy, Global recession, News, The Observer, World news

The Burj Dubai tower in UAE is due to open today, standing at 818m

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The 818-metre tower is a true wonder of the world, a fitting monument to Dubai as the capital of excess and irrational exuberance

The scaffolding has cleared from the most astonishing man-made structure I have seen. It is outrageous, wasteful, egotistical, ridiculous; but ask if the Burj Dubai is beautiful and I cannot deny it. When it formally opens (mostly empty) early next year, this Dubai tower will, at 818 metres, be the highest building anywhere, its "sneer of cold command" thrusting a finger at the outside world even as its Ozymandian surroundings sink beneath the economic waters of the Gulf.

With the Dubai property market plummeting, the Burj is the final grandiose gesture of the emirate's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, on his long campaign to make Ludwig of Bavaria seem like a jobbing builder on the North Circular Road.

Unlike most new skyscrapers, the $8bn (£5bn) Burj Dubai does not rise until the point where an accountant calculates the lifts can take no more. Its 20-acre base has the plan of a six-leaf desert flower, from which it launches itself into the sky in a diminishing cluster of rocket-like cylinders, spiralling and soaring to a celestial climax.

This is no pastiche Mies, pastiche Corb, pastiche Foster, like the postmodern blobs, slices, wedges and cornets that crowd every Gulf skyline, screaming "look-at-me" at the brain-dulled passerby. Burj Dubai, designed by the Chicagoan architect, Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and closely watched by the sheikh himself, leads the eye ever upwards. It has the exhilaration of a Gothic spire. At the top, a spike rises further, swaying 1.5 metres in the wind and appearing to bend towards the viewer, as if appalled at its own presumption in puncturing the heavens.

Dubai this week lay in the shadow of its new tower, a partygoer still dancing in the streets hours after the party has ended. Its hyperbolic malls are crowded, its freeways jammed and its latest attention-grabber, an international film festival, mobbed by crowds. On Monday Dubai's more sober neighbour, Abu Dhabi, tossed its defaulting property market a $10bn note for one last drink, with another $1bn in pocket money for the embarrassed Maktoum family.

The sheikh's obedient media barely mentioned the humiliation, as a drunk cares not who pays for the last round. The construction sites, once host to a quarter of the world's cranes, are mostly still building, but no one holds out much hope for the sea-girt ocean palms and "cities" planned at the height of the most reckless property bubble in history. The chairman of Dubai World, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, might cry earlier this year, "Dubai has a vision like no other place on earth," but it is a vision few want to share just now.

A quarter of new residential units stand empty and 34,000 are still under construction. Nothing is heard now of a plan to build a tower higher even than Burj Dubai in the port area. An archipelago in the form of a map of the world remains as piles of sand offshore, crazily shipped like coals to Newcastle from Australia and rumoured to have disgorged antipodean snakes into the Gulf. The capital of irrational exuberance has embarked on an almighty hangover.

Since I have long seen Dubai as a speculative accident waiting to happen, I could not resist a debate on its future, held on Monday in the rival statelet of Qatar up the coast – and held with not a little schadenfreude. Dubai's protestation of open markets, an open society and western freedoms have long been absurd. Its rulers reacted to the debate (broadcast next month by BBC World) by trying to have the Qataris suppress it and ensuring that three Dubai speakers and all Dubai journalists boycotted it.

This was absurdly self-defeating, since a motion critical of Dubai's breakneck expansion was defeated 60-40. Twitter and Facebook were flooded with the good news for Dubai, in a week when there had been precious little. Yet none of this was allowed to be reported in Dubai's censored media. Never were so many well-groomed heads buried in so much desert sand.

The surest sign of a polity that has lost confidence in itself is when its rulers cannot tolerate a debate on its affairs. Even the word default has had to be replaced in the Dubai press by "debt restructuring" or "new legal framework". Outsiders are routinely blamed for the property market collapse, which the emirate's buccaneers and paid stooges have for years been stoking with hyperbole. Property values are reported to be 50% down from their peak and are predicted by UBS analysts to be heading for 75%. Those who mimicked the 17th-century Dutch who believed that tulip prices could never fall are left with the paranoid's last gasp, blaming foreigners for their woes.

The most mesmerising thing about Dubai is not its present but its future. Will it be Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat or Fatehpur Sikri? Will it become a place of sand and weeds, so many "trunkless legs of stone" lost on a scorching Gulf shore?

What will happen when the world's funny money starts to flow elsewhere? What happens when a future sheikh goes either environmental or religious and tires of boosterism, returning to tents and camels, to order and respect for his ancestors? What happens when some political whirlwind sweeps across the Gulf from Iran, or down from Iraq, or across from Saudi Arabia?

At a certain point in the decline in property values, it no longer pays owners to maintain lifts, services and utilities (as on a British tower estate). More likely Dubai will be a desert Detroit, a place of widespread dereliction with some money remaining at the centre but with ghost towns and squatted housing in the sweltering suburbs. The smart money is already on the more cautiously developed Qatar and Abu Dhabi stealing its financial thunder and leaving Dubai with its bizarre hotels: Las Vegas to Los Angeles, or Atlantic City to New York.

There is a touch of Vegas to the gold-plated atrium of the "seven star" Burj Al-Arab hotel, with its casino baroque and computerised fountains like leaping dolphins. There is more than a touch of Disney to the $1.5bn Atlantis hotel, opened this year by Kylie Minogue, with shark-filled aquarium wall, garden gnome interior and giant conches for capitals.

Already the office towers of Dubai look like those of a pre-cyber age, when the rich had to live near the oil, and celebrities could be induced to buy off-plan and sell before the fireworks ended. Why live in Dubai and shop at an ersatz Harvey Nichols when you can live in Knightsbridge and shop at the real one?

Dubai is a gaseous burp about to explode in the desert air. But when it explodes it will leave behind the sensational Burj, standing visible across the desert, gleaming proudly in the sun. One day the cost of keeping it up will exceed its income, its steel will rot and the swaying summit will become dangerous. The mother of all demolitions will have to begin. Then Shelley can have his moment and Ozymandias his epitaph. But for the time being Dubai can at least boast a true wonder of the world.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Burj Dubai, Business, Comment, Culture, Dubai, Dubai World, Global economy, Global recession, Le Corbusier, Qatar, The Guardian, World news