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Dubai skyscraper reopens deck two months after elevator malfunction left tourists stranded 120 stories above ground

The observation deck of the world's tallest skyscraper reopened on Sunday, two months after an elevator malfunction that left visitors trapped more than 120 stories above ground forced it to close.Dozens of tourists lined up on Sunday for tickets to take an elevator to the 124th floor of the half-mile-high Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

The deck of the Burj Khalifa was shut in February after an elevator packed with visitors got stuck between floors for 45 minutes, before rescuers dropped a ladder into the shaft so those inside could crawl out. Two months later, it is still unclear what caused the elevator to fail.

The accident proved a major embarrassment for Dubai, whose rulers hoped the Burj Khalifa, which officially opened in January, would be a major tourist draw and buoy the Gulf city state as it struggles to revive its image as a cutting-edge Arab metropolis amid nagging questions about its financial health.

At 2,717ft (828 metres), the tapering, silvery tower ranks as not only the world's highest skyscraper, but also the tallest freestanding structure in the world.

The tower rises more than 160 stories, though the exact number of floors is not known. The observation deck is mostly enclosed, but it includes an outdoor terrace bordered by guard rails and is located about two-thirds of the way up.

Two elevators, with up to 15 people each, whisk people up to the observation deck daily, running every half hour from 10am to 9pm.

Most visitors who paid the 100 dirhams ($27) for the three-minute ride to the deck, which boasts a view of Dubai's glimmering skyline, the sprawling desert and the emirate's Gulf shore, either didn't know about February's elevator malfunction or did not mind the ride's bumpy start.

"We feel fortunate to have gone up," said Sheetal Gulati, a tourist from the UK who is on a three-day trip to Dubai. "The view is very nice and worth seeing."

Emaar, the state-linked company that owns the tower, had little to say about February's accident. The company said nothing about an elevator malfunction at the time of the accident and did not provide details of any repairs or maintenance work on the elevators before the viewing deck reopened Sunday.

Burj Khalifa was designed by Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which has a long track record for engineering some of the world's tallest buildings, including Chicago's Willis Tower, the tallest in the US and formerly known as the Sears Tower.

The observation deck was the only part of the tower that opened in January. Work continues on the rest of the building's interior and the first tenants are expected to move in soon. - Associated Press

As Dubai-style skyscrapers spring up in central Beirut, the city's precious architectural heritage is being lost

The built environment of Beirut is rapidly changing, and this transformation is destroying much of the city's rich architectural fabric. Surrounded by the new towering Beirut is the unique and heavily scarred structure of the Egg.

Built by the Lebanese architect Joseph-Philippe Karam in 1965, and dubbed "the Egg" due to its curved form, it is the only surviving building in the downtown area from Lebanon's vibrant avant-garde movement. Much of the rest of this heritage was destroyed during the civil war (1975-1990), a legacy marked on the outer skin of the Egg.

The Egg, after surviving the war, may not survive the recovery. Beirut's booming real estate market is resulting in the removal of Beirut's unique built heritage to make way for the ubiquitous skyscraper. The threat of the Egg being destroyed sparked a wave of emotion among many Lebanese increasingly distressed at the continued demolition of their architectural heritage. There has been substantial online activism and media attention to stop Abu Dhabi Investment House, the owners of the site, destroying the Egg. The activists are also vexed by the fact that it is a company from the Gulf that will decide whether the structure will be removed or not. Comments such as "Our identity and culture as Lebanese is not for sale for Gulf millionaires," capture the frustration.

The Egg is at the centre of a battle over the future of Beirut and the type of city it should become. Beirut has a wonderful and prolific architectural heritage, as does Lebanon as a whole. Although the city has been plagued by successive urban planning failures, a quality urban fabric of Ottoman and French colonial-style buildings did establish itself. As an independent Lebanon entered the 1950s a layer of significant modernist buildings was added. This continued into the 1960s and Beirut, by the end of that decade, had a internationally significant and unique body of modernist architecture. This rich heritage, built mainly by Lebanese master builders and architects, is being squandered.

The "Paris of the Middle East" is increasingly becoming a "Dubai of the Levant". Even after the global financial crisis, Dubai remains the city to emulate in Lebanon. This change in the character of the built environment is being pushed mainly by speculative property developers and the Lebanese business community, and resisted mainly by architects and civil society activists. Currently, it is the former that is winning the debate.

The result is that the city is being turned into a series of suffocating canyons. Outdated planning laws mean there are no formal height restrictions. If your building is set back far enough from the street then the sky is the limit. Some developers have taken this apparent challenge all too literally. In Beirut's Ashrafieh district, in the east of the city, a 50-storey building, named Sama Beirut (Beirut Sky), is being built, replacing four-storey French mandate art deco buildings. This pattern is being replicated all over the city. Historic buildings are ripped down for unplanned and ill-proportioned skyscrapers.

Many of those pushing for a Dubai-style environment point to Solidere as an example of how Lebanon is preserving its architectural heritage and economically progressing. Solidere, founded in 1994 by the late prime minister, Rafik Hariri, has been rapidly rebuilding the centre of Beirut that was completely destroyed during the 15-year civil war which ended in 1990. The Solidere project covers an area of 472 acres of land and has at great cost artfully and painstakingly reconstructed the Ottoman and French colonial style buildings that were turned to rubble during the civil war.

The total reconstruction of the historic core of downtown Beirut was a powerful political statement but a weak architectural one. The architectural community in Lebanon is very uneasy about what Solidere has recreated. The Solidere project is often described as a "Disney Downtown". Critics are also increasingly indignant of the focus of Solidere on recreating the Ottoman and French-style buildings that previously existed. Meanwhile, real existing Ottoman and French mandate buildings elsewhere in the city are torn down for more profitable skyscrapers.

A genuine history is being destroyed while a fake one is being built. The Solidere project has clearly illustrated in its reconstruction of the downtown area that once this heritage is gone it cannot be rebuilt. This process is creating a battle over what some are calling the "soul" of the city. As Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury protested: "We're not Dubai – we have a soul." This may not be so for long.

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.

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.

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?

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 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."

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

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

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.