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Bailed out and broke, Dubai opens the world’s tallest building

The Sheet — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:02:20 +0000

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.

David Teather

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When this gaseous burp explodes in the desert air, we’ll still have the Burj Dubai | Simon Jenkins

The Sheet — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 11:35:52 +0000

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.

Simon Jenkins

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Charlie Brooker | Remember those dreamlike images of Dubai? Guess what. You were dreaming

The Sheet — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:49:00 +0000

Dubai's fantasy skyline seems to have been built on sand
• Datablog: Dubai's financial crisis - how much money do banks lend around the world?

I am phenomenally stupid. Stupid in every conceivable way except one: I'm dimly aware that I'm stupid. This means I spend much of my time assuming the rest of the world knows better, that everyone else effortlessly comprehends things I struggle to understand. Things like long division, or which mobile phone tariff to go for. In many ways, this is a comforting thought, as it means there's a limitless pool of people more intelligent than myself I can call on for advice.

But sometimes I find out my gut assumption was right all along, and it's a deeply unsettling experience. Take Dubai. I'm no expert on Dubai. Never been there, and only read about it in passing. The one thing I knew was that everything I heard about it sounded impossible. It was a modern dreamland. A concrete hallucination. A sarcastic version of Las Vegas. Dubai's skyline was dotted with gigantic whimsical behemoths. There were six-star hotels shaped like sails or shoes or starfish. Skyscrapers so tall the moon had to steer its way around them. It had immense off-shore developments: man-made archipelagos that resembled levels from Super Mario Sunshine. One was in the shape of a spreading palm tree. Another consisted of artificial islands representing every country in the world in miniature. As if that wasn't enough, a proposed future development called The Universe would depict the entire solar system.

When I first read about all this stuff, I felt a bit uneasy. None of it sounded real or even vaguely sustainable. I'd been to Las Vegas a few times and seen crazy developments come and go. The first time I visited, the hot new attractions were the Luxor, an immense onyx pyramid, and Treasure Island, a pirate fantasy world replete with lifesize galleons bobbing outside it. Roughly halfway between the pair of them, a replica New York was under construction. By my next visit, the novelty value of both the Luxor and Treasure Island had long since palled, and they now seemed less exotic than Chessington World of Adventures. Meanwhile, unreal New York had been joined by unreal Paris and unreal Venice.

But even at their most huge and demented, none of these insane monuments looked as huge and demented as the projects being announced in Dubai. Yet the novelties, while larger, were wearing thin even more quickly. Dubai's The World archipelago hadn't even opened when the same developers announced The Universe, thereby making The World sound like a rather diminished prototype before anyone had moved in.

In Las Vegas the grimy engine that paid for each new chunk of mega-casino was there in plain sight at street level: woozy drunks thumbing coins into slots 24 hours a day. Hundreds of thousands of them, slumped semi-conscious in rows like dozing cattle hooked up to milking machines. Ching ching ching, slurp slurp slurp. It was like watching a gigantic crystal spider increasing in size as it coldly sapped the husks of its victims. Ugly, but at least it made sense.

Where were the coin slots in Dubai? I had no idea. I just gawped at the photographs and was secretly impressed by the cleverness of the people who'd managed to generate so much money they could safely take leave of their senses and construct 300ft buttplug skyscrapers and artificial floating cities shaped like doodles scribbled in the margins of sanity. To my dumb, uncomprehending eyes it looked like a collection of impossible follies. But what did I know? Clearly the people actually paying for all this stuff knew precisely what they were doing.

But ah and oh. It appears my uninformed gut reaction, that slightly worried vertigo shiver, the hazy sense of "but surely they can't do that . . ." may have been precisely the correct response. Now it's in trouble, the world's financial markets seem shocked and surprised, like Bagpuss being disappointed to learn that the mice from the mouse organ couldn't really create an endless supply of chocolate biscuits from thin air. They should've phoned me for advice. If only I'd known. I could have charged a fortune. But then I'm so dumb I'd probably have blown it investing in an artificial Dubai archipelago shaped like Snoopy's head or something.

In the cold light of 2009, Dubai resembles a mystical Oz that was somehow accidentally wished into existence during an insane decade-long drugs bender. Those psychedelic structures, pictured in a fever by the mad and privileged, physically constructed by the poor and exploited, now look downright embarrassing, like a Facebook photo of a drunken mistake, as though someone somewhere is going to wake up and groan, "Oh my head . . . what did I do last night? Huh? I bankrolled a $200bn hotel in the shape of a croissant? I shipped the workers in from India and paid them how little? Oh man! The shame. What was I thinking?"

The world's tallest skyscraper, the Burj Dubai, is due to open in January. It looks like an almighty shard of misplaced enthusiasm: a lofty syringe injecting dementia directly into the skies, a short-lived spike on a printed readout, or a pin pricking a gigantic bubble. Not a shape you'd want to find yourself unexpectedly sitting on, in other words. Just ask the world's financial markets, once they've finished screaming.

Charlie Brooker

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