Special effects will dazzle at Burj Khalifa

The inauguration of Burj Khalifa — the world's tallest building — will feature a spectacular display of fireworks, light beams, choreographed water displays and sound and music effects that will portray the evolution of the world's most iconic new building in a breathtaking sensory journey.

Week-long celebrations as Burj Khalifa marks its 4th anniversary

The Burj Khalifa will mark its fourth anniversary with celebrations beginning on Saturday. The world’s tallest building – a UAE and global landmark – will offer a week of special events.

Top 10 steel skyscrapers

Using Khan's Bundled Tube structural engineering principles, the building takes its strength from the combination of nine main structures arranged in a three by three grid that make up the impressive complex. It's a clever arrangement. All towers rise to 50-storeys, where the northeast and southwest buildings stop. The remaining seven towers continue to the 66th floor where the northeast and southwest structures end, and at 90-storeys, the north, south and east floors top out. The two remaining towers, the west and central towers, then stretch to 110 floors, the building's top. A similar system of bundled towers was used by SOM to construct the Burj Khalifa.

Burj Khalifa Towers with a 100 Year Design Life

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Standing 828 meters (2,717 feet) tall and boasting more than 160 stories, Burj Khalifa is the world’s tallest structure: a single tower that will eventually house 12,000 people. The significance of designing and building the tallest building on Earth, costing over AED5.5 billion (US$1.5 billion), has become a matter of national pride making the protection of this national asset a priority to the government of the UAE, investors, and the tourism industry.

How do you Transport 5,500 kgs up 2,717 ft at 18 Meters per Second?

The Burj Khalifa's elevators have the world's longest travel distance from lowest to highest stop. It is the first mega-rise to have elevators with specially programmed, permit-controlled evacuation procedures. At 5,500 kg capacity, the firemen/service elevator is the world's tallest service elevator. 54 lifts have been installed in the tower.

Irrational Exuberance Comes Home

Not that there wasn’t a lot of spectacle along with the technical ingenuity. Take the daring Burj Khalifa, a mixed-use skyscraper in Dubai designed by Adrian Smith (at the time an architect at Skidmore Owings & Merrill) and completed in January; it soars to 2,717 feet, past every other structure in the world. But the Burj, for all its glitter and quantitative abundance, is also an astounding technological achievement.

Watch a drone fly over the Burj Khalifa and Dubai

Team Blacksheep flew a drone all across—or more accurately, all over—Dubai to show you downtown Dubai, the Palm Island, the Burj Al Arab and of course, the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa.

BlackBerry PlayBook makes its UAE debut

The PlayBook, which was showcased at a launch event at Dubai’s Armani Hotel, was released in the US on April 19. Canadian makers Research in Motion (RIM) were forced to recall around 1,000 of the devices in May after they were shipped with a flawed operating system.

Notes on a Year: Christopher Hawthorne on architecture

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Opened with great fanfare on Jan. 4 as the tallest building in the world, the 2,717-foot-high Burj Khalifa, designed by Chicago architect Adrian Smith, acted instantly as a kind of 160-story Rorschach Test.

Global Architectural Highlights, 2010

The improbably thin shaft of the 828-meter (2,717-foot) Burj Khalifa, a tour de force of architecture and engineering, is a reflective-glass icon ofDubai's triumphant arrival on the world scene. Or it's a towering monument to easy-money hubris. Take your pick. Changing expectations is the perilous fate of architecture that strives to be the biggest, the most lavish, the most significant. Now pundits galore predict the end of spectacle and glitz. The post-crash reality is looking more complex.