The tower was designed by Chicago high-rise specialists Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, whose other credits include the Willis Tower, formerly the Sears Tower, in Chicago, and New York’s One World Trade Center. The building consists of a slender central square core, surrounded by three tiers arranged in a Y-shaped plan. These tiers are gradually stepped back as the building rises, forming a series of 27 terraces, before the central core emerges to form the culminating spire – a plan which makes the optimum use of available natural light, as well as providing the best outward views. The shape of the tower has often been compared to that for Frank Lloyd Wright’s visionary (but unrealized) plans for The Illinois, a mile-high skyscraper designed for Chicago, while chief architect Adrian Smith has said that the tower’s Y-shaped footprint was inspired by the flower Hymenocallis – although perhaps more important is the way the three buttresses supplied by the arms of the “Y” help support such a tall building constructed on such a relatively small base.
The astonishing scale of the Burj is difficult to fully comprehend – the building is best appreciated at a distance, from where you can properly appreciate the tower’s jaw-dropping height and the degree to which it reduces even the elevated high-rises which surround it to the status of undernourished pygmies. Distance also emphasizes the Burj’s slender, elegantly tapering outline, which has been variously compared to a shard of glass, a latter-day Tower of Babel and, according to Germaine Greer, “a needle stuck in the buttock of the Almighty”.
Most of the tower is occupied by some nine hundred residential apartments (these allegedly sold out within eight hours of launch, and subsequently changed hands, at the height of the Dubai property market, for a cool US$43,000 per square metre); lower floors are occupied by the world’s first Armani hotel.