Since yesterday the Burj Dubai is the highest building of the World, with his 1680 feet (512 meters) it’s now higher then Taiwan’s Taipei 101.
And construction is still going on. Nobody exactly knows how high it will get. But they expect it to reach 2605 feet (808 meters) high when it
should be finished at the end of 2008.
When completed, the skyscraper will feature more than 160 floors, 56 elevators, luxury apartments, boutiques, swimming pools, spas,
exclusive corporate suites, Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani’s first hotel, and a 124th floor observation platform.

The tower is designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, who also designed the Sears Tower in Chicago and the Freedom Tower in New York City,
among numerous other famous high-rises. The building resembles the bundled tube form of the Sears Tower, but is not a tube structure.
The design of the Burj Dubai is reminiscent of the Frank Lloyd Wright vision for The Illinois, a mile high skyscraper designed for Chicago, Illinois.
The Burj Dubai is expected to rise to 150% of the height of the Sears Tower.
The design of Burj Dubai is ostensibly derived from the patterning systems embodied in Islamic architecture, with the triple-lobed footprint of the
building based on an abstracted desert flower native to the region. The tower is composed of three elements arranged around a central core.
As the tower rises from the flat desert base, setbacks occur at each element in an upward spiraling pattern, decreasing the cross section of the
tower as it reaches toward the sky. At the top, the central core emerges and is sculpted to form a finishing spire. A Y-shaped floor plan maximizes
views of the Persian Gulf. Viewed from above or from the base, the form also evokes the onion domes of Islamic architecture.

The exterior cladding of the Burj Dubai will consist of reflective glazing with aluminum and textured stainless steel spandrel panels with vertical
tubular fins of stainless steel. The cladding system is designed to withstand Dubai’s extreme summer temperatures.

The interior will be decorated by Giorgio Armani. An Armani Hotel (the first of its kind) will occupy the lower 37 floors. Floors 45 through 108 will
have 700 private apartments on 64 floors (which, according to the developer, sold out within eight hours of going on sale). Corporate offices and
suites will fill most of the remaining floors, except for a 123rd floor lobby and 124th floor indoor/outdoor observation deck. The spire will also hold
communications equipment. An outdoor zero-entry swimming pool will be located on the 78th floor of the tower.

It will also feature the world’s fastest elevator, rising and descending at 18 m/s (65 km/h, 40 mph).[11] The world’s current fastest elevator is in the
Taipei 101 office tower in Taipei, travels at 16.83 m/s (60.6 km/h, 37.5 mph). Engineers had considered installing the world’s first triple-decker elevators,
but the final design calls for double-decker elevators.

I wonder how long it will last until it’s being past by an ever higher tower, as there are some projects under development at the moment for building an even higher skyscraper.
One of them is ‘Al Burj’ (The Tower), also in Dubai, it’s reported that it will be around 3937 feet (1200 meters) high and will have 200 floors !!!

Well, the Sky really is the limit here

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