In September, an Emaar spokesperson had sent this newspaper a statement that the last of the cranes atop the Burj Dubai would be taken down in a few weeks. The cranes were originally supposed to come down by end of August.

The building, when completed, will meet all four criteria listed by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) – the body that classifies the world’s tallest structures.

CTBUH measures the height of buildings to the structural top, the highest occupied floor, the top of the roof and the tip of the spire, pinnacle, antenna, mast or flag pole.

Emaar said last month that the Burj Dubai tower has accomplished a world record for the highest installation of an aluminium and glass façade. Keeping the tower façade clean will be the next engineering challenge, it said. “To guarantee that every corner of Burj Dubai sparkles, 18 window-washing units are built into the tower,” said the statement.

At least that is the rumour setting the internet ablaze at the moment – an official announcement has yet to be made.

Witnesses in Dubai say the tower has hit well over 800m and will not be going any higher and Wiki claims topping out was achieved 17 January.

Local media reports the skyscraper is being prepped for an 09/09/09 soft opening.

What we do know for sure is that workers are adding an antenna with a blinking light to the tower.

Samsung Engineering and Construction has confirmed its’ workers are on the job.

Although, several other projects were announced that claimed to surpass Burj Dubai’s height, analysts now agree that all such projects would require several billions for completion, and hence, they have all been bought to a halt.

The crisis is expected to govern global lives for the next three to five years, and an additional five years at least, would be required for the towers to surpass the 818 meters final height of Burj Dubai, and hence, it is now safe to say that the astonishing landmark, Burj Dubai, would cement its place as the world’s tallest building till 2019.

About four projects have been announced till date to outstrip Dubai. One being the Al Burj Tower by Nakheel in Dubai, the others are the Murjan Tower 1 in Bahrain, Burj Mubarak al-Kabir in Kuwait, and a kilometer high tower for Jeddah by Saudi Arabian Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.

1. The elevators will have the world’s longest travel distance from lowest to highest stop

2. Hot air on the outside will condense due to the large cooling needs of the building. The condensation will be collected and used to water the buildings flora and fauna. 20 Olympic sized swimming pools per year of water.

3. There are 1,210 fire extinguishers on the site.

4. At the peak cooling times, the tower will require approximately 10,000 tonnes of cooling per hour.

5. The tower’s observation deck will be located 442 metres above ground, the highest publicly accessible observation deck in the world.

6. Condensation on the building will be collected and drained down to a holding tank located in the basement from where it will be pumped into the site irrigation system for use on the tower’s landscaped gardens. This system will provide about 15 million gallons of supplemental water per year, equivalent to nearly 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

7. The amount of steel rebar used for the tower is 31,400 metric tons – laid end to end this would extend over a quarter of the way around the world.

8. Dubai has set a new world record for vertical concrete pumping for a building, by pumping to over 460 metres. The previous record was held by Taipei 101 for pumping concrete up to a height of 448 metres.

9. Burj Dubai will also break the world record for altitude transportation of concrete before construction is complete.

10. The total area of cladding used to cover the Burj Dubai will be equivalent to 17 football fields.

11. The concrete used for the Burj Dubai is equivalent to: a solid cube of concrete 61 metres on a side, a sidewalk 1,900 kilometres long, the weight of 100,000 elephants.

12. The tower’s peak electricity demand is estimated at 36MVA, equivalent to roughly 360,000 100-watt light bulbs.

13. There will be 200 metres of dancing fountains at the foot of the Burj Dubai.

14. The Burj Dubai will feature the world’s first Armani Hotel.

15. Burj Dubai derives its design inspiration from the desert flower, Hymenocalis, and incorporates patterning systems that are embodied in Islamic architecture.

16. 54 lifts are to be installed in the tower.

17. The Burj Dubai spire will be visible from as far away as 95 kms.

18. At 5,500 kg capacity, the firemen/service elevator will be the world’s tallest service elevator.

19. First mega-rise to have elevators with specially programmed, permit-controlled evacuation procedures. (I wonder how they work? Weren’t we supposed Not to use evaluators in case of an emergency)

20. Highest publicly accessible observation tower at 442 meters. ( Go up and watch miles and miles of desert as well as ocean I guess!)

21. The curtain wall of Burj Dubai will be equivalent to 17 football fields.

22. The total glass requirement is 142K sq/m

23. The car park has approx. 3,000 parking places in four levels and a total area of just under 89,000 m2.

24. The car park ventilation system must comply with the USstandards Ashrae and AMCA for air quality and fan requirements and must in case of fire be suitable for operating at 300°C for not less than 60 minutes.
25. The double deck cabin elevators are the fatest in the world and also the one to travel the longest from a lower to higher point. The speed of the cabin is 18 m/sec (40 mph).

26. It also has the worlds first programmed and controlled evacuation in the world.

27. It can withstand the worst storm to hit dubai in a 100 years

28. It has 15,000 sq ft of fitness facilities.

29. A cigar Club
30. Connected to the largest mall in the world.

And for the environmentally inclined person:

1. Power requirement is 36 KVA is equivalent of 36K lights bulbs of 100 watts each operating at the same time.

2. The cooling requirement is 10K tonnes of melting ice every day.

3. 15 Million gallons of supplemental water are collected and drained every day

And lastly, 33,236 Men in Blue work at the site on a regular basis.

The Burj Dubai tower currently stands over 1,700 feet tall. The state-owned developer Emaar Properties said completion would be postponed until sometime in 2009. It did not give specifics, but the newspaper Gulf News and the online news site ArabianBusiness.com said the delay would be four months.

“The company would rather opt for a nominal delay in total quality execution of the Burj Dubai … than compromise on any aspect of quality,” Emaar, one of the main builders in this Gulf boomtown, said in a press release without elaborating.

Emaar did not give the reason for the delay.

The final height of Burj Dubai is a closely guarded secret. Emaar’s representatives previously said the tower will stop somewhere above 2,275 feet.

Last summer, the company said the skyscraper had reached 1,680 feet, surpassing Taiwan’s Taipei 101 which has dominated the global skyline at 1,667 feet since 2004.

When completed, the Burj Dubai will have 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.

More..

The Burj Dubai tower currently stands over 1,700 feet tall. The state-owned developer Emaar Properties said completion would be postponed until sometime in 2009. It did not give specifics, but the newspaper Gulf News and the online news site ArabianBusiness.com said the delay would be four months.

“The company would rather opt for a nominal delay in total quality execution of the Burj Dubai … than compromise on any aspect of quality,” Emaar, one of the main builders in this Gulf boomtown, said in a press release without elaborating.

Emaar did not give the reason for the delay.

The final height of Burj Dubai is a closely guarded secret. Emaar’s representatives previously said the tower will stop somewhere above 2,275 feet.

Last summer, the company said the skyscraper had reached 1,680 feet, surpassing Taiwan’s Taipei 101 which has dominated the global skyline at 1,667 feet since 2004.

When completed, the Burj Dubai will have 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.

More..

Work that should have begun in the first quarter of last year won’t start until April at the earliest following the collapse of Switzerland-based Schmidlin Ltd Facade Technology, said George Efstathiou, a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, which designed the tower in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Delays to the US$900 million, 160-storey skyscraper are a setback to Dubai’s plans to create a 202-hectare district featuring hotels, offices, apartments and the world’s biggest shopping mall as it seeks to become the Middle East’s No. 1 tourist hub. While the tower’s internal structures have already passed the 100th storey, the lack of a facade means work on fitting out the building can’t begin.

“It’s very unusual for a tower to be this tall without cladding,” Efstathiou said yesterday in an interview on the sidelines of the “Building Tall” construction conference in Dubai.

“The cladding is the enclosure of a building, so any interior work that needs dry conditions cannot be completed if it’s not in place.”

Wolfgang Rudolph, US general manager of Permasteelisa SpA’s Josef Gartner unit
“But we have a new contractor on board and they have a local partner and a scheme to get us back on track,” he said.

The facade for the Burj Dubai, comprising thousands of metal panels, will now be provided by Hong Kong-based Far East Aluminium Group, Efstathiou said.

“The cladding is the enclosure of a building, so any interior work that needs dry conditions cannot be completed if it’s not in place,” said Wolfgang Rudolph, US general manager of Permasteelisa SpA’s Josef Gartner unit, one of the world’s largest producers of so-called curtain walling.

Schmidlin Ltd Facade Technology, based in Aesch, Switzerland, filed for bankruptcy on Feb. 22 last year. The company said at the time that the high-risk and technologically-challenging nature of its work had led to spiraling costs, leaving it “massively in the red” since 2003.