At 150 storeys, Burj Dubai towers above all the others

[JCMach1]

Source: Gulf News

Dubai: Just 1,325 days since excavation work started on the site of the $900 million Burj Dubai, the tower is now the world's tallest free-standing structure, surpassing the 553.3 metre CN Tower in Toronto, which held the record since 1976.

Emaar Properties' tower has risen to 150 liveable storeys, the largest number of storeys for any building in the world. It has already surpassed Taipei 101 in Taiwan, which at 508 metres (1,667 feet) held the title since it opened in 2004.

More than 320,800 cubic metres of reinforced concrete and 63,300 tonnes of reinforcing steel have been used in its construction so far...



Read more: http://gulfnews.com/business/Real_Estate_Property/10153488.html

[girl gone mad]

1. Built with slave labor...

from India and Pakistan.

[JCMach1]

4. Just like everything at Walmart, except

that's Chinese...

[Submariner]

6. And Filipinos

The emirates hold their passports so they can't sneak off to the UK, or elsewhere. On a survey vessel out of Abu Dhabi there were Indians (who make $20/day) that had not been off the ship in 2 years. Slavery indeed.

[LadyAziz]

23. here is an interesting documentary

Although, many worker face hardships they stay because they will be unable to make that amount money in their home countries. Many times they are recruited by people from their home countries on the notion that they'll be paid very good wages, which is not always the case and many are there to pay off debts. It's something that DXB and the other Emirates have to tackle.

It's sad but it is all around us and not just in DXB.

Do Buy! a Dubai Documentary (maybe a bit one sided but I has a lot of facts)
1.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYDc8V5bhbg
2.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJJ0m42MoXA
3.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skBMB6sxUy4

[JCMach1]

26. The labor situation in Dubai is not good for workers, don't get me wrong

despite how bad things are, they are still a good bit better than in Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, or Nepal...

I used to feel more harshly about this myself until you begin to realize the whold capitalist world-wide economy is built on slave labor. It really pisses me off when people don't exam the sweatshop products they are buying in the states... And yes, this includes you iPhone... and almost everything else being sold to the consumer market in the US today.

Yes, workers are treated badly... but check how the Chinese workers building your cheap crap are treated and then we'll talk.

[LadyAziz]

34. Dude, didn't you read what I said?

It never said that DXB is the worst in slave labor. I know many countries are involved in slave labor including us. I feel that other than China, DXB is getting a lot of slack for it because it's one of the hottest places to be.

I am a huge fan of Sheikh Mo and his vision for DXB but I hate how his prized horses live better than the guest workers building his city. Mo is compassionate on one side but very business minded on the other.

But you can't say that one country is worse than the other, all of them are guilty. And that includes us as consumers. I deeply hope that one day that the business world ceases to trample on helpless people's human rights.

[Ilsa]

48. "...hottest places to be..." Yep, the new Gomorrah. nt

[Deja Q]

44. The media claims

the Chinese people revolt if they don't have work to do, and MSN had a huge article series on the rise of China's middle class... now think of the quality of the goods and wince; Americans made things so much better...

I have noticed Indians aren't exactly being forced at gunpoint to sign up for H1Bs and learn this stuff, and those countries' cost of living is rather lower than ours.

Is the situation really as poor as some make it out to be? No. Are there people who still suffer? You bet. But, no, it's not nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I wonder if some of the Chinese product quality comes from the workers who are disgruntled? Or the lack of regulations, which nobody seems to say are good things anymore...

[lurky]

2. Your gas money at work.

Think of it as a big middle finger.

[Jemmons]

3. So are you saying that the US is being exploited by the middle east?

Here is what you need to understand: The middle east is the bedst market in the world for the only thing that the US produce in quality and numbers: Weapons and weapons systems. With Israel as a very effective marketing arm of the US billions worth of arms are being sold to countries in and arround the ME. In effect the US is making a living from extracting "protection-money".

[Turbineguy]

5. We build over there

so we don't have to build over here.

[bunkerbuster1]

7. It looks rather silly, doesn't it?

Standing out there with nothing even remotely like it nearby.

[Scooter24]

10. The development model for Dubai is most impressive

There are 3 superstructures already planned...



With more on the drawing board. Trust me, there will be a lot of company for that building in the next decade.

[closeupready]

14. I probably shouldn't say this, but I like it, too.

would be nice to see it for real.

[JCMach1]

27. I would like to as as well, but as Dubai pushes towards the 2million mark

the pollution is so thick from where I live you can't see it. Just a year ago you could. Car emissions reached the tipping point this past year! :(

Until the metro and tramlines are complete, it will be this way as Dubai pushes 5 and then 10million in the coming decades.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9008613@N06/1191563828/in/set-72157601585773369?edited=1

[JMDEM]

38. Cool!

In 50 years, 2/3 of those buildings will still be above the sea. Now that's thinking ahead.

[Zensea]

15. People used to say that about the WTC also

from an architectural standpoint in relation to its surroundings.

[sandnsea]

35. Not exactly

Dubai is booming. Where do you think all the money from the Bush tax cuts went?



http://archive.gulfnews.com/megaprojects/index.html

[madrchsod]

8. it will look very interesting in 500 years from now

that is if it is still standing

[soothsayer]

9. good target for al qaeda now that halliburton HQ is over there

[Zensea]

16. Just like the WTC was

see my comment above.
It's unfortunate that's the way things are, but that is the way things are.

[LadyAziz]

21. I doubt it,

I think the ruling families paid off al qaeda to stay away. The late president of the UAE Shk. Zayed bin Sultan al Nayhan of Abu Dhabi was involved in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) of Pakistan (the bank that John Kerry broke) which funded terrorist agents. I am sure other Sheikhdoms in the Emirates and elsewhere were also involved in the bank.

[durtee librul]

24. I was just thinking the same thing!

Wasn't OBL's big arguement about WTC that it represented all the 'evil western ways of greed and big money?

Wonder if he will order a strike on it? Probably not. Kind of hard to do from a chest freezer in the pentagon basement.

[Beausoir]

11. That's an ugly eyesore.

[itsrobert]

12. Was it built by the Bin Laden Contruction company?

?

[Javaman]

13. So when oil becomes scarce how will they power the elevators

to get to the top floors?

More useless phallic symbols.

[alfredo]

17. the elevators will be run by slave labor from the former middle class

in America. They will be pulled out of the rusting hulks of useless SUV's and collapsing poorly built Mc Mansions.

[Grandrose]

72. LOL...Brilliant!

:spray:Thanks, I needed that! :rofl:

[JMDEM]

39. Not much solar energy around there...

I guess that wouldn't work...

[kskiska]

73. The Eiffel Tower elevators use pig and ox grease

but somehow I doubt that would go over big in Dubai.

(snip)

The pistons are greased with pig or ox fat mixed with hemp fiber. The insides of the taps on the water pumps are lined with leather saturated in ox-hoof oil.

"The original machinery needs the original grease -- it won't work with modern oils," Fevai says, leaning over to inspect the thick, translucent globs of pig fat oozing down the sides of a pipe casing. "It's been like this for over 100 years."

Today, in an age of refined oil lubricants, the grease is hard to find, Fevai says. Fortunately, a company in northern France still produces the obsolete animal fat concoctions. Fevai orders it in 13-gallon jerrycans.

more in today's WP:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/16/AR2007091601412.html

[MetaTrope]

18. Curious coincidence about that $20 billion price tag

Considering how much money went missing in Iraq...

[daleo]

19. There was an interesting article in latest Harpers on Dubai

It seems hard to predict how sustainable the current Dubai situation really is.

[daleo]

31. For the record, it was "The Walrus", not Harpers

The Walrus is a sort of Canadian version of Harper's. If you read both, it is easy to mix them up.

[LadyAziz]

20. Cool,

I love how DXB is shooting for bigger and bigger things. I heard that they have plans to build an even bigger tower. Sheesh! Sheikh Mo got major bank.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

22. It somewhat surpasses the Tower Of Babel, doesn't it!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel

[Deja Q]

46. An astute observation; it'll also explain why offshoring isn't what it's cracked up to be.

Though I'll give this repeat of history a B+ for creativity...

[Solar_Power]

25. Buy a Prius and stop sending your $$ to them

and save the environment at the same time

win-win

[BestCenter]

66. Dubai isn't an oil state.

Their main industries include tourism, IT, and finance.

[JCMach1]

28. Other Dubai MEGAPROJECTS

http://gulfnews.com/megaprojects/index.html

[sandnsea]

36. People better pay attention

It may serve a certain smugness to look down ones nose at the global excess, but we're being left behind with these kinds of projects all over the world. I don't think most Americans understand what's happening.

[JCMach1]

41. Most have no clue how fast Asia is growing...

[Deja Q]

45. Despite obvious MSM coverage:

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/StockInvestingTrading/ChinaIntro_SeriesHome.aspx

[JCMach1]

50. Yet, what messages permeate the airwaves... bad products, oil barons, exploitation of workers, ports

all of which is true, but most people are missing the stories like the one you posted.

Dubai is the first Megalopolis of the 21st century. It is rapidly developing into a bizarre combination of Hong Kong and Orlando. It and the rest of Asia are leaving the United States and Europe behind.

[smirkymonkey]

29. I'm sorry, but am I the only one who sees this as another

"Who has the biggest dick in the world" contest?

Whether it's a building, a car, nukes, a rocket, cruise missles, oil tankers, assets under management...(the list goes on, ad infinitum...) It just the same shit all over again. And meanwhile, people starve to death, go without adequate health care, the means to make a decent living or educate their children properly. People die for these stupid fucking VANITY projects so some men can feel good about thier tiny, shriveled souls, hearts, minds and probably....appendages.

You won't see me jumping on the bandwagon of admiration.

[Posteritatis]

30. Er? If you read the comments you wouldn't be seeing that bandwagon. (nt)

[smirkymonkey]

32. I see plenty of admiration for a stupid, excessive waste of glass

and metal (which is basically what I think of most skyscrapers past a certain point).

[Posteritatis]

33. Not in this thread you don't (nt)

[Cleita]

37. What is it with male dominated, patriarchal societies and

their phallic symbol constructions? No city in any country needs buildings with that many storeys unless their intent is to house all the homeless and poor, but we know that isn't going to happen. All they are saying to the world is that my symbolic penis is bigger than anyone else's.

[JMDEM]

40. I think it's a power thing with multiple dimensions

Yes, your phallic analysis is probably correct -- but it's also being at or near the top of one of those things -- if your office was up there, you'd feel like some sort of God ruling over the little ant-people scurrying around below. I think this really thrills the peckerheads that run the huge companies.

[BestCenter]

42. Or it could mean that Dubai is a small place and requires upwards expansion

Until people decide to expand via huge holes in the ground.

[IDemo]

52. They're expanding outwards, too

[Posteritatis]

53. Didn't you know?

Anything that's longer or taller than it's wide must be a phallic symbol! There's no other possible explanation for anything! Aerodynamics, land area, more mundane aesthetics; those are all just excuses for mens' non-sapient, unwitting submission to The Phallocracy!

[Cleita]

60. So then what is it?

Let's face it, ancient civilizations built pyramids of one sort or the other, not big concrete and steel rods into the sky. Think of the environmental impact of those high rises, all the electricity and plumbing they need, not to mention parking. They really mess up a place environmentally because the amount of waste and trash a small patch of ground can produce. No one ever takes that into account, least of all the builders and building departments of the cities they are built in.

[BestCenter]

65. Wait,

So you would prefer pyramidal buildings that blanket larger amounts of land? Or are you saying the ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Mesoamerican civilizations WEREN'T phallocentric?

[Cleita]

67. Since pyramids were build more for mortuary and religious

purposes, I don't think that their use impacted the land like our use of high rises, places that we actually use to work and live in. There are anthropologists who believe that ancient religions were vagina centric, often symbolized by a triangle. Isn't a pyramid a 3-D triangle? Maybe some anthropologists have an answer.

[Posteritatis]

68. There are anthropologists who believe a lot of things

Most broad-brush statements like "ancient societies or religions (body part)centric" are bullshit, and going far out of their way to apply edgy significance to mundane facts. Period. Full stop.

Pyramids and ziggurats were built the way they were because it was easy and structurally sound with the technology of the time, not because they were secretly controlled by Freudian cryptopsychology. If you mentioned a theory like that around most professional anthropologists, or most anthropology grad students for that, they'd laugh in your face.

If ancient civilizations knew how to use steel and glass architecturally, and had the population sizes and densities that modern cities have, and wished to house residents and workers in something other than mid-Imperial style tentement blocks, they would have structures like the ones that you seem to think exist only to show off some secret hypermasculinity. Ancient cultures didn't build towering steel and glass structures because they didn't know how to. If they did, they would. They're some of the best uses of space in terms of floor area per ground area, and are certainly better than the ridiculous suburban sprawl I live in right now when you're geographically at a premium.

As for the environmental impacts, none of those ancient cultures particularly cared about that, however much people who aren't historians idealize them in that regard.

[Cleita]

69. Broad brush is the best you can do on a message board

about such matters and since a minute brush would use up the whole board, we have to leave that to academia. Just because urban sprawl exists, doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed. The solution of high rises has been proven not to be a solution to urban and suburban sprawl, but a contributing factor. All you need to do is look around you. Now also a nice laboratory specimen is Los Angeles. This is something you can look up and look at the trends. Now there was a time (1940s) when City Hall was the highest building in Los Angeles and the congested suburban areas were horse ranches and agricultural fields.

Multi-storey buildings were limited to less that fifteen storeys. It was when they lifted that ban somewhere in the mid-sixties that all the suburban sprawl began in earnest. I know because I was witness to all the changes over the decades. Just because a high rise goes up somewhere, doesn't mean that all the surrounding land is going to turn into a park. No, the rush is on to build more and more, nearer and closer and higher. It never stops. Add freeways to this and then housing developments spread out to places that were once pasture and wilderness.

It's not that we can't live within nature. We can, but high rises and artificial islands and all the other engineering tampering that goes on is out of control to the exclusion of any other solutions to city planning.

[Odin2005]

54. Oh fuck, not that BS pop sociology about "phallic buildings" again.

That pseudo-feminist postmodernist "intellectuals" believe such nonsense is hilarious.

[closeupready]

56. I agree.

Better to build up than out, destroying the environment in the process.

[Cleita]

59. So all those toilets flushing, air conditioning and lighting needed

as well as parking congestion to accommodate the occupants of said building are environmentally friendly? Man I lived in LA before the rush to build all the high rises and believe me the environmental impact was dramatic. Now the beaches are regularly closed on account of bacteria counts because of the sewage that over flows into the channels and creeks that lead to the ocean, not to mention traffic congestion at all hours of the day and practically no available parking although all you see are seas of cars all day both parked and operating. Of course you are familiar with our power shortages, which was made national with the Enron scandal. All of this occurred after the rise of high rises.

[Tesha]

62. Do you figure there are fewer toilets in "horizontal" building styles?

Do you figure there are fewer toilets in "horizontal" building styles
than in your "phallic" building styles? I'd have thought that the
toliets-per-butt ratio held pretty much constant no matter what the
style of building.

And high-rises only need parking if you assume the presence of
private cars. But that too is invariant depending on the building
style.

Ecologically, there's actually a lot to be said for concentrating
a lot of your population on the smallest possible patch of land.
Elevators provide far more ecologically-sound transportation than
any wheeled vehicle.

Tesha

[Cleita]

63. Also, high rises create urban sprawl because all those offices

hire workers who need places to live. So not only do you have the impact of let's say three toilets per lot multiplied by twenty or so storeys, the lots around them fill up with new building to accommodate the "growth". Unfortunately, infrastructure only catches up when it becomes overloaded and stops working as intended. Then the city planners have a we gotta fix this moment. The only problem is that the fix is always behind what is needed.

[Odin2005]

70. Huh? high density development is the OPPOSITE of sprawl.

Sprawl is having to drive 3 hours from the suburbs to get to work instead of living in an apartment 15 minutes away.

[Cleita]

71. Bingo you figured it out and don't even know it.

People with families drive fifty miles or more sometimes, from their houses to get to their jobs in a high rise. The only people in apartments are young singles, young marrieds and the families of the people who do the minimum wage work. The apartments, unless they are condos, generally in better (and distant) neighborhoods, are usually deteriorating buildings that the owners are holding on to to turn a profit to a, guess what, developer who is going to build a high rise of more offices. Office buildings cost less to build and yield better rents.

[Cleita]

58. Laugh away. It makes the discomfort you feel that I might be right

go away. Or maybe you could offer another explanation that isn't so feminist? Do tread carefully though.

[BestCenter]

64. Yes,

It would be preferable to have an explanation that doesn't seem to root from folk psychology.

[Deja Q]

43. The new Freedom Tower won't be even that high.

[Ilsa]

47. Invest in Dubai! (snark. We already have, unwittingly.)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1814058&mesg_id=1814058

[ohio2007]

49. Your gas dollars at work nt

[kskiska]

51. Sweden has the "Turning Torso"

(snip)

One of the tallest accommodation blocks in Europe, Turning Torso is the leading light of the newly created Western Harbour area of Malmö. It’s one of the most spectacular and luxurious apartment complexes in the world, with interiors priding the best of Scandinavian design, and a view that is, literally, breathtaking. It is the defining landmark of a new, vibrant region, the Öresund region of southern Sweden and greater Copenhagen, with a total of over 3.5 million inhabitants.

more…
http://www.thelocal.se/7922/

[treestar]

55. So stupid

Not even necessary in this day and age.

Whoever goes to the top of that is a fool. We all know that a fire on any of the lower floors can bring the entire building down. :hide:

[architect359]

57. Not really

These days with adequate fire proofing and fire / life safety systems, tall buildings are more better protected.

[Cleita]

61. Yes, remember the bank building that burned in Los Angeles

some twenty years or so ago. The builders hadn't even equipped it with a sprinker system. I believe at the time it was the tallest building in the west or something like that.

[architect359]

74. Yeah - I barely remembered that and dug around on the internet

Here's a rather comprehensive report on that fire: http://www.iklimnet.com/hotelfires/interstatebank.html

Turns out sprinkler systems were being installed at that time and weren't operational. Looks like they did turn on the upper level ones during the fire to try and contain the fire from spreading.

From the section under Building Descriptions:

"A complete automatic sprinkler system costing $3.5 million was being installed in the building at the time of the fire. The installation was not required by codes at the time the owners decided to provide increased fire protection for the building. The project was approximately 90 percent complete, with work in progress at the time of the incident. The piping and sprinkler heads had been installed throughout the five fire floors and connected to the standpipe supply. However, a decision had been made to activate the system only on completion of the entire project, when connections would be made to the fire alarm systems, so the valves controlling the sprinklers on completed floors were closed."

These days, codes do require application of all these fire and life safety requirements. However, the key phrase I've learnt is "fire-resistant", never "fire proof". Overall, high rises now with proper application of code requirements are safer and hopefully getting better as we discover and apply newer strategies.

As a P.S., there is a note mentioning fire resistive coatings on the structural members that helped prevent failure.