Opened in January 2010, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa has set a number of world records—and the global standard for opulence. From its height to its design, here are 10 fun facts about the tower.
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Standing at 2,717 feet, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai beats out the next-tallest building in the world by more than 1,000 feet. The Burj Khalifa is roughly three times the height of the Eiffel Tower, 15 times the highest point at Niagara Falls and almost twice as tall as the Empire State Building.
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The Burj Khalifa isn’t just the tallest building in the world, it holds a bevy of records. It’s the tallest free-standing structure, has the highest occupied floor, and boasts the most stories of any building on the planet. It also has the highest observation deck anywhere.
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The design is an abstraction of the Hymenocallis, a flower that has long petals that extend from its center. The flower is found in tropical and subtropical spots around the world, and its name means “beautiful membrane” in Greek. The Burj mimics the flower with its Y-shaped structure composed of elements—in this case building wings—arranged around a central point.
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Though the Burj is in Dubai, it was an American architecture firm that designed the now landmark building. Engineers working for the Chicago office of SOM, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, developed what they call a “buttressed core” structural system to support the building’s more than 160 floors.
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The actual construction of the building was done by a South Korean company, Samsung Engineering and Construction. It took more than 110,000 tons of concrete, 55,000 tons of steel rebar, and 22 million man-hours to complete the Burj Khalifa.
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There was so much rebar used to construct this building—31,400 metric tons, in fact—that if it were all laid end to end it would cover more than a quarter of the way around the world.
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The building’s exterior is made up of 26,000 individually cut glass panels. More than 300 cladding experts from China collaborated on the Burj Khalifa’s cladding system, which was designed specially to withstand the heat of a Dubai summer.
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How do you keep the world’s tallest building—covered in 24,000 reflective windows—clean? For the Burj Khalifa, 36 cleaners board 12 13-ton machines that move along tracks attached to the outside of the building, at heights of 20,000 feet. There actually was a competition for the cleaning gig, and Australian company Cox Gomyl won.
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It comes as no surprise that the world’s tallest building consumes a whole lot of resources. The Burj Khalifa is supplied with an average of 250,000 gallons of water every day, and can reach an electrical demand equal to that of 360,000 100-watt bulbs burning at once.
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The Burj Khalifa’s designers anticipated the difficulty of running down 120 flights of stairs in an emergency, so they developed the first-ever elevator system for a mega–high rise that can carry out controlled evacuations for some fire or security issues.
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