Evaluation of the Burj Khalifa

Among the greatest things that have come out of the United Arab Emirates, and especially Dubai, is the architecture. Dubai is known for taking things to a grand level: for creating a huge service based economy that caters to the whims of anybody with a lot of money, for basically building an entire island that models the continents artificially, and for creating one of the biggest tourist destinations and most productive cities in the world. The same can be said about the edifices. The structures are not a light matter—in fact they are so grand, their very presence is what defines the city in some cases. Thus the topic that is being proposed for evaluation is the Burj Khalifa building.

For background information, the Burj Khalifa is currently reputed as the tallest building in the world. Its construction budget was a staggering 1.5 billion dollars, which topples the next largest construction project in history by almost double. Its fame precedes it in so many ways, especially in the media, including its listing in the Guinness Book of World Records, or its use in the most recent Mission Impossible film. The Burj Khalifa is clearly something great. People know it, people recognize it, and people stare at it in wonder and awe. It very presence stands for everything Dubai is.

Thus, the criteria for evaluation is pushing the boundary of human achievement. For such a large-scale construction project with any number of conflicting physical factors and mechanisms, it is recognized as one of the grandest achievements of modern civil engineering. It is a representation of what to expect from Dubai—that is—only the best and the greatest. The building is a statement pride, power, wealth, and competition. The people of Dubai excel at all of these fields and have such magnificent symbolism within the building to show for it. Thus, these reasons give way to a set of criteria by which the piece of architecture should be evaluated.