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High anxiety
As Dubai rushes to complete the tallest skyscraper on earth, New York is keeping a low profile. Why?
By Corina Zappia
Months from completion, Burj Dubai is already the second tallest building in history.
If you’re hoping to erect the world’s tallest building, don’t expect to hold onto the title for very long. Taiwan’s 1,671-foot Taipei 101 tower will have enjoyed the designation for a mere four years before getting knocked off its pedestal in 2008. That’s when construction is expected to be completed on Burj Dubai, a mammoth superstructure in the United Arab Emirates metropolis that will house 160 floors, 40mph elevators and a 30-acre artificial lake. And, at approximately 2,600 feet tall, it will be more than twice the height of our beloved Empire State Building.
Even incomplete, the stratospheric glass fortress is already attracting attention Stateside, as evidenced by “World’s Tallest Building: Burj Dubai,” on display at the Skyscraper Museum through the end of August. “Doing the exhibition now, when it’s just this naked concrete structure, is really a great opportunity,” says museum director Carol Willis. “It demonstrates the scale of the building and its connection to the desert, since concrete is just sand and water. Once skyscrapers are finished, they all look the same. Here, you can really see this structure as it rises.”
Eschewing glitzier details—like the 175-room Giorgio Armani–designed hotel on the building’s lower floors or the ostentatious slogan plastered on its website (“Burj Dubai will be known by many names. But only a privileged group of people will call it home”)—the exhibit looks at the design and construction challenges involved and posits the Middle East mega-edifice within the framework of the century-old skyscraper race. Starting with an aerial view of the coast of Dubai, visitors move through a survey of global superstructures (both completed and under-construction), followed by a level-by-level breakdown of Burj Dubai. Architectural models and a photomontage of ongoing construction give visitors a sense of the massive undertaking involved. (The Burj’s 3,000–6,800 laborers have to work at night during the summer, when daytime temperatures can reach 120 degrees.)
Viewing the museum’s survey of 20th- and 21st-century monoliths, though, it’s hard not to notice the dwindling number located in the West—and especially in New York, a front-runner in the skyscraper race for so long. Today, only the 102-story Empire State Building cracks the top ten—coming in last place.
Unlike midtown’s Art Deco masterpiece, contemporary supertalls are mostly residential and mixed-use monoliths built in Asian cities like Shanghai or Seoul, where exponential population growth provides a constant demand for housing, or in Dubai, where taxes are nonexistent, labor practices are dubious and oil-rich investors subscribe to an “if we build it, they will come” philosophy. So why has New York stopped caring?
“I don’t think there was much interest in building the world’s tallest building here, even before 9/11,” says Andrew Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at the Columbia School of Architecture. If security were the issue, adds Dolkart, there wouldn’t be any skyscrapers being built here at all.
The real answer, according to Willis, is economics. “The most common romance about skyscrapers is that they’re all about ego—the architect’s ego, the owner’s ego—but they’re always built with other people’s money. And if a financial institution thinks you’re not going to make money on your building, they won’t loan you $3 billion, which is what it’ll cost to build the Freedom Tower.” The Tower, should it ever finally be built, will be the exception to New York’s aversion to superstructures, owing more to sentimentality than to hubris.
Bureaucracy is another factor keeping New York on the down-low. “The city puts a limit on how much space you can pile up on a given lot,” explains Willis. “You can’t assemble enough land to make the world’s tallest building anywhere in the five boroughs.” And there’s little point in tearing down an older edifice. Because of zoning laws, you’d have to replace it with something smaller. (The Twin Towers avoided such regulations because they were built on land owned by the Port Authority.)
The bottom line, Willis believes, is that today, New Yorkers just prefer smaller buildings that don’t overshadow their neighbors or blot out the sun. And, as both Willis and Dolkart agree, we no longer have to prove our mettle by bragging about the length of our edifices. “Every now and then, someone like Donald Trump will say, ‘I’m going to build the world’s tallest building,’ ” says Dolkart. “And everyone just yawns.”