1 · Position
Emaar announced the master plan in 2002 and began work in 2004. The Dubai Mall soft-opened on 4 November 2008 with 1,300 stores; the Burj Khalifa topped out on 17 January 2009 at 828 metres and opened on 4 January 2010, at a cost of about 1.5 billion dollars. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed it under Adrian Smith, with a Y-shaped plan derived from Islamic geometry, setbacks and a spiralling taper to break vortex shedding.
2 · Why it is in the Library
The hotels are inside the landmark, not beside it. Armani Dubai occupies thirty floors of the Burj Khalifa; the Address houses sit around the fountain. Everywhere else in this group a hotel is a tenant of the district; here the world's tallest building contains one, and the room rate is a function of the address rather than the view. It is the purest instance of what a district can do for a house — and of how completely a house can be subordinated to one.
3 · Candour
A district built on a single record is exposed to that record being broken, and to the tourism cycle that sustains it. The Library also records what the celebratory accounts omit: Downtown Dubai was delivered through the 2008–09 crash, which very nearly took Emaar with it, and the building carries the name of the ruler of Abu Dhabi rather than the one who commissioned it — the clearest possible marker of who paid at the end. Construction labour conditions in the Gulf during this period are a documented and continuing subject of criticism, which this entry states rather than settles.