City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (27 page)

Sang, forty-two, is not a man who gushes prose. He talks in monosyllables gummed over by his Kiwi drawl. He looks like Spiderman’s city editor J. Jonah Jameson, with the wrinkled white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, tie askew. He’s even got Jameson’s flat-top buzz cut. Instead of chomping cigars, Sang parks a Marlboro in the corner of his mouth. If Galadari’s invitation jazzed his soul, he didn’t let it show. “Sure,” he told the Dubaian. “Why not? Give it a go.”

Sang flew to Dubai to meet Galadari. The two men eyed each other up and down and seemed to get along. The skyscraper man was back in his element.

The Burj Dubai came about as the showpiece of a master plan for a new downtown. When the crown prince merged the Dubai Defence Force with the federal army in 1997, the emirate’s troops abandoned their base. It sat at a highway interchange known as Defence Roundabout. Ten years earlier, the base was too far out of town to be valuable. But the city’s expansion left the 416-acre plot in a prime location, right next to the new financial center.

Sheikh Mohammed wasn’t going to build a trailer park there. In 2002, he handed the plot to Emaar. The conditions were tough. Emaar’s chairman, Mohammed Alabbar, had to build a downtown that would command the world’s attention.

Alabbar, who directed the city’s Department of Economic Development, launched Emaar five years earlier, seeding his start-up with backing
from the Dubai government and $50 million borrowed from associates and savings.
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The company listed on the Dubai Financial Market in 2000 and shot off like a bottle rocket, amassing a market capitalization of $25 billion by June 2005, when it was declared the world’s largest developer by value.
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(It tanked soon after and in early 2009 languished in the penny stock realm.) At the time, Alabbar was Dubai’s golden boy.
Financial Times
magazine declared him Middle East Personality of the Year in 2006. And he was offered Donald Trump’s role in a Middle East version of the TV show
The Apprentice
. After a splashy launch, Alabbar quit. Many in Dubai thought the developer bowed out so as not to overshadow his own boss, Sheikh Mohammed.
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Emaar hired Los Angeles-based master planner David Klages to lay out the new downtown district. Klages had just finished the design for a new city center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where the trophy was the Petronas Twin Towers, the world’s tallest buildings between 1998 and 2004. Alabbar asked him for something similar in Dubai.

But Sheikh Mohammed was unimpressed with Alabbar’s initial design for the Burj Dubai. When he scanned the selection of architectural renderings of potential skyscrapers in 2002, he found they lacked a certain something: height. The Dubai crown prince asked for details of the world’s tallest building, a tower in Taiwan called Taipei 101: “Why is it taller? Are people there smarter than you?”
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When the Emaar chairman returned with a new rendering depicting the Burj Dubai—a pointed spire that rises in stair-stepped cylinders—it was the world’s tallest, but not by much. Sheikh Mohammed’s response was brief: “Go a lot taller.”
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The idea was to intimidate potential challengers into giving up. That’s why Alabbar needed Greg Sang.

When Sang moved to Dubai in late 2004, Alabbar’s rush-rush design competition had produced a winning entry: the silver spike of architect Adrian Smith of Chicago’s Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The Burj Dubai looks like a 1950s sci-fi depiction of a Mars rocket, a glossy creation with a needle tip and a cluster of booster engines at its base.

Alabbar chose Smith’s design because it was as good-looking as it was practical. Its concrete structure looked relatively simple and well proportioned. The building steps back as it rises, leaving external terraces that provided mounting spaces for cranes and staging points for construction material. It would cost $1 billion to erect.

There was another reason Smith’s design won. Super-tall buildings
are susceptible to high winds. Earthquakes aren’t a big danger, Sang says, because their shaking usually ends before major damage occurs. And an airliner strike of the sort that brought down the steel-frame World Trade Center wouldn’t topple the Burj, Sang believes. “Concrete can withstand impact better than steel. And it doesn’t burn.” But gusts are another matter. The building has to resist incredible wind loads that shove it from the side. Wind can even apply a dangerous twisting pressure.

“A strong gale trying to push the building over, that’s one of the things you need to design for,” Sang says.

The Burj Dubai is built to wave gently in the wind, like a reed bending slightly. In high winds, the top of the building sways ten feet back and forth in slow motion. A hazardous phenomenon called vortex shedding can take advantage of that waving cycle. Blasts of wind ricocheting off the structure can morph into tornadolike vortices that then peel around the building, pushing against one side, then the other. These swirling winds can generate a violent pulsing force that, if it matches the tower’s natural bending cycle, can cause a tower to rock back and forth in an ever-larger arc. “It’s like someone’s on a swing and you just give them a little push at the right time and they’ll swing higher and higher.”

Most vulnerable are towers that retain the same footprint from bottom to top, Sang says. Smith’s stair-stepped design defends well against vortex shedding. There’s a new shape presented to the wind at different levels, so the vortices can’t pulse simultaneously at different heights.

I first met Sang a few months after he arrived in Dubai. The Burj was then just a concrete pad surrounded by trucks and debris. Sang took me in a construction elevator to the thirty-seventh floor of a neighboring framework that would become an apartment block. It was a disorienting experience. There was no barrier between us and the abyss. We looked down at the Burj’s base and Sang spoke confidently of how the tower would rise in stages, growing so tall that its swaying motion would necessitate special dampeners to keep the elevator cables from whiplashing in their shafts.
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It was hard to imagine. But three years later, the tower has risen just as he’d predicted. Sang has ridden herd on his chief contractor, South Korea’s Samsung, which brought several members of its team that built the Petronas Towers. How’s it possible to build so fast?

“It’s a matter of throwing some design together, feeling reasonably comfortable with it, getting some foundations in the ground, and building
the superstructure,” he says. “We’re designing and building at the same time. You can walk it if you want. But why walk it? We want to run it.”

As Sang spoke in October 2008, the world’s tallest building rose just a quarter mile behind him. It was a year from completion, with scaffolding still covering its highest tip, where clambering men could barely be seen by the naked eye. “Our construction right now is over seven hundred meters tall. And we’re still going up.”

Sang makes it sound simple. But he’s had several knotty challenges to sort through. One dealt with the concrete mix that forms the Burj’s structural core. No one has ever done concrete work anywhere close to such heights. Taipei 101 held the previous record for vertical pumping of concrete, just under 1,500 feet. The Burj’s concrete superstructure is nearly 2,000 feet tall. The pump would have to push twenty-five tons of wet concrete up a tube far into the sky. Sang and his men found it flowed better when they halved the size of the gravel in the mix, using stones no bigger than half an inch.

Concrete is usually a simple mixture of four ingredients: Portland cement, sand, gravel, and water. The concrete that went into the Burj Dubai uses twenty-five ingredients. In summer, with temperatures over 110 degrees, crushed ice replaced some of the water. “It was like a concrete Slushie,” Sang says. The idea was to keep the mix from overheating. If wet concrete hits 160 degrees Fahrenheit, it weakens dramatically.

Samsung built the superstructure with an innovative self-climbing “form,” the mold in which concrete slabs are poured for each floor. The form used 230 hydraulic jacks to push itself up from each new slab just twelve hours after the concrete was poured. The system allowed Samsung to add a story every three days. But it called for a very special mixture of concrete.

“We want it to stay wet and sloppy while we’re pumping it up all that way, but when it gets there, we want it to get hard fast. Those are contradictory requirements,” Sang says. To cope, they used a range of plasticizers and hardeners.

The Burj’s concrete core rises 156 stories into the sky, skinned in silver glass. Beyond that, the tower’s framework is of riveted steel girders. Those upper floors are tiny, too small for offices or apartments. They’re there for prestige’ sake, holding mechanical and communications gear.

The Burj is the tallest man-made structure on the planet, with 5,000
workmen swarming over its every corner. In July 2007, it surpassed Taipei 101’s 1,670 feet. Two months later, it climbed past Toronto’s CN Tower, the world’s tallest freestanding structure. In April 2008, it stepped above the KVLY-TV antenna in North Dakota, the last remaining structure to challenge it. Two months later, Emaar announced that it would increase the Burj’s finished height. It reached 170 stories in November 2008, and the structure was more than 2,400 feet tall. In January 2009, an antenna appeared atop the Burj and newspapers declared it had topped out at 2,684 feet. Emaar had yet to announce the final height. Either way, that’s a half-mile-tall skyscraper, twice as high as the Empire State Building.

That kind of height allows for unique experiences. You can watch the sunset at ground level and then ride the elevator to the top and watch it again. If Dubai’s steamy skies ever clear, Emaar suggests you could see Iran, ninety miles across the Gulf, from the upper stories. More often, those near the top will be unable to see the ground.

The world’s tallest structure, for most of recorded history, has resided in the Middle East. Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza held the record for 3,900 years. It was only surpassed in 1311 by Lincoln Cathedral in England, when tall buildings went to the West. In the 1990s, Asia embarked on its tall building spree, and the trophy went there. Now the Middle East has reclaimed the distinction.

Alabbar knows that the Burj Dubai won’t always be tallest. Nakheel in 2008 announced a one-kilometer-tall skyscraper in Dubai—and then canceled the project a few months later. Developers in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have also kicked around plans for kilometer-plus towers.

The Burj’s main tenant is an ultraluxury hotel operated by Giorgio Armani. It sits next to the gargantuan Dubai Mall, with 1,200 shops; and is surrounded by nineteen apartment buildings, several hotels, and the Disneyesque Old Town, an apartment complex with wooden balconies and ocher domes evoking old Arabia.

The project has had its problems. In November 2007, Burj laborers joined a surprise general strike that swept Dubai, with 40,000 men refusing to work until they won a 25 percent pay raise. The strike took out Arabtec, the Burj’s concrete contractor, for a week.

Power demand is another headache. The downside of record height means everything must be hoisted a half mile into the sky. The Burj’s electrical load has been listed as anywhere from 45 to 150 megawatts of
power, enough to run a small city. The Burj is one reason Dubai is dangerously short of electricity.

Three men died building the Burj Dubai thus far. The first was an Indian laborer erecting scaffolding. He stepped on a plank that was cantilevered over dead space. The board gave and he fell to his death. The second victim was an Indian concrete crewman who fell from the 138th story. Workers found his body thirty stories below on one of the upper terraces. Sang says no one is sure how he fell. The climbing form is hung with safety netting. “We suspect he was trying to take a shortcut, climbing somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.” The third man to die was crushed when a giant panel of aluminum and glass, a piece of the building’s exterior cladding, tipped and fell on him.

There is a notion that the Burj Dubai is too tall for the sensibilities of most people. The upper floors in a swaying, needlelike building might be uncomfortable places to live or work. “If you don’t like high places, this isn’t the building you should be living and working in,” Sang says. “The views are going to be fantastic. The design is first class. But if you’re afraid of heights, you’re afraid of heights. Nothing we can do about that.”

When I was a teenager, my dad put me to work painting the gutters on his apartment building in Cleveland. I climbed up a forty-foot extension ladder to get there, a bit over three stories high. It was scary. I got used to it. But I’ve never been comfortable up high. I understand how people get acrophobia, the irrational fear of heights. So I was worried when my request to visit the top of the Burj Dubai was approved in the summer of 2007. The tower had just hit 141 stories, but it was a concrete skeleton, open on all sides. I phoned the guy at Emaar who was supposed to escort me to the summit.

“You’re not afraid of heights, by any chance?” he asks. He’s got a thick New York accent.

“I’ve never been that high so I can’t guarantee it,” I tell him. “Why? Have you had problems?”

“Oh yeah,” he tells me. “Saturday we had an incident. Some people just can’t help themselves when they get up that high. They feel like throwing themselves off. They get these thoughts in their heads, like ‘I’m going to end it right now!’ And they’re otherwise normal people.”

He tells me how he grappled with a woman visitor who, soon after reaching the top, tried to leap to her death. “It was a real struggle to get her down.”

“I think they call it vertigo,” I said.

“So tell me,” he says. “Are you a big guy? Reason I ask is because I could chain you to me. That way, if you get a crazy idea, I can bring you back.”

“I’m about six foot one,” I tell him.

“Oh, forget it,” he shouts. “You’d take me with you!”

He mumbles something about checking on permits for my visit and hangs up. Thankfully, I never hear from him again. My visit to the exposed top of the Burj Dubai never happens. Maybe it’s a good thing.