The Burj Dubai: Just How Tall Is It?

posted on: Dec 30, 2009

We know that the Burj Dubai (left), designed by Chicago architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, will be the tallest building in the world and the tallest free-standing structure on Earth, when it opens next Monday, January 4. What we don’t know is exactly how tall it really is.

The developers of the tower, Emaar Properties, have been very shrewd in not releasing the exact figure. That has led to an international guessing name and has resulted in innumerable stories (like this one), giving the record-shattering tower even more notoriety.

This much is clear: The tower is roughly a half mile, or 2,640 feet, high. An Associated Press report on December 2 said the Burj Dubai reaches a “reported” height of 2,684 feet–“reported” being journalistic shorthand for “I can’t vouch for this fact, but somebody else reported it.”

Chicago architect Adrian Smith, the chief designer of the tower (he left SOM in 2006 to start his own firm), isn’t spilling the beans. He and his former colleagues at SOM don’t deny that the tower is at least 800 meters, or 2625 feet, tall. But that’s as specific as they’ll get.

One complicating factor is a recent change in the standard for measuring heights by the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. The old standard was that height was measured from the sidewalk outside the main entrance to the building’s spire or structural top. The new standard is that height is measured from “the lowest, significant, open-air, pedestrian entrance” to the top. This matters because the Burj Dubai occupies a sloping site and one of its entrances is clearly lower than the others.

The rule change made the tower even taller–but just how tall we still don’t know. Tune in Monday for the answer. (And if you have an educated guess, in feet or meters, let’s hear it now.)

Blair Kamen
The Chicago Tribune