As an individual building, I don’t think it would have actually turned a profit, at least not very quickly. “If they had built the Burj Khalifa without that strategy, I think it might have been a white elephant for a very long time. “Placing a spike in the ground in the middle of the desert, and making that predominately something that is only accessible by car, is highly questionable in terms of sustainability,” says Safarik.īut he acknowledges that skyscrapers like the Burj Khalifa have been successful as the focal points of wider developments. Yet building tall can have an environmental impact, especially when towers are not part of a dense urban area with snappy public transport. “In the Middle East, it really has more to do with announcing the role of that country, or that person in some cases, as having arrived on the world stage.” And these days a skyscraper is about as permanent a thing as you can build,” he says. “There is a certain degree of an attempt at legitimacy by building objects of permanence. That, too, is part of the Gulf states’ obsession in joining the (almost) mile-high club, says Daniel Safarik, editor of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat journal. Skyscrapers are also the ultimate status symbol. “I think that’s really why people are trying to build tall in the Middle East.” “The tower itself was expensive, but the value to the developer is not necessarily the tower itself but the value of the surrounding land,” he says.
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