OMG the Burj Khalifa!

I've been lucky enough to experience some really cool world record-holding engineering achievements this past year: the tallest water fountain in the world, the tallest (unsupported) flagpole in the world, and now, the tallest building in the world: The Burj Khalifa.

During my vacation in Dubai over the Hajj break, I went on the "At the Top" Burj Khalifa tour and wandered around at the base afterwards. The name "At the Top" is a bit misleading because you don't actually go to the top (see fun fact #4 below), but the experience was still nothing short of spectacular and well worth the money, time, and energy spent. I highly recommend the Khalifa Tower to anyone visiting Dubai.

If you want to plan ahead, click here for ticket information.

Here are some fun facts that I learned during the tour. The ones in italics really caught my attention.

1. It's the world's tallest building (duh) at 828 meters (2,716 ft 6 in).
2. It is also the tallest structure in the world AND the tallest free-standing structure in the world (Guinness World Records likes to have lots of different categories).
3. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) developed three criteria for what makes a tall building tall (Height to Architectural Top, Highest Occupied Floor, and Height to Tip) - and the Burj Khalifa wins hands-down in all three.
4. The observation deck (where the tour takes you) is on the 124th floor and is 452 meters (1,483 ft) above the ground (Only 55% of the way up. Lame. I know. I wanted to go higher too).
5. The high-speed elevator takes you up at 10 meters per second. Your ears will pop.
6. Around every 30 stories, there are restricted-access floors for the distribution of mechanical and electrical services (transformers, AC equipment, water pumps, etc.) throughout the Burj Khalifa.
7. The tower's peak electrical demand is ~36 MW and it uses ~946,000 liters of water per day.
8. Condensate from the building (AC system) is collected and used to irrigate the landscaping. It provides 15 million gallons of supplemental water per year - roughly the amount in 20 Olympic-size swimming pools.
9. In total, 12,000 workers accumulated 22 million man-hours during the less than six years of construction. If you wanted to build it by yourself, it would have taken you 7,534 years of uninterrupted 8-hour days.
10. The "Y" shape of the tower, symbolic of a desert lily, allows it to maintain its structural integrity at high wind speeds.
11. The rebar used to build the tower weighs in at 31,400 metric tons. Laid out end-to-end, it would reach from Dubai to New York City - about 11,000 km or 1/4 of the Earth's circumference.
12.  The building officially opened on January 4, 2010.
13. Tom Cruise was here (Mission Impossible IV: Ghost Protocol filmed a scene here).

A fun fact I learned from a local:

The tower was supposed to be named "The Dubai Tower." However, the city ran out of money while building it and had to borrow the rest from Sheikh Khalifa, the President of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Abu Dhabi. Just another sign of the unsustainable growth Dubai is managing.

Some pictures I took during the tour:

Replica at the start of the tour.

Tom Cruise stuff.

That's where we're headed.

Made it! That was fast. Wait, only 452 m up? Isn't the building 828 m tall?

Look at how much further you can go up.

Still, the views are crazy.

The man-made World Islands off in the distance.

Fountain area, Dubai mall, and other development at the base.

Looking out the other side.

The Burj Al Arab, the world's only 7-star hotel, off in the distance.

A picture from the grand opening.

End of the tour :(

Some pictures I took after the tour:

The bottom half...

...and the top half!

OMG.

OMG again.

For the babies and kiddies.

Fountain area at the base.

I went back at night and took this picture: