Burj Khalifa
— — a tower that ends where the weather begins.
Not only on a wall.
“A tower that keeps climbing past where the weather changes. Eight hundred and twenty-eight metres of reinforced concrete and steel rise from the desert floor in twenty-seven setbacks, narrowing as they go. The lower floors stand in city heat while the top floors reach into cooler air. The lights of Dubai run out around it, and the gulf catches the rest.
Burj Khalifa, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The world's tallest building since it opened on 4 January 2010, in downtown Dubai on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf. The tower rises 828 metres to architectural tip and holds 163 floors above ground. The architect was Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with structural engineer Bill Baker. A consortium of Samsung C&T, Besix, and Arabtec built it. The Y-shaped trefoil footprint draws on the Hymenocallis flower and Islamic geometric pattern, narrowing through 27 setbacks as it climbs toward the spire.
The structure took 330,000 cubic metres of reinforced concrete and 39,000 tonnes of steel rebar, clad in 26,000 individually shaped glass panels covering 132,000 square metres of facade. Bill Baker's buttressed-core system uses a central hexagonal core braced by three wings, the geometry that lets a building reach 828 metres without going prismatic. The concrete was pumped to a record 606 metres, mixed for the desert heat with ice and chilled water so it would not set inside the delivery pipes on the way up.
The tower crosses enough vertical atmosphere to register a real climate gradient. Developer measurements put the top about six degrees Celsius cooler than the base. The spire pierces 600 metres into air where low cloud occasionally forms around the upper floors. From the desert beyond Dubai the tower is visible up to 95 kilometres away on clear days. At night the building runs a programmed light show across the facade and the gulf catches the colour off the western face.