Empty Facade

Somehow I'm fascinated by this monstrosity. It's sort of a grotesque monument to the high water of financial irresponsibility a few years ago. I suppose I'd visit and go up to the observation floors, but the thought of being in that thing for very long or actually living in the swaying structure gives me the willies.

The Burj Dubai and architecture's vacant stare


"One of the odder, more complicated moments in the history of architectural symbolism will arrive Monday with the formal opening of the Burj Dubai skyscraper. At about 2,600 feet high -- the official figure is still being kept secret by developer Emaar Properties -- and 160 stories, the tower, set back half a mile or so from Dubai's busy Sheikh Zayed Road, will officially take its place as the tallest building in the world.
Designed by Adrian Smith, a former partner in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Burj Dubai is an impossible-to-miss sign of the degree to which architectural ambition -- at least the kind that can be measured in feet or number of stories -- has migrated in recent years from North America and Europe to Asia and the Middle East. It is roughly as tall as the World Trade Center towers piled one atop the other. Its closest competition is Toronto's CN Tower, which is not really a building at all, holding only satellites and observation decks, and is in any case nearly 900 feet shorter.
Monday's ribbon-cutting, though, could hardly come at a more awkward time. Dubai, the most populous member of the United Arab Emirates, continues to deal with a massive real estate collapse that has sent shock waves through financial markets around the world and forced the ambitious city-state, in a significant blow to its pride, to seek repeated billion-dollar bailouts from neighboring Abu Dhabi. Conceived at the height of local optimism about Dubai's place in the region and the world, this seemingly endless bean-stock tower, which holds an Armani Hotel on its lower floors with apartments and offices above, has flooded Dubai with a good deal more residential and commercial space than the market can possibly bear.
And so here is the Burj Dubai's real symbolic importance: It is mostly empty, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Though most of its 900 apartments have been sold, virtually all were bought three years ago -- near the top of the market -- and primarily as investments, not as places to live. ("A lot of those purchases were speculative," Smith, in something of an understatement, told me in a phone interview.) And there's virtually no demand in Dubai at the moment for office space. The Burj Dubai has 37 floors of office space.

Though Emaar is understandably reluctant to disclose how much of the tower is or will be occupied -- it did not reply to e-mails sent this week on that score -- it's fair to assume that like many of Dubai's new skyscrapers it is a long, long way from being full. In that sense the building is a powerful iconic presence in ways that have little directly to do with its record-breaking height. To a remarkable degree, the metaphors and symbols of the built environment have been dominated in recent months by images of unneeded, sealed-off, ruined, forlorn or forsaken buildings and cityscapes. The Burj Dubai is just the latest -- and biggest -- in this string of monuments to architectural vacancy."

The Correlation Between Constructing Tall Buildings And Imminent Economic Disaster

China's skyscraper craze 'may herald economic crash'

"China could be the next country to go bust, if its headlong rush to build ever-taller skyscrapers is a guide to its future economic health.

According to a study by Barclays Capital, the mania for skyscrapers over the last 140 years is a sure indicator of an imminent crash.

It points out that the construction boom that threw up New York's Chrysler and Empire State buildings preceded the New York crash of 1929 and Great Depression.

More recently, Dubai built a forest of skyscraping offices, hotels and apartment buildings, including the world's tallest, the Burj Khalifa, before it got into terrible financial difficulties. In 2010 Dubai had to be bailed out by its neighbour, Abu Dhabi, to avoid going bankrupt.

Bar Cap's report said: "Thankfully for the world economy, there is not currently a skyscraper under construction that is planned to overtake the height of the Burj Khalifa."

However, BarCap said the "unhealthy correlation" between construction of the world's tallest buildings and economic crashes was likely to ensnare China, which is home to half of the world's skyscrapers currently under construction.

India, which has just two skyscrapers, sometimes defined as buildings over 240 metres (787ft) tall, is also on the radar after giving the go-ahead to its first skyscraper building boom, with 14 under way, including the world's second-tallest tower in the financial capital, Mumbai.

Andrew Lawrence, director of property research at Barclays Capital in Hong Kong, said: "Building booms are a sign of excess credit."

Lawrence said that historically, skyscraper construction had been characterised by bursts of sporadic, but intense activity that coincided with easy credit, rising land prices and excessive optimism, but often by the time the buildings were finished, the economy had slipped into recession.

China is already showing signs of fulfilling the prophecy. Its largest quarterly business survey showed that confidence among property developers had collapsed to a point where it was worse than the lowest point in the 2008 recession.

More worringly, the same survey revealed that confidence among construction firms, while a little down on the previous quarter, remained bouyant. Capital Economics, the independent analysts, said Beijing's decision to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into construction projects, bypassing private developers, has prolonged the building boom and potentially stored up a bigger crash.

Even funds pouring into residential schemes are at risk following years of high-rise developments near factories and businesses dependent on the west for trade. A recession in Europe that drags the rest of the world into a period of lower growth will hurt Chinese exporters, jobs and demand for property.

BarCap said signs of trouble were escalating in China and India. China had the dubious distinction of being the world's "biggest bubble builder," as it erected ever more and higher towers, it said."

Movies

They hate us for Tom Cruise.



He shit his pants all over the Burj Dubai.



Christian Bale based Patrick Bateman in "American Psycho" on Tom Cruise and his "very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes"

Personality

Dubai Is A Fantasy Bubble

With a lot of pins lying around.
Dubai is one of the Arab Emirates and is also the name of it's biggest city. You may have heard about it's frantic construction boom, from man made islands visible from space to the tallest building in the world. Superfluous vanity projects like that which benefit only a select few should be a red flag that something isn't right, and it ain't.


the burgeoning Burj

This so called "utopian capitalist city" exists because of unique ingredients found nowhere else on the planet. It lies at the intersection of vast oil wealth and an enormous cheap labor pool, and is kept alive because powerful interests need the place secure. The huge non-citizen demographic that numbers around a million has no say in the political structure, and by integrating them into the work force the ruling monarchy made sure their power wouldn't be threatened. Trade unions, the possibility of strikes and any organizing are all illegal and almost 100% of workers there can be deported on the slightest provocation. US robber barons must be salivating.

You'd think such an opulent place would be a tempting target but security for the fat cats is extremely tight and powerful interests have need for Dubai's existence. It's a bizarre hub of international finance perched on the edge of all the chaos spawned from the ziofascist "war on some terror". This pig thrived because it put on a whole lot of makeup and flirted like hell with international financial markets. The city's eyes are concentrated so firmly on outside interests that it wants to build the world's biggest airport with only a population of about 1.5 million.

Dubai thrives because it's made itself important to both the US and other powers in the region who will either leave it alone or want it to succeed. The relations between this country and that one are so close that the pentagon cleared a Dubai management company to protect US port security for a brief time two years ago. Halliburton moved it's headquarters there last year. But the real importance of this middle east hub is the fact that it's the biggest criminal paradise in the world. Smuggling, drug and arms transfers, money laundering, the sex trade and underground banking all thrive in Dubai. Think of the bar scene in Star Wars; the powers that be need their seamy bazaar to conduct their real business ventures.

But I think Dubai is just a temporary phenomena, and not only because it's financial facade may be all smoke and mirrors. Who knows where the price of the oil that pays for this party might be in the near future, or even the viability of the oil market? Any widespread conflict would surely suck in all the countries of the middle east, including the Emirates, and could topple the hated monarchies with their egregious disparities of wealth and power. But the real reason Dubai's ambitions will come to and abrupt end is the same reason american southwest cities will be in big trouble soon - their obscene refusal to face the harsh reality of where they're located.
Water is scarce and growing scarcer, but the opulent lifestyles of the rich and richer demand immaculate putting greens and their olympic sized swimming pools. And something tells me the plug will be pulled on this anomalous excess in the middle of the scorching desert: