![]() There aren’t a lot of people who have access to super talls, so it is something unique.” One of the reasons people want to be on top of the mountain is that the perspective is so different. A man-made mountain.”įor Gill: “There’s a specialness about them, because they give you an experience you don’t normally get. “All of a sudden this mountain appears, it’s all buildings and it’s amazing. He recalls arriving in Chicago as a young student in the 1960s, when the city was generally regarded as the world capital of architecture. “Looking back into history everybody has aspired at one time or another to be on top of the mountain or to be the highest monument or the tallest observation location and I think that it’s ingrained in our DNA,” Smith says. So both men are well equipped to explain the fascination we have with such colossal structures. Of the 11 tallest buildings on the planet, Smith has been involved in four of them, working with Gill, his partner at the Chicago-based practice they founded in 2006. Meanwhile, 1,600 kilometres to the west, work is progressing on their design for the Kingdom Tower, a thousand-metre “super tall” in Jeddah that will become the world’s tallest building when it is completed some time in 2019 or early 2020.Īs part of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Smith also designed the current record holder, Dubai’s own Burj Khalifa, at 828 metres. ![]() The pair are in town for Cityscape, where on Tuesday they will reveal more about Burj 2020, one of the world’s tallest commercial towers and the centrepiece of a new district being created by Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC). Through the plate glass windows are the spires of Dubai Marina and Jumeirah Lakes mere minnows compared with some of the other projects associated with the architectural duo. ![]() Seated in a boardroom on the 50th floor of Dubai’s Almas Tower, Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill are barely just off the ground by their – literally – high standards. ![]() But in the Burj, Smith managed to make something beautiful.Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill designed the world's tallest building for Jeddah, and plan another in their international city, Dubai. SOM-founded as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-is a factory for enormous corporate projects, some of them inspired and some of them, like the Willis Tower, less so. The building is the work of Adrian Smith, who designed it while he was still working at the architectural firm SOM, which he left in 2006. The New Yorker’s architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, wrote in 2010, when it opened, that “the profile of the Burj has a magnetism that is lacking in almost every other supertall building of our time.” The Burj Khalifa, a bundle of cylinders that aren’t uniform yet are formally organized, rises in a graceful spire. It’s not a workmanlike stack of boxes, like the 442-meter Willis (né Sears) Tower in Chicago, or a postmodern heritage trinket like the Makkah Clock Tower, which resembles a Big Ben souvenir someone might buy at Heathrow. But the most interesting thing about it isn’t any of these incredible statistics but the way it looks: Unlike most supertall buildings, the Burj is nice to look at. More than double the height of the Empire State Building, the 163-story building took six years, $1.5 billion, 110,000 tons of concrete, and 22 million man-hours to build. At 828 meters (2,717 feet), it’s the tallest in the world, 227 meters taller than No. 2, the Makkah Clock Royal Tower in Mecca. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is a building of superlatives.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |