59 Fun Facts About Burj Khalifa

Roughly how tall is the Burj Khalifa from the ground to its tip?

Half a mile. The tip stands 829.8 m up, just over half a mile, and the developer kept that final height a closely guarded secret all through construction.

What fills the Burj Khalifa's topmost floors?

Broadcast gear. Nobody lives up there: the highest apartments stop at level 108 of the tower's 163 floors, and the last few are given over to communications equipment and machinery.

Which skyscraper did the Burj Khalifa replace as the world's tallest building?

Taipei 101. The Burj overtook it in July 2007 while still a building site, more than two years before it opened, and finished over 300 m taller than the Taiwanese tower.

Which architecture firm designed the Burj Khalifa?

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The Chicago firm won an invited design competition for the tower, its bid backed by a long list of very tall towers that includes Chicago's John Hancock Center.

Which South Korean company was the Burj Khalifa's main contractor?

Samsung C&T. Its crews worked in three shifts round the clock, and at full stretch the tower gained about two new storeys a week.

The Burj Khalifa was built as the centrepiece of which new Dubai district?

Downtown Dubai. The tower was never meant to stand alone: it anchors a whole new district of homes, hotels and parkland, reportedly part of Dubai's push from oil towards tourism and services.

By what name was the Burj Khalifa known throughout its construction, until its opening day?

Burj Dubai. The name lasted through six years of building and vanished on opening day in January 2010, when a new one was announced in the middle of the ceremony.

The Burj Khalifa was renamed at its opening to honour Sheikh Khalifa, who then held which office?

President of the UAE. Sheikh Khalifa also ruled oil-rich Abu Dhabi, which had just bailed out debt-laden Dubai during the financial crisis, and the tower is said to have taken his name in thanks.

From about how far away can the Burj Khalifa's spire be seen?

95 km. Height like that draws more than the eye: the chairman of its developer said lightning struck the tower twice while it was still being built.

What form does the Burj Khalifa's footprint take?

A Y-shaped tripartite plan. Slim wings put every flat and hotel room close to a window, and views are what sell them: the layout was drawn to make the most of the outlook over the Gulf.

Which flower, with long thin petals round a central cup, is the Burj Khalifa's design said to echo?

Spider lily. Its designers call it a desert flower of the region, yet botanists know the genus, Hymenocallis, as a native of the tropical Americas.

What do the Burj Khalifa's designers say its stepped profile does?

Confuses the wind. Gusts meet a different outline at every tier, so their eddies never fall into step up the tower; the design team got there by reshaping it through more than 40 wind-tunnel tests.

About how far can the tip of the Burj Khalifa sway?

1.5 m. The give is deliberate: the tower is built to flex rather than stand rigid, and can move about that far in any direction.

What do skyscraper experts call the Burj Khalifa's spire, which holds no usable floors?

Vanity height. The term covers spire added above the last usable floor; measured by that floor instead, the Burj would still lead the world, but by only about 2 m.

How was the Burj Khalifa's steel spire raised into position?

Built inside and jacked up. The spire was put together within the tower itself, then pushed more than 200 m into the sky by hydraulic pump, rising out of the top like a telescope opening.

Which demolished building's steel was reused in the Burj Khalifa?

The Palace of the Republic in East Berlin. East Germany's old parliament was cut up for scrap in 2008 and its girders melted down and sold on, some for the tower in Dubai and some for Volkswagen engines.

Which company supplied the Burj Khalifa's elevators, including its double-deck observation-deck cars?

Otis. The firm goes back to Elisha Otis, who showed lifts could be trusted in 1854 by riding a platform high above a New York crowd and ordering its rope cut to prove his safety brake.

What safety feature helps people escape a fire in the Burj Khalifa?

Refuge rooms. Pressurised, air-conditioned and spaced at intervals up the tower, they are there because nobody can be expected to walk all the way down in one go: people stop and shelter on the way.

Where does the Burj Khalifa's ventilation system draw its fresh air from, to save on cooling?

The top of the tower. Air at that height is cooler and less humid than at street level, so it takes less energy to chill, a trick the designers call sky-sourced ventilation.

The Burj Khalifa belongs to which height class, reserved for buildings of 600 m or more?

Megatall. Supertall starts at 300 m, a mark well over a hundred towers have passed, but the 600 m class stayed almost empty: years after the Burj opened it still held only a handful of buildings.

How long does cleaning the Burj Khalifa's whole exterior take?

Three to four months. A crew of 36 rides cradles that run on tracks fixed to the building, and the job takes so long that the machines are at work for most of the year.

Which giant shopping centre stands next door to the Burj Khalifa?

The Dubai Mall. That was the idea: the tower was built as the centrepiece of one development of mall, hotels and homes.

The Burj Khalifa collects about 15 million gallons of water a year from what source?

Air-conditioning condensation. Dubai's humid air beads on the cooling system in such volume that it is piped to a holding tank in the basement and used to water the gardens at the tower's foot.

Which fashion designer's first hotel opened inside the Burj Khalifa in 2010?

Giorgio Armani. He did more than lend his name: the designer drew up the hotel's interiors himself, and the floors above it hold private Armani Residences for buyers who want to live in them.

Khalifa, as in Burj Khalifa, is the Arabic word behind which English title?

Caliph. Khalifa means 'successor', the title of those who led the Muslim community after Muhammad; on the tower, though, it is nothing so grand, just the given name of the sheikh it honours.

What do the residents' sky lobbies on the Burj Khalifa's 43rd and 76th floors both contain?

Swimming pools. Both open to the outside, so a resident can start a length indoors and swim out onto a balcony high above Dubai.

At.mosphere, on the Burj Khalifa's 122nd floor, opened in 2011 as the world's highest what?

Restaurant. It sits 441 m up, just two floors below the public observation deck, so a dinner booking comes with almost the same view as a ticket to the deck.

What closed the Burj Khalifa's observation deck for two months in 2010?

A stuck elevator. A lift packed with visitors jammed between floors for 45 minutes, and rescuers had to drop a ladder into the shaft so that the passengers could crawl out.

Which shorter skyscraper opened an observation deck even higher than the Burj Khalifa's 555 m deck?

Shanghai Tower. Its top deck, about 561 m up, sits a few metres above the Burj's 148th-floor deck, and the Burj took the record back in 2019 by opening a lounge at 585 m.

Which country is said to be visible from high in the Burj Khalifa on a very clear day?

Iran. Its shore lies across the Gulf, and the sighting needs air so clear that one writer who has seen it called such days in Dubai 'rare as a gem'.

How much later than the street must residents above the Burj Khalifa's 80th floor break their Ramadan fast?

Two minutes. Dubai's clerics ruled that the sun stays in view longer from the upper floors, applying an old principle for people who live on mountains; above the 150th floor the wait is three minutes.

The fountain beside the Burj Khalifa was designed by the firm behind which Las Vegas hotel's fountains?

Bellagio. WET Design made its name with that Las Vegas water show and then outdid it in Dubai, where the jets can blast water fifty storeys high, about 150 m.

A stuntwoman in cabin-crew uniform stood on the tip of the Burj Khalifa in a 2021 advert for which airline?

Emirates. She really was up there: a professional stuntwoman in the airline's uniform stood on the pinnacle, and for a sequel she did it again while an A380 airliner circled the tower.

What did 2003 test drilling find beneath the Burj Khalifa's site?

Weak to very weak sandstone and siltstone. With no hard bedrock to stand on, the tower rests on a concrete mat almost 4 m thick, held in place by bored piles sunk deep into the weak rock.

Which New York skyscraper was designed by the same firm as the Burj Khalifa?

One World Trade Center. Its height carries a message: the roofline matches the lost Twin Towers, and the spire lifts it to 1,776 feet, a nod to 1776, the year the United States was born.

Under which architectural style is the Burj Khalifa classed?

Neo-futurism. The label suits its gleaming, technology-led look, yet the designers say their inspiration was far older: the form of a regional flower and the patterns of Islamic architecture.

Which landmark lost its record as the world's tallest freestanding structure to the rising Burj Khalifa in 2007?

The CN Tower. Toronto's concrete needle had kept the record for 32 years, and it lost it to a tower that was not yet finished: the Burj still had more than 250 m left to climb.

Which Polish structure, the tallest ever built, did the rising Burj Khalifa finally surpass in 2008?

The Warsaw radio mast. It had collapsed in 1991, yet at 646 m it stayed the tallest thing people had ever built for another 17 years, until the Burj finally climbed past the height it once reached.

About how much did the Burj Khalifa cost to build?

$1.5 billion. That is the developer's own estimate, and it made the tower a small slice of the bill: the whole district built around it was costed at about $20 billion.

How did the two BASE jumpers who leapt illegally from the unfinished Burj Khalifa in 2008 get inside?

Dressed as engineers. Builders took the pair for site staff, so nobody stopped them climbing to a balcony near the summit and jumping; the breach only came to light when their video surfaced months later.

In 2013 Dubai's crown prince waved the UAE flag from the Burj Khalifa to celebrate winning the bid for which event?

World Expo 2020. Delegates meeting in Paris had just picked Dubai as host, and Sheikh Hamdan marked the win, along with the UAE's National Day, by taking the national flag up the tower.

What did French climber Alain Robert, who usually climbs unaided, have to use on the Burj Khalifa in 2011?

A rope and harness. Robert normally climbs with bare hands and no protection, but safety rules in Dubai required both, and even with them the ascent to the tip of the spire took him six hours.

Which 2011 film has its hero scale the Burj Khalifa's glass exterior?

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Tom Cruise went out on the real tower for the scene, and director Brad Bird said the crew were the first to film Dubai as Dubai rather than as a stand-in for somewhere else.

Which tower is designed to top the Burj Khalifa by reaching one kilometre?

Jeddah Tower. The Saudi skyscraper was drawn by the very architect who designed the Burj Khalifa, so if it is finished he will have beaten his own record, by at least 170 m.

Which Guinness World Record did the Burj Khalifa's New Year's Eve show set as 2019 began?

Largest LED-illuminated façade. A year earlier the tower had seen in the new year with no fireworks at all, only lights and lasers; for 2019 the fireworks came back, with the giant screen running alongside them.

Who was the chief architect of the Burj Khalifa?

Adrian Smith. He left his firm in 2006, with the tower still rising, to start a practice of his own, and went on to design the building that is meant to take his record away.

Which Chicago high-rise near Navy Pier did the Burj Khalifa's architect call its prototype?

Lake Point Tower. He could see its curving glass from his office window, and he took its slim, view-hugging form as the model for a far taller tower of hotel rooms and flats.

The Burj Khalifa's structure was first tried on Tower Palace Three, an apartment tower in which Asian capital?

Seoul. The same design team finished Tower Palace Three there in 2004, and it behaved so well in testing that its designers saw the system could carry a building far higher.

Fazlur Rahman Khan's 'bundled tube', an idea that paved the way for the Burj Khalifa, first rose as which Chicago skyscraper?

Willis Tower. Opened as the Sears Tower in 1973, it is nine tubes of different heights bound together; Khan died in 1982, long before a tower built on his thinking reached nearly twice as high.

What is the name of the public observation deck on the Burj Khalifa's 124th floor?

At the Top. The name stopped being literal in 2014, when a higher deck opened on the 148th floor, and again in 2019 with a lounge higher still, at 585 m.

Ten months after the Burj Khalifa opened, about what share of its 900 apartments were reported occupied?

8%. Dubai's property slump had cut the tower's rents by 40% within ten months of opening, and a letting agent counted more than 800 of its flats still standing empty.

In which 2016 sequel do aliens drop the Burj Khalifa on London?

Independence Day: Resurgence. The first script had it fall on the Eiffel Tower; after the Paris attacks of 2015, director Roland Emmerich aimed it at the London Eye instead, saying 'the English can take it'.

The Burj Khalifa is often likened to The Illinois, a mile-high tower proposed for Chicago by which architect?

Frank Lloyd Wright. He drew the 528-storey design in the 1950s and insisted it could be built with the technology of his day; nobody tried, but the Burj's architect is said to have taken inspiration from it.

Some Burj Khalifa lifts are programmed to do what, a first for a tower so tall?

Evacuate people in emergencies. Its designers call it a 'lifeboat' system: chosen lifts stay in service under close monitoring to carry people out during a fire or a security alert.

Which Dubai developer built the Burj Khalifa and the district around it?

Emaar Properties. One of the tower's designers said its chairman built his whole business model around it: the homes and hotels of the surrounding district all sell on standing next to the Burj.

What did Burj Khalifa site workers do over pay in 2006?

Started a riot. In March 2006 about 2,500 men smashed cars and offices, at a time when a skilled carpenter earned about $7.60 a day, then came back the next day and refused to pick up their tools.

In 2019 Dubai projected an image of which foreign prime minister onto the Burj Khalifa?

Jacinda Ardern. Dubai lit the tower with a picture of her embracing a Muslim New Zealander under the word 'peace', and its ruler thanked her for the empathy she showed after the Christchurch mosque attacks.

Most of the labourers who built the Burj Khalifa were migrants from which region?

South Asia. Most came from poor parts of the Indian subcontinent, many borrowing heavily to pay recruiting agents for jobs that paid a labourer a few dollars a day.

In the Burj Khalifa's residential lobby, each gold-plated cymbal in Jaume Plensa's sculpture World Voices represents one what?

Country. All 196 cymbals sit on rods that rise like reeds from two basins, and dripping water strikes them, a sound the artist likened to water falling on leaves.