He higher skyscrapers in the worldBurj Khalifa is shocking. In a period of three weeks, Adrian Smith outlined the original designs that would end up becoming the higher skyscrapers in the worldBurj Khalifa. In the early 2000s, Emaar Properties, the real estate company that developed the skyscraper, contacted him: «They wanted to ask us about our experience in SUPERALLS«Smith tells AD. At that time, Smith worked in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (Som) and had designed buildings such as the Jin Mao Tower, a 420 -meter tower in Shanghai, and the Zifleng Tower (formerly known as Nanjing Greenland Financial Tower), a 451 -meter tower in Jiangsu (China).
Smith and his colleagues, including Bill Baker, a structural engineering partner of SOM, took advantage of the meeting and traveled from Chicago to New York to maintain an informal but informative conversation: «We talked a lot about the HIGH BUILDING DESIGNbecause they are very different even from a 60 -storey building, «says Smith. Emaar representatives explained to the Som team that they wanted to build in Dubai the higher skyscrapers in the world And they asked them for recommendations to select an architect. «I told them that they should organize a two or three weeks ideas contest,» says Smith. «They called me the following week and they told me: 'That is what we are going to do'».
Shortly after, Emaar contacted a handful of architecture studies, including Smith's team in Som, with the basic details of the project – they wanted something in the range of 500 to 600 meters – and gave each team a couple of weeks to gather their ideas. According to Smith, Som's team presented «an outline» of what would end up being the Burj Khalifa. «The initial drawings, which were not much, adjusted to their needs,» he says. «They selected us and we started seriously about a month later.»
What is the design of Burj Khalifa based?
Structurally, Burj Khalifa is designed with a Y Y -shaped tripartite plant geometry. The design was largely based on the Samsung Tower Palace Three, a Seoul skyscraper with a similar structure in which Smith had previously worked. Due to urban restrictions, the Palacio Tres Torre currently has 73 floors, although it was originally going to have 93, with multiple retracts as they grew in height. When the height was reduced, «I brought it to a point where they were still staggered, but only in two or three floors increases,» Smith explains, «so it was almost like building a top of the building.»
Although the original vision of Tower Palace Three did not materialize in Seoul, Smith continued to have the idea of a high -height structure with varied steps from the three points of the tripod. «He had a scheme in which every leg of the three tripods was off the day of different points,» he says, «and the other two legs rose and then one of them was going to go, until only one leg continued.» Similarly, Smith had also designed a version in which the legs were collected at variable intervals around the building, so that from the distance it looks like a spiral. During the three weeks that the ideas contest lasted, Smith presented both concepts to Emaar, which was attracted to the fact that, in either versions, the building was not only buildable, but also had a dynamic character.