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DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Seeing advanced architectural opinion tying itself up in knots is always entertaining, hut rarely more so when these intellectual fumbles come close to those of our own heir to the throne. 'Pointless' summarises German architect Meinhard von Gerkan's rather selfcontradictory criticism of the newly completed Burj Khalifa - a sentiment that fits in with Prince Charles' comment that tall buildings take 'commercial macho into the realms of adolescent lunacy'. Throw in gratuitous references to Shelley and misinformed claims that Frank Lloyd Wright inspired the Burj's design, and you cover most of the limited critical armoury with which the finest architectural writers have tried to make sense of the world's tallest building, opened with due fanfare on 4 January.
At 160 storeys and 828m. SOM's Burj trumps the previous record holder, Taiwan's Taipei 101. by well over 300m. When fully occupied, it will hold 35,000 people. Among the crunching battery of statistics and facts deployed in its wake are odd offbeat items, such as,...