Burj Dubai-Part 1

However it's encountered, the Burj Dubai fills the Dubai skyline and landscape like nothing else imaginable. Four lights seen flickering through the darkness. A stray glimpse through the dusty terrain. An upward gaze to count the 162 floors. Marked as a testament to Dubai's achievement, the tower stretching nearly a kilometer into the sky marks the spirit of this rapidly modernizing city. At first thought, it is redolent to America's skyscrapers of early twentieth century in the way that it embodies the city's rapid industrialization. As a wheel to the stone age, it represents this zeitgeist in a way that no other symbol comes close to matching. Yet, in the process, it bypasses a skyscrapers most basic purpose--to increase the efficiency of space amidst a rapidly urbanizing population. With the empty desert landscape looming in the background, the building's functionality seems a moot point in the face of its symbolic claim as the tallest building in the world.

So if you are to read the building symbolically, what does it say about Dubai? What collective and individual ideas and emotions are scattered onto this architectural wonder?

Is it as a schoolboy discovering his prepubescent muscles for the first time, flexing them to his peers in efforts to amass some sort of confidence? Or is it more genuine than such overcompensation? Should the skyscraper instead be likened to a student who, amidst years of recurrent study and failure in his maths class, finally grasps fractions for the first time? Or, more directly, after years of toil in the desert, have the Emirates finally affirmed their rightful place in the world?

Whether it is a deep-seated arrogance or this sense of perseverance and providence that shape the building's identity, the wonder and amazement that it brings remain paramount to me. And these feelings cannot be escaped. This attention is affirmed by the Burj Dubai's centrality in Dubai's skyline (it is over twice as tall as the next tallest building!). Unless dust or haze shields its view, I encounter and admire it on a daily basis. A towering silhouette of the Burj even graces my "Building Sentences" board in my classroom. Now, all I have is to look forward to its grand opening in the next couple months.

(Photo: "Skyscraper" by Howard Norton Cook. Print: "Chrysler Building" by Bernice Abbott. From the Philadelphia Museum of Art's "Skyscrapers: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs of the Early Twentieth Century").