Cometh the tower ... Burj Dubai under construction in March 2006. It's a lot bigger now. Photograph: Dan Chung
Burj Dubai is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a friend of the earth. The tower, which became the world's tallest last week (it's still under construction, and the final height is a secret), is more like an environmental liability. That much is clear from the official website, which makes none of the usual nods to the green lobby, boasting that "at peak cooling times, the tower will require approximately 10,000 tonnes of cooling [water] per hour". Of course, could a building this size be anything other than an energy-guzzling monster? This thing is the Exxon Valdez of contemporary architecture.
It's a fitting emblem for Dubai, then, a city of climate-controlled skyscrapers and malls in one of the hottest regions of the world. The combination of oil wealth and tax haven status have turned this place into the churning epicentre of Middle Eastern capitalism, a display of wealth far more extravagant than anything conjured up by Louis XIV. You'll have seen Palm Jumeirah, the ridiculous palm tree-shaped piece of reclaimed land which now makes Dubai look quite silly on maps. It's to be joined by two more, all the bright idea of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the city's very own absolute monarch.
So at a time when the environmental movement seems at last to have captured the agenda in rich countries, a lot of people are clearly still blithely ignoring the message. Like Las Vegas, the neon-aircon city built where no one in their right mind would build a city, Dubai is using technology to beat nature into submission. It does so at its peril.
In the case of Burj Dubai, how it looks and how it feels to use are disqualified as criteria for judging the building. It's such a travesty on environmental grounds that it can immediately be dismissed as bad architecture. If, as the PR people would have us believe, Burj Dubai is "a beacon of progress for the entire world", then the green-minded among us evidently still have our work cut out.
