There Is Another...Sky...Walk...urk

At 2,213 feet, the Burj Dubai Tower (the larger photo on the left) is supposed to be the world's tallest building when completed in 2008. This would make it 537 feet taller than the Freedom Tower in New York City (above and to the right), which is designed to stand at 1,776 feet. The Freedom Tower, which is to replace the World Trade Center, is scheduled for completion in 2010. You can click on the photos shown to see larger renderings. Also note, per our previous discussion on this subject, that the rendering of the Burj Dubai shows no context whatsoever (clouds don't count, though they are really NICE clouds).

There are those who are calling for yet another redesign of the Freedom Tower (you did know about the first redesign, didn't you?) so that it won't be dwarfed by the Burj Dubai, located -- wouldn't you know it? -- in the United Arab Emirates. What a joke all this struttin' has become. In the meantime, other "World's Tallest Towers" are being planned and constructed in Hong Kong and mainland China. I suppose Malaysia, Singapore, and Japan have something in the planning stages too.

By the way, Burj Dubai simply means "Dubai Tower", and the design, which I find to be quite graceful, is based on a six-petaled desert flower -- a concept that sounds poetic to these ears. At least the design was based on something, which is an idea too often lost on most American architecture -- although to be fair, both towers were designed by the same American architecture firm, SOM. Go figure. In case you wonder, I don't much care for the design of the Freedom Tower (partly because it insisted on being too reminiscent of the original plain and monolithic WTC towers, and mostly because I know the new design's history and know what "might have been". Yet another unbuilt masterpiece.)