World's tallest building set to open in Dubai - PHOTOS

On Monday it opens the world's tallest building, Burj Dubai.

At more than 800m, Burj Dubai smashed the previous world record, which was held by Taiwan's 508m Taipei 101.

It's about twice the height of the Empire State Building, you can see its spire from 95km away and the exterior is covered in about 26,000 glass panels, which glisten in the midday desert sun.

The design of the building posed unprecedented technical and logistical challenges, not just because of its height, but also because Dubai is susceptible to high winds and is close to a geological fault line.

"You have the solutions for it but you always wonder how it will really work," Mohamed Ali Alabbar, chairman of Emaar, the developer behind Burj Dubai told the BBC.

"We have been hit with lightning twice, there was a big earthquake last year that came across from Iran, and we have had all types of wind which has hit us when we were building. The results have been good and I salute the designers and professionals who helped build it."

One of the companies behind the Burj was the Canadian-based wind engineering firm RWDI. Extreme wind speeds on the ground in Dubai can reach 50km an hour. At the top of the building it can be three times as fast.

Wayne Boulton, general manager of RWDI's wind engineering team in the Middle East, explains how they tested the building for wind resistance.

"We constructed a scale model and put it in a wind tunnel," he says. "In the wind tunnel we are able to test a number of different wind speeds and directions. We can test the pressure you would get on the surface of the building under normal conditions and also under more extreme events."

The last couple of decades have seen a shift in the building of skyscrapers from the West to the East. Four out of five of the world's tallest buildings are in Asia and the Middle East.

/BBC/

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