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Dubai's superscraper opens - 4 January 2010

Flying in the face of the credit crunch, the world’s tallest building opens today in Dubai, heralding a new dawn of the superscraper - but the final height of the Burj Dubai remained a closely guarded secret right up until its unveiling.

The Burj Dubai - Arabic for Dubai Tower - boasts the most storeys and highest occupied floor of any building in the world, and ranks as the world’s tallest structure. Its observation deck - on floor 124 - also sets a record.

Bill Baker, the building’s structural engineer, from Chicago-based architecture and engineering firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, said, "We weren’t sure how high we could go, it was kind of an exploration...a learning experience."

Early designs for the Burj had it edging out the world’s previous highest building, record, the 508-metre Taipei 101 in Taiwan, by about 10 metres. Today, the Burj Dubai has more than surpassed that - towering more than 800 metres.

The Burj’s developer, Emaar Properties, kept pushing the design higher even after construction began, eventually putting it at 300 metres taller than its nearest competitor.

Today, Dubai’s ruler will open the tapering metal-and-glass spire with a mammoth fireworks display.

At their peak, some apartments in the Burj were selling for more than £1,000 per square foot, though, thanks to the credit crunch, they now can go for less than half that.

Besides luxury apartments and offices, the Burj will be home to a hotel designed by Giorgio Armani. It’s also the centerpiece of a 500-acre development that officials hope will become a new central residential and commercial district in this sprawling and often disconnected city.

Emaar has said the entire Downtown Burj Dubai development, which includes the tower, will cost $20 billion to build.

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