THE NEXT VERY, VERY BIG THINGS

LISA ROCHON Saturday, October 13 2007

Big is the new kind of architecture, designed to please a new class of billionaire titans. Extreme architecture appeals to the Versailles in every wannabe king: A penthouse on the 100th floor, where Marie Antoinette deserved to live. Up high, next to heaven.

Big is the new kind of architecture. Something designed at a scale to please a class of billionaire titans. Something that appeals to the Versailles in every wannabe king: A penthouse on the 100th floor. Marie Antoinette deserved to live there. Up high. Next to heaven.

Not long ago, I stood in the heavens on the 85th floor of the Petronas Twin Towers, built in 1996 in Kuala Lumpur, in an unfinished suite reserved for VIPs. A model of the city with future projects by Kuala Lumpur City Centre and Petronas (one of the world's largest oil refineries) was on display. Below, it was possible to gaze upon some of the remaining historic tracts of the downtown and two-storey wooden houses that have managed, despite the city's feverish construction, to survive.

The Petronas replaced a racetrack with structures unimaginably tall. In-your-face massive. They wear their stainless-steel cladding like medieval armor. For more than a decade, they were the world's tallest. But in July that record was beat. The Burj Dubai of the United Arab Emirates surpassed the twin towers in Kuala Lumpur. You weren't supposed to mention that to the Petronas elevator operator.

The current big outsizes the big of the 1990s by a serious stretch. Right now, big means the construction of the Burj Dubai, a 164-storey glass tower with a seemingly endless spire in the middle of the Arabian Desert. Big means conspicuous displays of wealth like we've never seen before - a 60-storey tower in downtown Mumbai that will house the family and offices of one of the world's wealthiest billionaires, Indian business mogul, Mukesh Ambani. Big means nature writ unbelievably large - a 155-storey spiraling work inspired by a seashell and invented for downtown Chicago by the fantastic mind of Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava. When completed in 2009, the building, estimated to cost $2.4-billion, will become the tallest residential tower in the United States.

"I've never seen anything like this," says Bill Baker, the structural engineer partner at the Chicago office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), the designers of the Burj Dubai super-skyscraper in the United Arab Emirates. "It's as if 500 metres high has become the new 250-metre-high tower."

Big is where we might want to live if we could afford it. If we never lived in fear. Even post 9/11, a place to enjoy the sky. If only there was a way to create uber-skyscrapers powered by wind turbines rather than designing them to suck the life out of the earth.

Big can be a splendid alternative to sprawl. Chicago provides plenty of credible cases. When completed in 1973 at a height of 442 metres, the Sears Tower inserted 100 acres of office space vertically onto one city block. The Spire in Chicago began as a lyrical watercolour by Mr. Calatrava depicting the form of a seashell. But the hard reality is that the tower houses 1,200 residential units rising up from a four-storey transparent lobby.

For a city in hot pursuit of urban densification, the relatively small footprint of the supersized building satisfies the need to exploit existing infrastructure, such as public transit, sewage and water supply. The slender structure - some have likened it to a drill bit - takes up less than a one-acre site. Originally, two towers were planned, each about 40 storeys tall and relatively squat compared to Mr. Calatrava's scheme - but now there's more space on the ground for a park and more space to create an iconic standalone.

Some European cities have moved to restrict heights - Hamburg banned tall construction, for example, to privilege the scale of the city's church spires. But Chicago wants to bring on tall. The post-9/11 fear of tall towers, a paranoia shared by both developers and the public in North America, apparently skipped over the Windy City.

"We've done a lot of work in terms of educating the public about tall towers," says Sam Assefa, the city's director of policy on design, architecture and sustainability. "The issue has to do with design, not so much height. We were able to get acceptance from the public in the last four years. And, now, people are more accepting of taller buildings."

The Burj Dubai has forever shifted our measure of tall. Designed by the Chicago office of SOM, with Toronto-based NORR Consultants serving as the onsite coordinators, the tower uses a system of streamlined step-backs - sort of a slick, gargantuan version of the 1930s' Rockefeller Center. George Efstathiou, SOM managing partner for the Burj Dubai, says the scale of the tower is best imagined as the John Hancock Building stacked on top of the Sears Tower. Or about a million Gumbys doing consecutive handstands.

Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French visionary architect - the world's arbiter of high modern design - would have been pleased with the singular height of today's superstructures. When Corb arrived for the first time in New York in 1933, he sneered, "The trouble with New York is that its skyscrapers are too small. And there are too many of them."

The scale of big architecture tends to be too large for one architect, even a superstar. In the case of the Burj Dubai, the tower design was led by celebrity architect Adrian Smith of SOM in close collaboration with Mr. Efstathiou and Bill Baker. But the team is vast, comprising some 90 architects and 50 other consultants.

And though they might wax poetic about the Burj Dubai inspired by the geometrics of the desert flower and Islamic patterns, the step-back design is shaped largely by the need to quiet the force of wind. People may find the idea of living up in the sky enchanting, but they don't want their building swaying in the wind. Much time was spent by SOM testing their design at RWDI (Rowan, Williams, Davies, Irwin), a wind-load facility located in Guelph, Ont. As for many of the world's tallest towers, a miniature version of the Burj Dubai was inserted into the wind tunnel to test for undesirable flex when exposed to medium and extreme winds.

Feeling frustrated by the complexity of your kitchen renovation? Consider the near impossible building conditions in a Middle Eastern city such as Dubai. Dubai sits only about one-and-a-half metres above the water table. The degree of salt in the water is greater than that of the sea. Besides driving 192 massive columns or piles to depths of more than 50 metres, the instability of the site required that polymers be added to thicken the ever-present water. The grid of piles was then bonded to a 3.7-metre-thick concrete raft across 8,000 square metres. All concrete and steel members were waterproofed, and a monitor has been installed in the foundation to warn of corrosion, if and when that occurs over the next 100 years.

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