THE NEXT VERY, VERY BIG THINGS

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For 30 years, the CN Tower reigned as the world's tallest free-standing structure. For 20 years, the Sears Tower was the world's tallest habitable building. But now, the widening gap between the rich and the poor has meant urban slums are on the rise as are billion-dollar towers for the extremely wealthy.

There is serious ongoing competition for spectacular height. The 492-metre Shanghai World Financial Centre, scheduled to open next year, is designed by the New York architecture firm, Kohn Pederson Fox, to be the world's tallest commercial tower. But no one's stay at the top of the class of big will last. Expect the Burj Dubai to hold the title for five, maybe eight years. Then another Herculean feat will be unleashed.

There is a flip side to the dazzling power of a super-tall structure to shift our perception of space, and time. Money can build, but it can also destroy. Dubai is one of seven semi-autonomous states of the United Arab Emirates with a rapacious plan to increase tourism. To that end, the government-owned developer Nakheel is building three islands in the shape of palm trees. A fourth cluster of 300 private islands are shaped like a map of the world.

"There will be environmental impacts from something this major," says Victor Smith, CEO of Ingenium, the parent company of NORR Ltd. in Toronto. NORR is currently completing design of the Atlantis, a five-star hotel and resort with a water-park facility stretched across a new 200-acre island. Besides the damage to fish breeding grounds and coral reefs, massive development has decimated a mountain range that runs between the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, its black rock being scooped away from the slopes to provide fill for the manmade islands.

"Dubai is a cross between Las Vegas and Disneyland," says Tonu Alposaar, managing director of Middle East operations for the Toronto-based architecture firm, Bregman + Hamann. He says that construction costs per square metre there are somewhat in keeping with North America's, but labour in the United Arab Emirates is much cheaper. "It's essentially slave labour. You bring in workers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Somalia and then you work them through long hours and put them up in hotter-than-hell tin trailers. Their passports, I've heard, are kept by the builder until the contract is finished."

Erasure is what big architecture craves - a wiping-away of previous conventions. Dutch superstar architect Rem Koolhaas once declared, "Bigness is no longer a part of any urban tissue. It exists. At most, it coexists. Its subtext is 'fuck context.'." But, these days, big architecture also invents context. In Dubai - a place largely bereft of a particular culture or historic structures - the damage caused by extreme development is being addressed by reimagining the environment. Coral growth will apparently be stimulated by placing electrically charged mesh underwater. Major tankers have been dropped into the sea to provide fresh fish habitats, and entertainment for scuba divers.

"What we're talking about is a result of the industrialization of construction, which has allowed us to build enormous structures in very short periods of time," says Jorge Otero-Pailos, an assistant professor of historic preservation at Columbia University. "Add to this the fact that now there's such concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and the result is that large projects can happen quickly and without much public debate."

The cathedrals of Europe took a couple hundred of years to build. The Burj Dubai will require a total of three years to complete. "We don't have time to gage the consequences, that's really the problem," says Prof. Otero-Pailos. Communities of people, not just fish, could be devastated by tall buildings. Maybe a sense of belonging within the city was already contested the first time an elevator was installed in a 19th-century skyscraper.

And, along the way, our access to public space is being seriously comprised. "One must not confuse this idea of a city within a city as one that permits increased freedom. They're all about control, about exclusion," says Prof. Otero-Pailos. "Bigness does not constitute the contemporary equivalent of the traditional city."

But. Bigness is seductive. The website of the Burj Dubai provides daily updates as to what height the building has reached - 154 floors, or 574.5 metres, when I checked a couple days ago - and tantalizing bits of trivia about the structure, always prefaced by the urgent question, "Did you know?"

Did you know that the amount of rebar used to reinforce the concrete, if laid out on the ground, would extend one-quarter of the way around the globe? Did you know that the spire atop the Burj Dubai can be seen 95 km away? Did you know that the Burj Dubai will consume 946,000 litres of water every day? In a region where summer temperatures can soar to 55 degrees Celsius, the tower will require 10,000 tons of cooling - the equivalent of 10,000 tons of melting ice - during peak times.

"The Burj Dubai", reads the website, "will be known by many names." (Environmentally unethical, is, strangely, not listed.) "But only a privileged group of people will call it home."

Big architecture depends on extreme ego - the kind exquisitely strutted by Howard Roark, Ayn Rand's ideal man in The Fountainhead, a classic tale of greed, power and uncompromised architecture. Bill Baker assures me that his client, Mohamed A. Alabbar, chairman of Emaar Properties, is a very nice man, relatively young and extremely polite, who likes to make a few dollars here and there.

The super-scaled tower of the Burj Dubai functions effectively as Emaar's massive billboard asking the world to come and play. At the base of the tower will be a 220-hectare district featuring hotels, offices, and the world's biggest shopping mall. "The Burj developers are definitely doing it for the money," says Mr. Baker. "They sold the residential levels on floors 19 - 109 in two nights at an invited sales event."

It was Sept. 12, 2007, that I was to suffer the apparently debilitating news that the CN Tower had been dethroned by the Dubai tower. Talk about deflating. For 30 years, Torontonians had found international fame because of a telecommunications tower measuring 553 metres. Not that we were hung up on our claim to international fame because of living in a city with extreme height. (Did I say 553 metres? It's actually 553.33 metres.) The entire city was meant to be in mourning. People dressed entirely in black. I don't mean to downplay the sadness of that day but, in retrospect, those serious-looking people in dark clothes? They might have been architects.

There are a few great things about standing up high. First, the elevator ride. Second, the view of the dwarfed city and, way beyond, the endless yawn of suburbia. And, third, after doing push ups on the glass floor and ordering an expensive ginger ale just to score the CN Tower sizzle stick, is the desire, pure and simple, to travel down, way down.

Why? It's in our nature. To return to the street. Where you can always find a mess of humanity.

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