Dubai has opened the world’s tallest building, a glistening concrete, glass and steel pinnacle rising 828 metres out of the desert sands.
Blazing fireworks rippled up and down the massive structure after it was officially opened by Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashed al-Maktoum.

He renamed the building, previously known as Burj Dubai, Burj Khalifa in honour of United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan.

“Today the United Arab Emirates achieves the tallest building ever created by the hand of man… and this great project deserves to carry the name of a great man. Today I inaugurate Burj Khalifa,” Sheikh Mohammad said.

Parachutists bearing the UAE colours of red, green, black and white then touched down as a giant portrait of Sheikh Khalifa was projected on an outer wall of the structure which cost $US1.5 billion to erect.

In the fireworks spectacle that followed, blossoms of flames crackled up and down the huge building and out into the Dubai night sky, followed later by lasers sweeping the horizon from the tower’s many levels.

Dubai hopes the opening of the Burj Khalifa – the latest in a series of grandiose projects – will burnish an image tarnished by its crippling debt woes.

The needle-shaped tower, described by its developer as a “vertical city” as it dwarfs existing skyscrapers, boasts new limits in design and construction.

Emaar Properties, the partly government-owned developer, had maintained the suspense about the skyscraper’s final height, saying only that it exceeded 800 metres.

On Monday it said the tower had more than 200 floors, only 160 of which would be inhabited, while the remaining floors were for services.

Burj Khalifa has a total built-up area of 530,000 square metres, including 170,000 square metres of residential space and more than 28,000 square metres of prime office space, Emaar said.

This amounts to 1,044 apartments and 49 floors of office space, served by 57 lifts. It also has a hotel carrying the Georgio Armani logo.

Bill Baker, a structural and civil engineer and partner in Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), which designed the tower, said it has set a new benchmark.

“We thought that it would be slightly taller than the existing tallest tower of Taipei 101. (Emaar) kept on asking us to go higher but we didn’t know how high we could go,” he said.

“We were able to tune the building like we tune a music instrument. As we went higher and higher and higher, we discovered that by doing that process… we were able to reach heights much higher than we ever thought we could.”

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