The ongoing soap opera surrounding the world’s tallest building just continues to swell. The building, as you might remember, opened a month ago to great fanfare, despite not being completely booked up with tenants and not actually being finished. Now, with the first tenants scheduled to move in this month, the building’s only officially open section, an observation deck, has been closed indefinitely. Officials from Dubai blame the closure on a combination of electrical problems and unprecedented tourist travel.
Let’s see, you build a $1.5 billion dollar skyscraper basically in the middle of nowhere with high-tech fountains and cool features, and you’re surprised when it becomes a tourist attraction? You build the world’s largest building, and you can’t handle the amount of traffic that comes in? As lame excuses go (and this one is very lame), that’s spectacularly bad. It’s another stumble for a city with big dreams but a recession-smashed pocketbook and a huge international embarrassment.
Tags: world’s tallest building, burj khalifa, dubai, united arab emirates, burj khalifa closed, electrical problems, architecture, building nightmares, burj dubai, failures