Like petals from a stem, the Burj Khalifa’s wings extend from its central core. This building is a work of art, and as beautiful inside as it is out. It has come to symbolize this city, built but a generation ago, from sand.
Heavily influenced by Middle Eastern design, architect Adrian Smith incorporated patterns from traditional Islamic architecture throughout the Burj Khalifa. But his most inspiring muse was a regional desert flower, the Hymenocallis, whose harmonious structure is one of the organizing principles of the tower’s design.
The architecture features a triple-lobed footprint, an abstraction of the Hymenocallis flower. The tower is composed of three elements arranged around a central core. The modular, Y-shaped structure, with setbacks along each of its three wings provides an inherently stable configuration for the structure and provides good floor plates for residential apartments. Twenty-six helical levels decrease the cross section of the tower incrementally as it spirals skyward.
The central core emerges at the top and culminates in a sculpted spire. A Y-shaped floor plan maximizes views of the Arabian Gulf. Viewed from the base or the air, Burj Khalifa is evocative of the onion domes prevalent in Islamic architecture. Its tapered outside gives the Burj Khalifa its beauty and ensures it does not overwhelm everything around it. What a flower in the desert.
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