LEGO 21008 Service Manual

Burj Khalifa

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

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Architecture.LEGO.com

AdrianDSmith

With notable supertall skyscrapers such as the Buri Khalifa,
Jin Mao Tower and the Trump International Hotel & Tower
to his name, Adrian D. Smith is one of the most recognized
and respected architects in the world today.
Born in Chicago in 1944, Adrian moved to the
West Coast as a young child and was brought up in San
Clemente, California. Growing up next to the ocean
and beach instilled in him a respect for the relationship
between a building and its environment. And this “sense of
place”, as he described it, would later play a major part in
his work as an architect.
After studying at Texas A&M University, a chance
encounter back in California led him to a apply for a job with
the renowned architect company, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
(SOM), in Chicago. In 1967, Adrian began his thirty nine year
career with the company working on the John Hancock
Center. From 1980 to 2003 Adrian was a Design Partner in the
Chicago office of SOM and a Consulting Design Partner from
2004 to 2006. Adrian also served as the SOM’s Chief Executive
Officer (1993 to 1995). He was the Chairman for the SOM

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Foundation (1990 to 1995) which serves to recognize and
nurture students in architecture, design, urban design and
structural engineering.
After nearly four decades with Skimore, Owings &
Merrill (1967–2006), Smith left to found his own firm
(Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture) with Gordon Gill
and Robert Forest.
Projects under his design direction have won over 90
major awards for design excellence, including five international
awards, eight National AIA awards, 22 Chicago AIA awards,
and two ULI Awards
for Excellence. Smith’s
work at SOM has been
featured in major
museums in the United
States, South America,
Europe, Asia and the
Middle East. He is a
Senior Fellow of the
Design Futures Council.

Adrian D. Smith (Image: Emaar Properties)

PlaceholderAdrianSmith

BurjKhalifa

Envisioned as the tallest structure in the world and the
flagship building for the Downtown Dubai development,
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was selected to carry out the
architecture and engineering of the Burj Khalifa project,
and gave Adrian D. Smith the role of the chief architect.
In 2003 Adrian said “Burj Khalifa is an interesting project

because there is very little context for a building of this
height to draw from in Dubai. The city has a heritage similar
to Bahrain – it’s a historic Middle Eastern trading port with
lots of desert and the same water conditions, but here I am
trying to connect on a more organic level.”.

The structure is all reinforced concrete below the spire.
The spire above the observation floors are steel. Architecturally,
the building is transition from a solid base expression to
a vertically expressed middle section of polished stainless
steel projected metal fins and glass. Adrian wanted to use only
vertical elements here because the fine dust in Dubai’s air
would build up on any horizontal projecting elements.
They have sandstorms quite frequently so in order to reduce
maintenance costs the tower has virtually no horizontal ledges.

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Burj Khalifa is the tallest man-made structure ever built,
at 828 m (2,716.5 ft). Construction began on 21 September
2004, with the exterior of the structure completed on 1 October

2009. The building officially opened on 4 January 2010.
The decision to build Burj Khalifa was based on
the government’s decision to diversify from an oil-based
economy to one that is service and tourism-oriented.
According to officials, it is necessary for projects like Burj
Khalifa to be built in the city to garner more international
recognition, and hence investment. Sheikh Mohammed bin
Rashid Al Maktoum wanted to put Dubai on the map with
something really sensational.
In 2007, several records fell as the Burj Khalifa
climbed above the city-state’s skyline. In May 2007, the Burj
surpassed the height of the tallest building in the United
States, the Sears Tower (recently renamed the Willis Tower),
designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the 1970s. Adrian
Smith designed the Burj in the early years of the new
millennium, but by the time the new skyscraper zoomed
past Sears (at 1,450 feet, or 442 meters), Smith had left SOM.

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In July 2007, the Burj became the talest building in the
world, at 512.1 meters (1,680 feet), pushing past Taipei
101, which had held the title of the world’s tallest
for only six years. By September, the Burj had broken
another record: at 555 meters (1,821 feet) it was now
the world’s tallest freestanding structure, nosing
past the CN Tower in Toronto by just two meters (6.6
feet). The Burj reached its fi nal height at 828 meters
(2,716.5 feet), just 172 meters shy of a kilometer, and over
half a mile tall.
No stranger to Middle Eastern design, Adrian Smith
incorporated patterns from traditional Islamic architecture.
But his most inspiring muse was a regional desert
fl ower, the Hymenocallis, whose harmonious structure
is one of the organizing principles of the tower’s design.
Three “petals” are arranged in a triangular shape and
unifi ed at the center, and instead of repeated identical
patterns, the architectural plan appoints successively
receding and rotated stories. The Y-shaped plan is ideal
for residential and hotel usage, with the wings allowing

maximum outward views and inward natural light.
Viewed from above or from the base, the Y-shape
also evokes the onion domes of Islamic architecture.
During the design process, engineers rotated the building
120 degrees from its original layout to reduce stress from
prevailing winds. At its tallest point, the tower sways a
total of 1.5 m (4.9 ft).

Dome shape and Dessert Flower (Image: Emaar Properties)

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Thestructuralsystem

To support the unprecedented height of the building,
the engineers developed a new structural system called
the buttressed core, which consists of a hexagonal
core reinforced by three buttresses that form the ‘Y’ shape.
Each wing, with its own high performance concrete corridor
walls and perimeter columns, buttresses the others via a
six-sided central core, or hexagonal hub. The result is a tower
that is extremely stiff laterally and torsionally. SOM applied a
rigorous geometry to the tower that aligned all the common
central core, wall, and column elements.
Each tier of the building sets back in a spiral
stepping pattern up the building. The setbacks are organized
with the Tower’s grid, such that the building stepping
is accomplished by aligning columns above with walls
below to provide a smooth load path. This allows the
construction to proceed without the normal diffi culties
associated with column transfers.
The setbacks are organized such that the Tower’s
width changes at each setback. The advantage of the
stepping and shaping is to ‘confuse the wind’. The wind

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vortices are never allowed to build up because at each
new tier the wind encounters a different building shape.
This structural system enables the building to support
itself laterally and keeps it from twisting.
At the top, the central core emerges and is sculpted
to form a finishing spire. The design architect, Adrian
Smith, felt that the uppermost section of the building did
not culminate elegantly with the rest of the structure, so
he sought and received approval to increase it to the
current height. It has been explicitly stated that this

Placeholders

change did not include any
added floors, which is fitting
with Smith’s attempts to
make the crown more
slender. The spire of Burj
Khalifa is composed of
more than 4,000 tonnes
(4,400 ST; 3,900 LT) of
structural steel. The central
pinnacle pipe weighing 350
tonnes (390 ST; 340 LT) was
constructed from inside
the building and jacked to
its full height of over 200
m (660 ft) using a strand
jack system. The spire also
houses communications
equipment.

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Burj Khalifa has “refuge fl oors” at 25 to 30 story intervals
that are more fi re resistant and have separate air supplies
in case of emergency. Its reinforced concrete structure
makes it stronger than steel-frame skyscrapers.
Designers purposely shaped the structural concrete
Burj Khalifa - “Y” shaped in plan - to reduce the wind
forces on the tower, as well as to keep the structure
simple and foster constructibility. It went through three
wind tunnel tests, and one of the important things they
learned was that the taller legs needed to be on the
sides of the prevailing wind rather than the front face
because it sheds the vortexes more eff ectively. The
texture of the façade and the weight distribution also af­fect how wind impacts the structure – for instance how
much weight is at the top of the building, and where the
columns are placed. The structural system can be de­scribed as a “buttressed” core.
The building utilises high-speed, non-stop shuttle
elevators to sky lobby fl oors where passengers transfer
to local elevators serving the fl oors in between.

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Burj Khalifa has 58 elevators and 8 escalators, which in­clude 20 Gen2 fl at belt elevators and two double deck
observation deck cabs with a capacity for 12-14 people
per cab. Travelling at 10 metres per second, they will have
the world’s longest travel distance from lowest to highest
stop. The building service/fi reman’s elevator will have a
capacity of 5,500 kilograms and will be the world’s tallest
service elevator.

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Inside the high-speed elevator

Burj Khalifa is also the fi rst high-rise building to

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contain controlled evacuation elevators for emergency
situations. The tallest tower in the world also has the
world’s highest elevator installation — the spire maintenance
elevator — situated inside a rod at the very top of the
building.
The water system supplys an average of 946,000
litres of water per day. At the peak cooling times, the
tower will require approximately 10,000 tonnes of
cooling per hour, which is equivalent to the capacity
provided by 10,000 tonnes (22.4 million lbs or 10.2 million
kg) of melting ice in one day.
The tower also has a condensate collection system,
which uses the hot and humid outside air, combined with
the cooling requirements of the building and results in a
signifi cant amount of condensation of moisture from the
air. The condensed water is collected and drained into
a holding tank located in the basement car park. This
water will then be pumped into the site irrigation system
for use on the tower’s landscape plantings. This system

will provide about 15 million gallons of supplemental water
per year, equivalent to nearly 20 Olympic-sized swimming
pools.
There are unconfi rmed reports of several planned
height increases since its inception. Originally proposed
as a virtual clone of the 560 m (1,837 ft) Grollo Tower
proposal for Melbourne, Australia’s Docklands waterfront
development, the tower was redesigned with an original
design by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Marshall Straba­la, a SOM architect who worked on the project until 2006,
said that it was designed to be 808 m (2,651 ft) tall.

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The design (& height) changes Burj Khalifa went through

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FactsaboutBurjKhalifa

Location: .......................... Downtown Dubai,

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Architect:.......................... Adrian D. Smith for Skidmore,

Owings & Merril

Building type: ............... Supertall skyscraper

Materials: ......................... Refl ective glazing, aluminum

and textured stainless steel

Construction: ................ Reinforced concrete and steel

Date: ................................... From 2004 to 2009

Floor area: ...................... 5,000,000 sq. ft. (464,511 m

Height: ............................... 2,716.5 ft. (828 m.)

Stories: .............................. 160 habitable fl oors plus 46

maintenance levels in the spire

and 2 parking levels in the

basement

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