The world's tallest building

A tower rose on empty desert beside a military compound

You're standing beside the Burj Khalifa, a glass tower that climbs 828 meters into the sky over Dubai. Nothing built by humans stands taller.

Work started in 2004. Engineers used reinforced concrete for most of the structure, with steel salvaged from the demolished Palace of the Republic in East Berlin. The building opened in 2010 as the heart of a new district called Downtown Dubai, planned around it from the start. It took until 2011 for every part of the tower, including its restaurants and observation decks, to actually open for business.

The tower carries the name of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the former president of the United Arab Emirates. The federal government stepped in to help Dubai pay for it during a financial crunch, and the name was a form of thanks.

Before any of this stood here, the land was open desert on the edge of Burj Khalifa, Dubai, with a former military compound on the site. No creek, no road, no settlement marked this exact patch of ground. Dubai's growth had always run along its creek, miles from here. This stretch was empty sand until planners chose it for the tallest building on Earth.

Three construction workers died when a crane collapsed on a site next to the rising tower. The crane fell suddenly, during the years when cranes crowded the skyline here and thousands of laborers worked the site around the clock. At least five more workers were hurt.

Two Indian construction workers, 24 and 27 years old, were installing glass on a building next to the Burj Khalifa when their work cradle failed. A mechanical fault in the side winch sent them falling from the 27th floor. Both men died. Emaar Properties, the developer, confirmed the deaths at the time.

Through the six years of building the tower itself, from 2004 to 2010, the death toll on site stayed disputed. Officials counted one fatality. Other reports, including from labor rights groups, put the number far higher once subcontractor sites were included. The workforce was largely South Asian and East Asian. A 2006 wage report found skilled carpenters earning about £4.34 a day and laborers about £2.84, while Human Rights Watch and the BBC separately reported poor housing and long hours on the project.

Nine days later, on January 5, the observation deck called At the Top (Burj Khalifa) opened on the 124th floor, 452 meters up. Visitors could look through augmented reality telescopes built by a Montreal design studio, which let them compare the view to pictures taken at different times of day, or to a helicopter shot of the empty desert from before the tower existed.

A month later, on February 8, the deck shut for two months after a power failure. An elevator stuck between floors and trapped a group of tourists for 45 minutes.

An Asian migrant worker in his mid-thirties, employed by a construction firm, climbed to the 147th or 148th floor and jumped. He landed on the 108th floor observation deck. Dubai police said his employer had refused his request to go home. It was reported as the first suicide from the tower, and it happened only months after the building was declared fully operational.

Downtown Dubai kept building outward around the tower it was designed to frame. Emaar launched the Kempinski The Boulevard Dubai in 2012; every unit sold the day sales opened, and the hotel opened in 2017. The Boulevard Plaza towers, started in 2007, had already topped out in 2010, rising from the lot directly beside the Burj Khalifa.

The observation decks kept climbing too. In 2014, a new level called SKY opened on the 148th floor, 555 meters up, taking back the world record for highest observation deck after Guangzhou's Canton Tower briefly held it. Shanghai Tower overtook it in 2016. Burj Khalifa answered in February 2019 with a level called The Lounge, on floors 152 through 154, at 585 meters, the highest lounge in the world.

Mahra bint Mana bin Mohammed Al Maktoum died in 2024 at Latifa Hospital in Downtown Dubai.

Each New Year's Eve, fireworks launch from the tower itself, timed to a light and laser show across its face and a matching display from the Dubai Fountain on the lake below. The tradition has run every year since.

Emaar sold several of its Dubai hotels, including the Address Boulevard, to Abu Dhabi National Hotels in 2018 for $598 million. In 2024, that hotel was rebranded as the Kempinski The Boulevard Dubai, ending Emaar's management of the building it once marketed as its own showcase address.

Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum died in 2021 in Bur Dubai, across the creek from Downtown Dubai.

You can still ride the elevators up to At The Top, or past it to SKY and The Lounge, and look down on the fountain, the mall, and the boulevard that Emaar built to surround its tower. Dubai Mall sits a few hundred feet away, with the aquarium inside it drawing families past the base of the building where a worker once fell. Shops, restaurants, and hotel lobbies now fill the ground where none of this existed twenty years ago.