Updated: March 8, 2024

Tom Cruise scaled it for Mission Impossible and French Spiderman Alain Robert aced it for inspiration – everyone loves Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. But how was the world’s tallest tower, Burj Khalifa in Dubai, built, and how are its elevators operated?

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was the architecture firm behind the design and engineering of the tower. Key considerations included the impact of wind forces and ‘constructability’, architecture cant for practical construction considerations.

The design employs a ‘buttressed core’, which has each wing of the building buttressing the others through a six-sided central core.

To build high – you must dig deep. Burj Khalifa’s superstructure is supported by a large, reinforced concrete mat that is in turn supported by 192 bored reinforced concrete piles.

The mat is 3.7m thick, and was constructed in four separate pours totaling 12,500 cubic metres of concrete.

Bauer Spezialtiefbau, with Middle East Foundations, took on much of the piling work, which required bores to be sunk for cast in-situ piles, to a depth of 43 metres. Known by some as the ‘Rolls-Royce’ of the drill rig world, the Bauer BG40 can deliver, as the name suggests, 40 newton-metre of torque.

Around 45,000 cubic metres of concrete, weighing more than 110,000 tonnes, was poured for the foundations – that’s equivalent to 18 Olympic sized swimming pools – with 192 piles running to a depth of over 50 metres. The overall construction process reportedly used more than 330,000 cubic mietres of concrete and 39,000 tonnes of steel rebar.

Laid end to end, the rebar used in the tower would extend over a quarter of the way around the world. For the construction of the tower, BASF developed a special concrete mix that was pumped to a height of more than 600 metres without segregating.

Thanks to BASF’s admixture Glenium Sky 504, the concrete could be worked on for more than three hours before hardening took place.

In November, 2007, the highest reinforced concrete corewalls were made using concrete pumped from ground level to a vertical height of 601 metres. This broke the previous pumping record for a building of 470 metres on the Taipei 101 and the previous overall world record for vertical pumping of 532 metres for an extension to the Riva del Garda Hydroelectric Power Plant in 1994.

Over a period of about 32 months, a high-pressure Putzmeister pump and two others delivered more than 165,000 cubic metres of high-strength concrete, which is about 66 Olympic sized swimming pools.
Three Favelle Favco cranes served right up to level 156 – all diesel units of various specs.

Installing the three high-level cranes was relatively straightforward as sections of the cranes could be moved up the tower with the completion of new levels.

Getting the towers down however, required a little more lateral thinking. The first high-level crane was moved in November 2007 down to level 99 in order to serve as a future recovery crane.

The next high-level crane came down in October 2008, leaving one prominent machine at the top.

Another small crane had to be lifted to floor 159. With a crane on this floor as well as the one on level 99, the dismantling process was ready to begin.

The process started with the crane climbing down from its working height of over 700m. Burj Khalifa was an international collaboration between more than 60 contracting and consulting companies from all over the world.

Watch this video to find out how companies such as legacy Arcadis outfit, Hyder, ETA, Hitachi, Voltas, and so on built the world’s tallest skyscraper.

READ MORE:
How was Dubai’s 828m Burj Khalifa built? https://bit.ly/2NcaBG9

Some visuals in this video are courtesy:

* Emaar Properties
* Construction Week / ITP Media Group archives
* Getty Images

CAMERA:
Liju Cheravathur

EDITING:
Liju Cheravathur
Neha Bhatia

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