Building Identity

Buildings that have a deep sense of place impart a unique identity rooted in community and culture. This kind of architecture creates unparalleled experiences and later invokes intense memory. A building that’s designed to respond to its one-of-a-kind circumstance could not have been built anywhere else but where it stands. This is a fleeting idea on a global stage but manages to flourish in Dubai with the Burj Khalifa.

Ultra-large-scale buildings, like the Burj Khalifa, are built with global technologies and often with a global collaborative design process. These necessities often homogenize architecture by stripping it of its local identity. Along with globalized design and technology, the meteoric rise of Dubai as a cosmopolitan city over the past relatively brief 50 years makes the realization of a new vernacular architecture in the United Arab Emirates an unlikely success story.

Skyscrapers encompass the world’s most advanced building technologies and “the tallest” particularly necessitates innovation to achieve never-before-seen heights. As the current title holder for the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa’s 160-stories could have easily glossed over questions of geography and identity to rest on its laurels. Instead, the tower’s sense of place is embedded in a building footprint inspired by the Spider Lily, a regional desert flower. The Burj Khalifa’s ascending form is inspired by the flower’s central bloom and slender outreaching petals. The same design narrative increases opportunities for views and embellishes the tower’s strategy to resolve high wind loads. Flora, climate, and culture permeate the design DNA of the high-tech giant in downtown Dubai.

The Burj Khalifa is not alone in the Emirates when it comes to succeeding in an often-overlooked feature of what makes great architecture. The Museum of the Future, also in Dubai, wears its cultural identity on its sleeve with a façade inscribed with calligraphy. The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s latticework dome acts as an artificial palm canopy, dynamically shading the galleries beneath, which are clustered like structures in a traditional Middle Eastern village. The most recent, notable buildings in the Emirates have been able to avoid a pitfall of contemporary architecture with designs that are deeply integrated with the Emirates’ unique geography and culture.

Essay and photographs by Bob Cuk