Burj Khalifa.

(or how it was called until 2010, Burj Dubai) the most technologically-
advanced skyscraper in Dubai opened on January 14th, 2010. Even before the building
construction was finished, starting from 2007, it had become the highest skyscraper in the
world. Its exact height is 2,722 feet, or 829,8 meters. With total of 163 floors, which is 16’2”
(about 5 meters) for each floor.

The building is a multi-use Burj Dubai development tower with an approximate total area
of 460,000 meters squared. Burj Khalifa is that it had been planned to be a “city within the
city”; this means inside the tower, includes shopping malls, entertainment centers, offices, hotel,
commercial, residential and leisure establishments (AL-KODMANY 2013, p. 12). The decision
to construct this building was initiated by government’s idea to diversify from an oil-based
economy to one that is tourism and service oriented. It is 828 meters tall and comprises three
basement levels and one hundred and sixty-two floors. The construction of this tower
commenced in January 2004, with excavation works. (Abdelrazaq 2008, p.35).

The tower employ’s a record-breaking 142,000 square meters of glass 330,000 cubic
meters of concrete, 39,000 metric tonnes of steel rebar, and the man-hour that was involved in
building was 22 million man hours. The structure below the spire is entirely concrete reinforced
while steel is employed in the spire above the observation floor. Architecturally, the tower is a
transition from a stable base expression to a vertically expressed middle section polished
stainless steel projected metal fins and glass. The tower is located at the center of downtown
Dubai, United Arab Emirates (BENNETT 2008, p.13).

Burj Khalifa looks like a stalagmite, which means it resembles vertical minerals growing
from cave floors. Stalagmites usually have a shape of a cone, and so does Burj Khalifa; if you
look at it from a distance, it will remind you of a gigantic sharp cone made of glass and steel.
The glass of the tower’s surface always shines, because it is washed every single day, and the
make of concrete of which the tower was built from was invented specifically for Burj Khalifa.
There are three entrances to the tower, because it is so huge that one or two would not be
enough. At the foot of the skyscraper, there is a big artificial lake that measures up to 12
hectares. The Burj Khalifa elevator speed is 10 meters per second, making the elevators among
the fastest in the world. The Burj Khalifa elevator time to reach the observation deck on the
124th floor is only one minute. It has over 57 elevators work 24 hours each day to transport
visitors between floors.

Burj Khalifa has partnered with LED lighting and media project company SACO, to light
up the skyscrapers east façade and provide high-resolution video capabilities. They would use
every part of building structure, even the curves and depths would be a canvas to emphasize the
colours, lighting effects or 3D deformation and they would never have any content flat to the
surface. SACO utilized the V-stick LED video/light fixtures which has 20 times more resolution
than the previous system and extend virtually the entire height of the structure. It comprises 17
miles of V-stick fixtures and boast 1,139,144 RGB pixels, mapped and powered by disguised.
 Burj Khalifa is considered as a biggest LED screen around the world, its 1.2 million of
lights make up a composite image of same video playing on the laptop. Tiny LED lights run
down the side of the thin plastic strips, where the individual pixels located and blend it perfectly
to the façade. The lights are set by 40 percent brightness. The system has the maximum capacity
of 790 kilowatt per hour. It is over 1.2 million of pixels (LED lights on the facades) to light on.
There are approximately 33 km length of LED strips that put together in the façade and it is
almost 1,825 number of shows needed to display on the big screen.

Media files of the show plays on the laptop that is connected to the server, which allows
signal to distribute through the nerve system, all the way down to each and every pixel. Through
a network of fibre optics and smaller brains, it commands tiny LED lights on the façade to
display a particular colour. This is actually much easier than manually checking if 1.2 million of
lights are working fine of the façade. The system automatically recognized if there’s something
wrong and are able to easily trace and fix it.

According to the Bashar Kassab, Technical Services Director, there were experience
challenges while installing and maintaining the exterior structure of million LED lights. They
were required to use more than 110 kilometers of rope access, 72 kilometers of cabling and
10,000 connectors to cover a total area of 33,000 square meters for this massive LED screen
display (Patrick Lynch 2016). One of the factors for installing this millions of LED lights were
the atmospheric conditions, they need to consider the climate and the condition of atmosphere.