The World's Tallest Building -- finally

If the news stories are to be believed, the world's tallest building will start construction shortly in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The significance of the building is two-fold: one, in this era of frustratingly incremental height increases, this structure beats all comers with a thorough finality. With skyscrapers like the Petronis Towers (1469 feet tall) and Taiwan's 101 Building (1651 feet tall) claiming top honors by dint of tactics like counting a building's spire (as opposed to the highest occupied floor) to beat the Sears Tower (1450 feet tall) as the world's tallest building , there is something satisfying about a skyscraper that quashes all the hairsplitting equivication to reach a height of 2312 feet. The rules that the Council for Tall Buildings uses to determine the tallest buildings, Highest Occupied Floor, Top of the Roof, and Top of Pinnacle or Antenna -- the engineering equivalent of everyone being special -- are all rendered irrelevant by this monster. At 2312 feet, this structure is almost 1000' taller than the late World Trade Center and represents the first clear advance in building height since the construction of the Empire State Building and Chrysler Buildings in the early 1930s.

Secondly, the location of the tower in the center of the Arab Middle East cannot be ignored. The United Arab Emirates is one of the few progressive and tolerant Arab counties in the region, a model of where the Arab world could move should it decide to chuck its backward and revanchist behavior. The destruction of the World Trade Towers represented Western Enlightenment ideas under attack by the forces of religious intolerance. It is marvelously symbolic that this tower, a product of Western rationalism, will be built in the heart of a malignant, death-centered, anti-intellectual Muslim culture. Building such a structure in the U.A.E cannot help but be a provocative challenge to the rest of the Arab World.