Emaar Properties Opens Burj Khalifa as the World's Tallest Building · Chronopin

Emaar Properties Opens Burj Khalifa as the World's Tallest Building · Chronopin

Burj Khalifa officially opened on January 4, 2010 in Dubai, developed by Emaar Properties, at a height of 828 m (2,716 ft 6 in)^[2][3]
The margin over the previous record holders was unusually large: Taipei 101 stood at 508 m when completed in 2003 and the Petronas Towers at 451.9 m in March 1996, and fifteen years on Burj Khalifa was still "over 200 metres taller than the Shanghai Tower"^[2][3]
The tower grew enormously during design - first drawn at 518 metres, then extended by 310 metres - before construction began on 21 September 2004, with the exterior completed on 1 October 2009^[2][3]
The build took six years, 22 million man-hours and more than 12,000 workers at an estimated $1.5 billion, using more than 330,000 cubic metres of concrete, 39,000 tonnes of steel reinforcement, 103,000 square metres of glass and almost 26,000 hand-cut glass panels, on a concrete raft carried by 192 piles reaching 50 metres into the ground^[1][2][3]
Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill led the design, taking inspiration from the Hymenocallis or spider lily and Islamic architecture for the triple-lobed footprint and spiralling setbacks; the Y-shaped cross section reduces wind effects and the tower can move about 1.5 metres in any direction^[2][3]
It set a cluster of records alongside the height: highest occupied floor at level 160, highest outdoor observation deck at 555 m, highest restaurant at 441.3 m and the longest single lift shaft, with lifts running at up to 10 m per second and reaching the 124th floor in under a minute^[3]
Other figures: the spire alone is 200 metres and visible from up to 95 km, the building uses 946,000 litres of water daily and carries 378 solar panels, and cleaning it top to bottom takes about three months^[2][3]
It sits within the 2 km² (490-acre) Downtown Dubai development^[2]
A Free Documentary episode pitting it against the Empire State Building describes it as "the world's tallest skyscraper and the tallest building on earth" which "at eight hundred and twenty-eight metres... breaks every record - by a huge margin" and is "more like a vertical city, than just a skyscraper", against a 443-metre Empire State Building that held the title for more than forty years^[1]
None of the wikis mention the accession anniversary the pin ties the opening date to^[1][2][3]