Hasta La Ideas

Well, yesterday saw the big opening of the Burj Dubai and with it came dozens upon dozens of reviews and photos and video. The professional critics generally seemed to deem it nifty that the world had a new tallest tower and had mostly positive things to say about it, though always reminding us what a huge investment this was for an emirate that hasn’t been doing so hot lately and how disastrous it might be, should the massive building not fill its millions of square feet of available space. But again, fairly positive throughout. That wasn’t the case in Germany however, where, according to South Africa’s Business Report, many of the country’s architects hate the Burj Dubai and all it stands for. Most of the quotes came from members of the DAI, the German architects association, and say that they find the whole thing much too large, far too un-green, and not at all practical:

“One thing is sure though: what has become a glass and ferroconcrete desert hardly represents a sustainable contribution to building practices around the world,” [DAI’s president Christian Baumgart] added.

German architect Meinhard von Gerkan called the skyscraper “an economically pointless symbol of prestige, representing the power of money.”

So not everyone is excited about the new building, we find. However, we shouldn’t believe that all German architects share this opinion, or that these quotes even came from actual Germans, given that the Business Report also says that the Burj’s architect, Adrian Smith, is British. Unless they’re handing out UK citizenships for we here in the Midwest, we’re pretty sure he’s still Chicago born and raised.

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