I first visited the Burj Khalifa in 2013, I think, when I was 10. I don't really remember anything from that trip apart from the few photos we have and the likely overpriced fridge magnet we bought.
(This would be the perfect spot for one of those photos, but I couldn’t find them!)
In 2023, while I was in Canada for university, my parents moved to Dubai. After graduating earlier this year, I moved back to spend some time with them. Apart from it being a new city to me, living here has kind of normalized the building. Depending on where I’m going, I see it far away in the skyline almost every time I leave the house, whether it’s to play padel or to go to the supermarket.
So I got curious about how tall it really is. Turns out a big chunk of it isn’t really usable building at all...
Vanity height
The Burj Khalifa is 828 meters tall. But the highest floor anyone actually uses is at 585 meters, The Lounge, an observation deck on floors 152 to 154. Everything above that is what’s called vanity height, the part of a skyscraper above the last floor people can use.
On the Burj, that’s 244 meters, or 29% of the whole building! It’s mostly the thin pointy tip on top, plus a few floors for maintenance, communications and equipment.
In 2021, Emirates airlines filmed an ad with a stuntwoman dressed as one of their flight attendants standing on the very top of it. It took the crew over an hour just to climb from the 160th floor to the tip at 828 meters. See the ad here.
So why build it?
Because it counts. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the group that decides which building is officially the tallest, measures to the “architectural top”. That includes spires (the pointy tips) but not antennas, signs or flagpoles. So if you want your building to rank higher, a tall pointy tip is a pretty easy way to get there.
Before you jump on the “that’s so typical”, “it doesn’t count”, “that’s not fair” bandwagon, it’s actually pretty common! As of September 2023, the 100 tallest buildings in the world had an average vanity height of 12.6%.
One World Trade Center in New York is a famous example. Its roof is at 417 meters, and the mast on top takes it to 541. In 2013 the council ruled that the mast was a permanent part of the design, so it counted, and that’s what put it above Chicago’s Willis Tower (442 meters) as the tallest building in North America. The top 155 meters of it is vanity height.
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(Also, to be fair to the Burj, even without its empty top it would still be the tallest building in the world, but only by about 2 meters.)
Putting 244 meters in perspective
What’s kinda crazy and blew my mind is that if you cut off just that empty top and stood it up on its own, it would be taller than the tallest building in about four out of five countries in the world. That includes France, Italy, Switzerland, Argentina and South Africa.
(And before anyone brings up the Eiffel Tower, it’s 330 meters but it doesn’t count as a building. The council only calls something a building if at least half of its height is space people can use, and the Eiffel Tower is mostly open metal frame with three levels you can visit.)
It’s also taller than every building in Antarctica. But the tallest one there is about 15 meters, so that’s not saying much.