If you think you’ve seen the tallest buildings, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Because the tallest building you’ve ever seen is already trumped by Dubai.

On Monday, Dubai will open Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest skyscraper. The developer is Emaar, the giant property firm part-owned by the government.

As of now we still don’t know the exact height of the needle-shaped concrete, steel and glass structure, because Emaar refuses to reveal it. But we do know that it exceeds 800 metres (2,640 feet), putting it much higher than Taiwan’s Taipei 101 tower (508 metres).

With this building, Dubai has set a new benchmark. Bill Baker, a structural and civil engineer and partner in Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) which designed the tower, said, “We thought that it would be slightly taller than the existing tallest tower of Taipei 101. (Emaar) kept on asking us to go higher but we didn’t know how high we could go. We were able to tune the building like we tune a music instrument. As we went higher and higher and higher, we discovered that by doing that process… we were able to reach heights much higher than we ever thought we could.”

Burj Dubai has 160 floors and 57 elevators. Its construction started in 2004 and is believed to have cost one billion dollars (694.7 million euros).

(via Yahoo News)