"Less is only more where more is no good." I wonder how many guests squinting into the Gulf's blue skies before the sublime, coruscating, vitreous surfaces of the blasphemously vertiginous Burj Dubai at yesterday's opening ceremony knew Frank Lloyd Wright's sardonic remark.
Height is an expression and a metaphor of ambition, but – equally – as Freud knew, falling is a universal fear. Dubai's economy will probably recover, but the Burj Khalifa will very likely be the last of its kind this particular Emirate builds.
Paradoxically, Burj Khalifa is not a truly modern building. It is a hangover of a demented spending binge. It is a subprime Great Pyramid. It is queasy nostalgia for a version of the future that looked old-fashioned a generation ago. It is kitsch retro fantasia, a glassy memorial to something not so much forgotten as never known.
Sublime to the point of being frightening, Burj Khalifa is archaically greedy with energy and resources. It is a modern building in the sense that – like Zaha Hadid's new MAXXI museum in Rome – it was built for vainglory rather than for purpose. Vast in size but small in meaning, Burj is a lot more stuff, but less idea.
I have a vision of it now, several years hence, its glossy surfaces dulled by sandstorms, embarrassing stress-fractures in its shiny, arrogant face. It will be an ancient monument surprisingly soon. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.
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