JUST over a year ago the office, hotel and condo tower known as the Burj Dubai became the tallest building in the world. But when its developer, Emaar Properties, announced that the Burj had surpassed the 1,670-foot Taipei 101 Tower in Taiwan, it refused to say how much higher the building would go. That set off a guessing game among architects and developers who follow the tall-buildings equivalent of the arms race. A spire that is being built inside the tower has yet to be unveiled, according to Emaar, which hopes to keep the guessing — and marketing — game going until the building opens next year.
But in Chicago, Adrian Smith, the building’s lead designer, says that the Burj Dubai is already “in the past.” He predicts that a taller building will surpass it within five years. And when the Burj Dubai cedes the title, it may well be to another building by Mr. Smith, a blond bear of a man whose firm, Adrian Smith & Gordon Gill Architecture, has made a specialty of designing “supertall” buildings, some as high as the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building put together.
Already he is designing six other buildings over 100 stories in the United Arab Emirates, including a futuristic three-pronged tower with so many curving surfaces that it required technology created for Frank Gehry.
Thanks to his oil-rich clients Mr. Smith has the chance to create mammoth landmarks that will long outlive him; the risk is that these buildings, which are freed from nearly all stylistic constraints, will look ridiculous, like alien spacecraft that landed in the middle of the desert. At 63 Mr. Smith is performing this high-wire act while building a big architecture firm essentially from scratch. When he led the team that created the Burj Dubai, he was part of the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the blue-chip firm behind many of the world’s most famous skyscrapers, from Lever House in New York to the Sears and Hancock buildings in Chicago to the pagodalike Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai. But after 39 years at Skidmore, including a stint as chief executive from 1993 to 1995, Mr. Smith left in 2006 to start a competing firm. That set off a struggle over bragging rights to the Burj. Emaar lists Mr. Smith as the building’s architect on its promotional materials. “They were buying Adrian Smith as a brand,” said Carol Willis, director of the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan. She described Mr. Smith as “a true artist.” But when her museum, which occupies a space that Skidmore designed pro bono, organized a lecture series on the Burj, Mr. Smith was not included. (William F. Baker, a structural engineer from Skidmore, who played a crucial role in the building’s design, was the keynote speaker.)
Mr. Smith concedes that years of acrimony preceded his departure from Skidmore. But ultimately, he said, he left because the firm requires partners to retire at 65, and he was not ready to stop designing.
Today his Chicago firm is working on two dozen projects. The one closest to home is a proposed retrofit of the Sears Tower, a Skidmore landmark just a few blocks from his office. Mr. Smith is investigating ways to reduce energy and water use with a new glass skin and new mechanical systems.
Otherwise nearly all of the firm’s work is in the United Arab Emirates, which he admits is “a lot of eggs in one basket.” As for his clients’ penchant for supertall buildings, he said it is less about egomania than real estate savvy, a way of creating value in the middle of the desert. Emaar, he said, may never make money on the Burj, but it will profit from all of the buildings that surround it — including at least three by Mr. Smith. The developer has already commissioned Mr. Smith to design three condo buildings with views of the Burj.
Like many architects, Mr. Smith — who collaborates with his partner Gordon Gill on all of the firm’s designs — is fond of saying that he wants to make buildings responsive to their context. That can be a problem in the emirates: most of the time, he concedes, there is no context, at least in the form of surrounding buildings, to respond to.
As a result he has turned to a larger context. He explains the buildings’ architectural features as responses to geography, geology and climate and is consumed by the notion of making supertall buildings “green.”
Hauling vast amounts of steel and concrete into the desert to create an edifice that needs to be heated and air-conditioned and supplied with hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day hardly seems eco-friendly. But Mr. Smith casts those projects as an opportunity for environmental innovation. Several of the towers he is designing have wind turbines that can take advantage of their elevation — winds are stronger at high altitudes than near the ground — to generate electricity. And cool air surrounding the top of a supertall building can be pumped to the lower levels, reducing the load on the building’s air-conditioning.
Many of the buildings Mr. Smith is working on will be double walled, meaning that a gap of eight inches or more between layers of glass will allow heated air to be directed toward the outside of the building (in summer) or the inside (in winter, although there isn’t much of one there).