Due to a few requests, I decided to do another mashup of the world’s two tallest buildings side by side on the skyline of Taipei, Taiwan.
The Taipei 101 was the world’s tallest building from 2004 until the first week of January 2010. The new Burj Khalifa has now taken the title. As for the name ‘Khalifa’ its going to take some time to get used to seeming they spruiked it as the Burj Dubai all throughout construction.
So why the name change from Burj Dubai to Burj Khalifa?
The new name is after Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan – the president of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of the neighbouring Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Khalifa pulled a few strings to get Dubai out of their financial woes following the GFC, so heck why not name it after him.
SEO Miracle
The biggest miracle of all is that when you type in ‘Burj Dubai’ in Google the first result is the official site for the Khalifa even though the URL is www.burjdubai.com and the <title> tag still reads ‘Visit the Burj Dubai — The Tallest Building in the World‘. It’ll take Google a few weeks to reindex the changes they’ve made to their meta data and description tags. The search also outranks wikipedias entry which has the new correct name. Sheik Khalifa have you been helping out again???
Back to the bridesmaid, the Taipei 101..
I remember watching the Discovery Channel Seven Wonders of Engineering documentary on the making of the Taipei 101 at some ridiculous hour (hey free pay TV) while staying at the Regency in Kuala Lumpur. It was oddly the same day I’d visited the Petronas Towers and skybridge. The most amazing part of the Taipei 101 is the enormous tuned mass damper – a 600 odd tonne ball of steel that swings as a pendulum to counteract shifts of the building caused by winds and tropical storms/typhoons.
I’d love a visit to Dubai, just to be in awe of their architectural projects, but I’ll hang out for another 5 – 10 years until they finish off the Palm Jumeirah and World Project and Dubailand.
For the record, the Burj Khalifa is 1.63 times taller than the Taipei 101.
The mind could have only have boggled if the cancelled Nakheel Tower (formerly Al Burj) had ever got off the ground.
DesignedbyNatalie 
really tall buildings! I can hardly imagine it’s scale since in my hometown the buildings are only allowed 3 floors, to keep the castle’s tower the tallest building in town.