Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
". . . [Burj Khalifa] represents a great leap forward in height and, especially for Dubai, in design quality. It is a luminous, light-catching skyscraper that looks like a skyscraper-ridiculously tall, but exquisitely sculpted, elegantly detailed and unapologetically exultant. In contrast to Dubai's preposterous collection of architectural cartoons-here, a big-bellied tower that suggests an oversize perfume bottle; there, a paper-thin skyscraper that looks like someone sliced a giant hole in its top with a pair of scissors-the Burj Dubai offers God-is-in-the-details articulation along with its dazzling shape."
— Blair Kamin
— architecture critic
— Chicago Tribune
"[Adrian] Smith is an unusually talented shaper of skyscraper form, as he proved at Shanghai's 88-story Jin Mao Tower, which he designed before leaving SOM in 2006. The Burj Dubai's profile, which Smith says is inspired by a range of local influences including sand dunes and minarets, grows more slender as it rises, like a plant whose upper stalks have been peeled away."
— Christopher Hawthorne
— architecture critic
— Los Angeles Times
"[Burj Khalifa] strikes me as the most graceful skyscraper of the modern(ist) era. Most recent skyscrapers look like refugees from a Fisher-Price toy factory. Yet the skyscraper is the only type of building in which modernism may plausibly be said to challenge the superiority of classicism."
— David Bussat
— Providence Journal
"[Burj Khalifa is] possibly the world's most elegant, as well as tallest building—spare, using a minimum of mass, structurally tight, and architecturally evocative."
— Robert Ivy, FAIA
— editor
—Architectural Record
