Construction: it's the Burj, but not as we know it

Perhaps in time, the new name will become popularised; once the current crop of expats have moved on to be replaced by another mix of refugees from larger financial centres and chancers and when the road signs have been changed for so long that subliminal responses replace memories.

In the light of the Dubai World debacle, it's clearly no longer correct to say "Dubai this..." or "Dubai that...." as there is, clearly, no unified Dubai as was thought until just a matter of a few weeks ago.

And so to say "Dubai launched Burj Khalifa with a fireworks display redolent of all the Best Ofs and Biggests that Dubai is known for" would be wrong. But someone paid for and arranged the fireworks which were so magnificent that they were reported visible from neighbouring emirates. Yet we may never know who paid for them - but we can be sure it was not Abu Dhabi which remains more than a little upset by the culture of excess that Dubai (as Dubai was (mis)understood) fostered and ultimately could not pay for.

There is no doubt that Burj Khalifa (it means Khalifa Tower, a fact lost on those who refer to "the Burj Khalifa Tower) is a spectacular project. And the renaming seems to be a form of humility by Dubai: the new name is in honour of the president of the UAE. The full name of the tower is Burj Khalifa Bin Zayed - Khalifa Bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi is the man ultimately responsible for the multi-milliard bailout of Dubai World and to whom Dubai is still looking for support.

But looking beyond the problems, the tower is truly spectacular - although not truly original.

Wherever one puts it, a tower more than 800 metres high is going to face challenges. But specific locations also present specific challenges. Dubai is in the desert: lots of sand to contend with; despite the desert location, Dubai has lots of water, so the subsoil is complex and variable; its close to a fault-line - in fact, during construction a large earthquake in Iran provided an ad hoc test of the building's stability; its windy - and the higher the tower, the windier it becomes.

All of these factors mean that the ideal shape for a building is a pyramid. But Egypt has some of those so there would be nothing novel in that. But the tallest tower in the world?

The design of the tower had to replicate, in principle, a tall pyramid with a small footprint. That means sloping sides - or steps.

The architects chose steps, then to clad the building in stainless steel and glass. Today they are patting themselves on the back for the cleverness and originality of their design. Tomorrow, they might like to fly home via Kuala Lumpur and see the same principles in the Petronas Towers, completed in 1998. In fact, many of the details on Burj Khalifa are very reminiscent of features on the Petronas Towers.

There are 162 floors (excluding service floors) in the Dubai tower and it stands 828 metres. The Petronas Towers, a twin structure, has 86 occupied floors in each tower, each 452 metres.

The Dubai tower takes over from Taipei 101 (508 metres) as the world's tallest tower.

There was a plan for that title to be held for a relatively short time, with another giant structure planned to exceed the magic 1km figure. Plans for that have been scrapped.

For in Dubai there is just one problem: the theory that "build and they will come" worked, then stopped working. Office, residential and retail space that was once at a premium is now difficult to sell at any price. With residential prices in prime locations at 50% of their prices two years ago, some are saying that they expect another significant drop. They hope that speculators will come along and buy up the property expecting to make a return over a period of five or even ten years.

That's a long way from the overnight profits being generated during the hype-years.

In the late 1980s, when the bubble in property in London's Docklands burst, there was a joke doing the rounds:

Q: "What's the difference between a Docklands Flat and a packet of broken biscuits?"

A: "you can throw away a packet of broken biscuits."

Dubai, used to being top dog is looking at crumbs for the foreseeable future.

And no amount of steel and glass is going to provide more than a transient lift in spirits that lasts much longer than the fireworks.

Perhaps the closest analogy is that of the car company that released a massive car that gulped fuel just as prices went over USD150 a barrel. Oh, wait: that was most of them.

Which is a shame: for regardless of the timing of its birth, Burj whatever-it's-called is, simply, stunning and an amazing construction achievement.

And that fact, today, has largely been somewhat overlooked.