Roughly how much did it cost to build the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, in US dollars?
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Answer
About 1.5 billion USD
The tower was called Burj Dubai right up to opening day in 2010. It was renamed after the ruler of Abu Dhabi, whose emirate had bailed Dubai out during the financial crisis.
How to estimate it
Price the floor space. The tower has about 160 floors, and its slender plan averages perhaps 2,000 square metres per floor: 160 × 2,000 = 320,000 square metres. Supertall towers are costly to build, around 4,500 dollars per square metre, several times an ordinary block. 320,000 × 4,500 = 1.4 billion dollars. The reported construction cost is about 1.5 billion US dollars.
Source: Emaar Properties; Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat
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