Burj Dubai tower

The Burj Dubai tower, a needle-shaped skyscraper which stands more than 800 metres tall and can be seen from 95 kilometres away, will stand as a gleaming testament to Dubai's glory days before the recession ground its construction industry to a halt.

The structure easily surpasses its closest rivals, the KVLY-TV mast in Blanchard in North Dakota, U.S, which measures a lofty 628 metres-high and the Guangzhou TV & Sightseeing Tower in China, which falls short at 610 metres.

The Burj Dubai - literally meaning 'Tower Dubai' - brings records galore to the UAE. As well as being the tallest building in the world, it also has the most stories and highest occupied floor of any building in the world, and ranks as the world's tallest structure. Visitors can look out from the highest observation deck in the world on the 124th floor.

The tower's glass and steel exterior would apparently cover 17 football fields if laid out flat and will take some poor workers between six and eight weeks to clean.

The concrete used in the core of the building could build a pavement 1,283 miles long and the cooling system produces enough condensation to fill 20 Olympic swimming pools a year. It's a good thing those eco-conscious developers will be using the waste to water the grounds.

Work on the Burj Dubai began in 2004 and continued rapidly. At times, new floors were being added almost every three days, reflecting Dubai's raging push to reshape itself over a few years from a small-time desert outpost into a cosmopolitan urban giant packed with skyscrapers.

By January 2007, thousands of laborers, many of them brought in on temporary contracts from India, had completed 100 stories.

To ensure the tower doesn't twist or break during bad weather, it is built in a Y-shape, with three 'wings' evenly distributing the building's weight.