There is no reason to build buildings that tall when land is so cheap around it. And not just closer to the desert but also to the north and south. Just looking at the place you can see poor economic choices being made.
There’s a very simple reason: air conditioning. One skyscraper with a thousand residents is going to be more energy-efficient than a thousand single-family homes or even a hundred smaller apartment buildings. It also allows the developer to offer tenants some other amenities, such as restaurants or shopping, just an elevator ride away, and others within a few blocks or a short drive.
Most Americans aspire to live in a detached single-family house with a yard, if they don’t live that way already, but I don’t think this is a worldwide preference.
If you want to optimize for energy-efficiency and short travel distances, you end up with something spherical or octahedral, and probably mostly buried, like a subterranean Epcot Center, or maybe Arcosanti. The form of Burj Khalifa is following a very different function.
Buildings rappidly increase in cost as the height increases. A 30 story building has vary close to the same amount of surface area as a 60 story building, but a 60 story building needs to support the full weight of the 30 storys on top of it, and at the same time have spare elivator capacity to reach the top 30 floors.
Yes, the cost is nonlinear with height, but my point is that the benefit to density can also be very high.
(I can believe that in the specific case of the Burj the cost outweighs the benefit, given that the skyscraper was built primarily to give Dubai bragging rights. But even if the infrastructure of a 124-story skyscraper is too expensive, that doesn’t refute the value of 60-to-80-story buildings.)
For comparison the strip in las vegas is basicly a tourist trap in the middle of the desert http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=las+vegas&ie=UTF... but it still has plenty of support around it. http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=las+vegas&um=1&#...