City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (19 page)

The carrier has been indispensible to Dubai, a city that depends completely on air travel. Dubai could never become the world’s fastest growing city without one of the world’s fastest growing airlines. In 2007, Emirates says it made nearly $13 billion in indirect contributions to the Dubai economy. “It’s a massive virtuous circle,” says Flanagan. “Neither can succeed without the other.”

Emirates swears it gets no special treatment from its owner, the Dubai government. Executives at competitors like Air France and Qantas beg to differ. They say Emirates benefits from hidden subsidies that keep expenses far below the industry norm. A 2003 study by Switzerland’s UBS found costs 40 percent below those of Dutch carrier KLM.
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For examples, it’s hard to look past the fact that Sheikh Ahmed is the government’s top aviation official as well as the airline’s chairman. The government built Dubai airport’s new Terminal 3 and, in October 2008,
handed it to Emirates for its exclusive use. Emirates’ home in tax-free Dubai means the airline and its staff pay no corporate or income tax. Government ties mean it borrows at low rates for which it wouldn’t otherwise qualify. It cuts costs by recruiting low-paid Africans and South Asians for cabin crews and ground staff. It houses catering staff in a gritty labor camp in Sonapur, Dubai’s poorest neighborhood.

Flanagan calls such claims “utter rubbish,” and reels off a list of costs that Emirates carries that most airlines do not. For the past five years, Emirates has paid a $100 million dividend into the city budget. And Emirates lures pilots and executives from U.S. and European airlines with unmatched perks like free housing and children’s tuition.

Flanagan puts the airline’s success down to decision speed and freedom of action. “We’re a Maktoum family business, run by a brilliant Maktoum, Sheikh Ahmed. We don’t have a board to slow us down.” Sheikh Mohammed only gets involved for purchases in the multiple billions of dollars, Flanagan says.

The carrier’s ambition matches that of Dubai. Simply stated, Emirates wants to take over the world. “Any city with a conurbation of five million plus, we could probably serve. The further distant from Dubai, the better,” Flanagan says. “We can link any two points in the world now with one stop in Dubai.”

Long routes are its most profitable, and Emirates has lots, including the fifteen-hour route to São Paulo, the seventeen-hour trips to Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the fourteen-hour flights to Sydney. It flies direct to most of the major cities in Europe that supply Dubai with tourists. It flies to almost every major city in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.

But as 2009 dawned, air travel began to plummet. Emirates, like many Dubai-owned companies began to look overstretched, its order book extravagant and its debt levels dangerous. It began to appear, again, like a carrier in need of government support.

In 1969, Dubai’s airport was a flyblown patch with an open concrete shed where sweaty officials hand-stamped passports. Nine airlines served twenty destinations. In 1980, just after Flanagan arrived but before the city’s tourism push, the airport had more than tripled its destinations to 64 and airlines to 31. By 2007, Dubai International was heaving with
passengers. It was the world’s eighth largest international airport, with 118 carriers serving 202 destinations. In 2008, Dubai International received nearly 40 million passengers, nearly double the airport’s design capacity.
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Flanagan stands on his office balcony and points out the shiny new Terminal 3, bigger than Heathrow’s new Terminal 5. Adjacent is a hole in the ground that will become Terminal 4. Dubai airport will be wracked by permanent expansion until its operations shift across town. There, next to Jebel Ali port, the first of six runways at Maktoum International Airport are being paved. Dubai expects its new airport to be the world’s busiest, with rail connections to Dubai International, and cargo synergies with the port.

With Dubai’s airport madness seemingly mushrooming without end, I ask Flanagan when he’ll call it quits. He’s fifteen years beyond retirement age. “I should. There are other things I want to get on to.” Flanagan could use a break. He’s got a bum leg. Each time he stands up he presses his knee into place. His right middle finger is locked into a leather splint. He speaks in a whisper.

More disturbingly, every time he runs into Sheikh Mohammed, the Dubai leader shouts the same greeting—“Hello, old man!”—and grins and slaps him on the back.

“I don’t know what kind of message he’s sending. He’s probably discovered how old I am.” Flanagan laughs, stands up, and pops his knee into place.

In the early 1990s, the Chicago Beach Hotel sat alone, eight miles out of Dubai. The yellow concrete hotel was a cash cow. Year after year, it managed 80 percent occupancy. Its Bierkeller tavern and Beachcombers bar were two of the best expat watering holes in Dubai. “It’s making a lot of money,” Sheikh Mohammed said one day. “Why don’t we put something else out there?”
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In 1992, a British engineering firm called W. S. Atkins submitted a proposal for a new beachfront resort, to be called the Jumeirah Beach Hotel. It was a two-dimensional wave design. It looked like the initial hill on a roller coaster, except glassed-in. Every room faced the sea. Atkins’s
architects showed Sheikh Mohammed the concept. The company wasn’t really in the design business. It was more of an engineering firm that kept a few architects on staff.

“I like that,” Sheikh Mohammed said, giving Atkins the go-ahead. “But we want a tower as well.”

In 1993, Atkins assigned a thirty-six-year-old London-born architect named Tom Wright to work on Sheikh Mohammed’s tower. Wright was a wild card. Atkins had hired him just over a year before. He’d never worked on a hotel. Neither had any of the others on his team. Wright knew only that the young sheikh wanted something tall and iconic. Without experience, Wright, a thoughtful and plain-spoken man who is an avid sailor, sought inspiration in structures that had won fame: the leaning tower of Pisa, the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower. He wanted his hotel to be instantly recognizable—by everyone on the planet.

“We decided that the test to determine if a building is symbolic is if you can draw it in five seconds and everyone recognizes it,” he said. He was given two weeks to come up with sketches and a model.

One day Wright and his team were discussing La Défense, the modern square arch in Paris. Wright thought a giant arch in the Islamic style might make an iconic hotel. He folded a sheet of paper in half and cut out the center. He unfolded the sheet and showed the arch to his team. It wasn’t right. But the paper cutout was interesting. It looked like the blade of a kitchen knife, a flat edge and a curved edge meeting at a sharp point.

“Hey, that’s quite good,” Wright said, holding up the scrap. It reminded him of a sloop sail. Since he wanted the structure to rise from the sea—perhaps on an island—the nautical theme made sense. “Let’s push this modern sail idea,” he told his team.

They started sketching it out. Early drawings showed a huge sail-shaped building 1,300 feet tall, jutting from the sea floor, waves lapping at its base. The building leaned over the sea—a sop to Pisa—and a cable car ran from shore to its peak. The other access came via an undersea tunnel. It was iconic all right, but structurally impossible. Wright straightened it up, moved it from the sea floor to a small man-made islet, and traded the cable car for a helipad. A causeway bridge replaced the tunnel. They scaled back the height to 1,000 feet.

“It didn’t need to be the tallest building in the world, just the most interesting,” Wright said.

Wright and his ten-man team drew their sail-shaped building and
three others as alternates. The men didn’t put much effort into the alternates. One, Wright said, was a pile of terraces, like a ziggurat protruding from the sea. It would have made a nice hotel with all those balconies, but the shape wasn’t iconic.

In October 1993, Wright flew to Dubai and gave Sheikh Mohammed his first look at the drawings. He chose the sail-shaped one, just as Wright had hoped. His order was simple: “Build it.”

Unlike today, when Dubai projects are launched with fanfare on overload, very little was said as work began in 1994. Those who noticed dubbed the project the new Chicago Beach Hotel. To Sheikh Mohammed, it was much more. The iconic tower symbolized his pride as an Arab. It would cement his legacy as one of the great Muslim builders. The sheikh’s project would become the most significant Arab monument since the Alhambra, built in Spain during Muslim rule in the fourteenth century. He would call it the Tower of the Arabs—Burj Al Arab.

Wright rented a house in Satwa and bought a Jeep to drive the sandy track to the construction site. There was still no paved road along the beach. The neighborhood now known as Umm Suqeim was a fishing village.

Sheikh Mohammed had other projects under way, including the Emirates Towers skyscrapers, which would be taller than anything in the Middle East or Europe. But he obsessed over the Burj Al Arab. “It was his baby,” Wright says. “We gave him presentations on details right down to the door handles. This was his chance to do something really special and he needed to get it right.”

The Dubai crown prince was a dream client. He was enthusiastic. He understood engineering challenges. And he was decisive. “He had the ability to make big decisions without many facts, and to get them right,” Wright says. “He had a sophisticated vision. He knew what was significant and what didn’t make a difference. He could see the end result.”

The budget was unlimited. The Burj’s purpose was to put Dubai on the map. The tower had to be stunning enough to compete with the classic buildings that inspired it. Inside, it had to be luxurious beyond compare—a twenty-first-century version of the
Arabian Nights
. Sheikh Mohammed knew the hotel would never pay for itself. He didn’t want pursuit of profits to cramp Wright’s style. The hotel would be the world’s tallest, but it would hold just 202 giant suites, two stories each. The smallest would be 7,200 square feet, larger than most private homes.

The Burj would shatter the hotel industry’s five-star standard. It would be beyond classification.

One day, discussion centered on Wright’s desire to locate the hotel atop a man-made island. The sheikh moved the model back and forth from island to mainland. Building it at sea would add cost and time, and the hotel’s underground parking garage would be tricky, essentially lying under water. But a land location was less unique, and the tall structure would cast a shadow on its own beach. Mohammed decided to keep it on the island.

Another day he took issue with the helipad, which was to sit atop the tubular Sky Bar, facing the sea. The sheikh, who flew his own helicopter, knew the strong Gulf breezes would create a dangerous tailwind.

“A helicopter needs to land into the prevailing wind,” he told the men, jabbing at their drawing. “You have to move the helipad to this side.”

Some of the work was unique. The three hundred-foot-long steel trusses that buttress the Burj’s exterior were assembled in the desert and trucked to the site on a giant flatbed with forty axles. Road crews took down streetlights, so the truck could turn corners without wiping them out. Since much of Dubai has no bedrock, the pilings that anchor the tower to the earth would not sit on rock but in hard sand, held there by friction.

Dubai lacked the capacity to build big in those days. Atkins and its contractors had to import cranes, trucks, engineers, and crews. They used Dubai companies whenever possible, passing along their knowledge. “One of our missions was to upgrade Dubai’s entire construction industry and the technology they were using,” Wright says.

By 1999, the Burj was creating a stir around the world. The blue-and-white tower is an arresting sight, especially in the soft afterglow at dusk. The building’s land face is sheathed in white, Teflon-coated fabric that resembles a billowing sail. Flashing strobes race up the tubular frame that bows out in the middle stories and converges at its pointy summit. From the beach, the island-bound Burj casts its reflection on the water like a river of moonlight. Guests flick on their room chandeliers and wedges of glass light up like blocks of iridescent ice. Tucked under the spire, the Sky Bar looks like a roll of parchment laid horizontally, its soft cocktail lighting beckoning. A yawning eighty-foot cantilever attaches the tavern to the Burj’s frame. The only thing between drinkers and the sea far below is a bit of steel plate. “That caused a few structural nightmares,” Wright chuckles.

Burj Al Arab did exactly what Sheikh Mohammed wanted. It became an instantly recognizable icon. Dubai’s skyline was famous. No one could confuse it with Bahrain or Kuwait anymore. The Burj lured in droves of big-spending tourists. The publicity has been genius. When Andre Agassi and Roger Federer happened by, they were photographed whacking volleys on the helipad. A year later, Tiger Woods drove balls from the same spot.
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But the Burj isn’t perfect. Step inside and the clean modernity of its exterior disintegrates. Suddenly, you’re in Vegas. The walls are fishtanks trimmed in gold piping. The lobby centerpiece is a fountain that explodes like a rocket-propelled grenade, firing off a fourteen-story geyser. The lobby’s Al Iwan restaurant is a confused muddle. Its arches look Arab. Its red and gold tapestries look Chinese. “It’s Chinese-Persian fusion,” a tour guide explains.

Looking up, the atrium is dizzying, almost seizure-inducing, with scalloped balconies rising floor after floor—so high that the Eiffel Tower could fit inside the open space. Looking down, the floor is dizzying. It’s covered in giant mustard tiles woven with arabesques of gold mosaic, blue wedges, and red swooshes.

There is a dichotomy in philosophies between Wright the architect, who likes things clean and white, and British-Chinese interior designer Khuan Chew, who doesn’t. Sheikh Mohammed sides with Chew.

Wright says the interior isn’t his taste. His team’s designs roughly matched the exterior. It was white, with muted shades of blue. One day, Wright, Mohammed, and Chew walked into the hotel lobby and looked up at the scalloped balconies, stretching far up into the heights. Wright loved it. The boss did not.