World’s Tallest Building gets Guinness Record

Throughout recorded history, whenever someone’s won a war or where there's been an economic boom and a brief period of fickle confidence, or a major pick up on a National Lottery roll-over, there have been tall pointless structures erected to mark such events.

The Colossus of Rhodes, the Leaning Thing of Pizza Hut, the Great Pyramid of Giza, Blackpool Tower, Cleopatra’s Needle, the Easter Island heads, the Statue of Liberty, Nelson’s Column, the Great Wall of Bolton: the list goes endlessly on.

"They're desperate acts of optimism in a time of recession. They're a dog wanker's dreams rendered in bits of iron and balks of wood, held together with papier mache and duct tape," says Barkley Numbnuts, the chief structural engineer behind what will soon be unveiled as the daftest, albeit tallest, building in the world.

Mr Numbnuts’ company, Skidmark Giraffe, specialises in ill-conceived lofty buildings. He personally designed and stuck together the 100/1scale model of the ‘Burj’ Dubai (which literally means tall pile of shite in Arabic) from 42 Euro-pallets of u-pvc commercial grade Lego.

The scaffolding used in the construction of the Burj, if laid end to end, would stretch from the Straits of Hormuz, go around the world four times, and end up outside Mrs. McFeeney’s Bakery shop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
The sheer amount of scaffolding employed in the construction even surpasses that used in the Irish attempt to scale Everest in 2003, which failed when the mountaineers ran out of cross clamps at 28,000 feet.

However, at an estimated 30,000 feet the Burj Dubai will assume the mantle of the World’s tallest ‘anything’ and simultaneously claim a Guinness record for the loftiest flagpole : 2,700 feet, whose tubular core can be hydraulically extended a further 1,500 feet if any other competitive buildings get close to breaking it’s record height over the next few years.

With the Arabs of the Gulf States not exactly being renown for their construction abilities, apart from cobbling together sandcastles and putting up tents, it is with pride they now boast the Burj’s soaring claim.

But the old and established architectural credo that form must follow function leads one to ponder just what the fuck the designers intend to house at the top end of the Burj: apart from the extendable flagpole. The vista from the top is said be somewhat less that spectacular as the last 300 feet are perpetually engulfed in cloud.

Alike a classical wedding cake its succeeding tiers reduce in size, and while the ground floor might well contain an entire UK bus station, a Tesco Extra and a branch of B & Q, the 2,453rd floor is so narrow and cramped it is already known alternately as the ‘crow’s nest’, the ‘coffin’ and the ‘closet’ and can hardly accommodate its single skeletal Darfurian watchman.

Stop press / Al Jizzero News: Ladbrokes bookies declare the ‘Burj Dubai’ the most likely 2009 target for a Mid’-East terrorist attack or another 9/11 style ‘Let’s turn the building to dust’ DEW experiment.