The man who designed the world’s tallest tower, one year on….

As the Burj Khalifa lit up the Dubai sky with fireworks in the early hours of 2011, the world’s tallest tower was days away from another anniversary – its first birthday.

From his office on the 42nd floor of Emirates Towers, Eric Tomich wouldn’t have been able to see the fireworks, because although the southern side of the twin towers commands excellent views of the Burj Khalifa, Tomich’s office faces Sheikh Zayed Road and Dubai Creek.  He loves the Burj, but that doesn’t mean he needs to look at it every day.  “I feel like I hand-built parts of it,” Tomich says, gazing at the tower from the empty Burj-facing office he had requested for the benefit of Middle East Architect’s photographer.

He never doubted it either. Even when the economy faltered and construction sites slammed to a halt all over Dubai. Even when the money looked like it had run out. Even when everyone said Dubai was done.  “It had too much momentum. In a way, Dubai’s reputation was riding on the building. I never ever thought that it would stop, not once,” he said.  It had been a big step for Tomich, a Berkeley-educated architect who has been with SOM for over 25 years and headed up the firm’s technical architecture office in London from 1989 to 2003. He had worked on some big projects in London, including the Broadgate development, but the tallest tower in the world was for him – as it would be for anyone – a huge move.

“When we won this competition I didn’t think about it for very long, I just took the job. I thought it would be a fantastic assignment and it was,” he recalls. “It’s a different environment, a different climate, but I find the Middle East a very exciting place to work.”  Since the completion of the Burj, SOM has scaled down its workforce in the UAE, and currently Tomich is the lone representative of the Chicago-based architectural giant in Dubai. But that was not as much a response to the global recession as a ongoing business philosophy, he says.  “You don’t need an office here to produce the work, but once you have the job, you can’t build it on email.

“On the Burj we had consultants from everywhere, LA, Sydney, Paris, UK, Chicago and at some point we had to come together, and everybody would fly in to have a round-table with the client. Even with video conferencing you still need face to face contact. You can do a lot of things remotely, but you can’t do everything by email.”  Especially with a client like Emaar’s visionary chairman Mohammed Alabbar, who Tomich is still quick to pay tribute to one year after the Burj Khalifa was finished. He describes a man who realised early on that it wasn’t enough for the Burj Khalifa to be the biggest building in the world, it had to be the best. From the design down to the doorknobs, quality was paramount if the building was to be successful in the long term.

“I think he knew that having this icon, creating this shape on the skyline, it was assured that it was going to be famous. But he also realised that the experience that people had would be when they were in the building, approaching it, living and working in it,” Tomich recalls.  “He wanted the best building in the world, and we really drove an agenda of quality in how we approached finishes and how we made that quality happen. We were very careful about who got appointed to do the finish work, we hand-selected all the materials. We even went to Brazil twice to hand select the veneer. We hand-selected all of the stone, the marble, everything.”

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