Instructions: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Input: Life in present-day Dubai is not for the faint-hearted. But for those who fear neither heights nor financial crisis, the Gulf city-state is to offer an entirely new experience: the chance to spend the rest of your days thousands of feet up in the air. 
  
 Monday sees the long-awaited opening of the Burj Dubai, not only the world's tallest building but the world's tallest building by some 1,000 feet. At 2,683 feet tall, it is the height of the current highest skyscraper, Taipei 101 in Taiwan, with the Eiffel Tower perched on top. 
  
 It has been designed so that those who wish to do so will never have to leave, or even descend below the 108th floor, at about 1,300 feet. 
  
 That is the height up to which there will be residential apartments. For work, you can nip to the offices upstairs - anywhere up to the 160th floor, in fact. To eat, you can visit the restaurant on the 122nd, and to exercise you can use the gym on the 123rd, about 1,440 feet off the ground. 
  
 The gym has both an indoor and, unnervingly, an outdoor swimming pool. 
  
 One might fear such a high-flying yet enclosed life would get a little dull. But the tower's developers have a solution there, at least for the young. 
  
 The Burj Dubai is also intending to host the world's highest nightclub, 20 floors higher still than the gym. 
  
 Since ground was broken on the project in January 2004, the tower has inspired huge debate in Dubai which has mirrored the fortunes of the emirate after which it is named. 
  
 For the company which built it, Emaar, and the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, it is a "shining accomplishment ... an icon of the new Middle East: prosperous, dynamic and successful". 
  
 The purple prose of tourist guidebooks has already had difficulty keeping up with Dubai's transformation from an oriental souk, with picturesque dish-dasha-clad locals bobbing on the creek in wooden dhows to the world capital of bling. For them, the Burj Dubai has proved a challenge. "Just damn tall," was the pithy conclusion of The Lonely Planet. 
  
 It can hardly be blamed. Burj in Arabic means tower, so that the building, which is set next to the Dubai Mall and the world's tallest fountain, called the Dubai Fountain, is actually named less than imaginatively "Dubai Tower". 
  
 As the global debt-fuelled property boom came to an end, Dubai's vision has turned to nightmare and with Dubai's fall from grace in November after admitting a multi-billion-dollar hole in its finances, the Burj took on a deeper symbolism. 
  
 Its sharp spire appeared to "pierce the bubble in the sky". One commentator compared it to Ozymandias, the poem in which Shelley describes the arrogant wreckage of a long-disappeared empire. 
  
 "Outrageous, wasteful, egotistical, ridiculous," a journalist wrote of the Burj after Dubai asked for a standstill on its debt repayments. 
  
 He portrayed its "sneer of cold command" as "thrusting a finger at the outside world even as its Ozymandian surroundings sink beneath the economic waters of the Gulf". 
  
 Whether Dubai's economy fails or recovers, however, the brute facts will remain: 8 million cubic feet of concrete, 31,000 tons of reinforcing steel, 167,000 square feet of stainless steel cladding, and 1.1 million square feet of double glazing have been mixed together to create a spire visible from 60 miles away across the desert. It will dwarf the new 1,776 ft 1 World Trade Center, also known as "Freedom Tower", being built on Ground Zero in New York, and is unlikely to be surpassed any time soon. The world recession has not been kind to mega-projects. Emaar's great rival in Dubai, Nakheel, builder of the Palm Islands, proposed a one-kilometre tall tower in 2008, but has put it on ice while it tries to tackle its multi-billion dollar debts. 
  
 As to the Burj's actual height, that remains officially a secret, which is odd since the developers have already told newspapers it is 818 metres tall, or 2,683 feet. 
  
 Also a mystery is who is going to live and work there, which is said to be a matter of client confidentiality. Despite the recession, the developers say it is sold out. 
  
 What happens to unlucky acrophobes whose employers suddenly decide to move from a pleasant ground-floor office next to the beach to a look-out perched two and a half thousand feet in the air, Emaar says that, with respect, it is none of their business. 
  
 "That is up to the clients," said a spokesman. ||||| And so here is the Burj Dubai's real symbolic importance: It is mostly empty, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Though most of its 900 apartments have been sold, virtually all were bought three years ago -- near the top of the market -- and primarily as investments, not as places to live. ("A lot of those purchases were speculative," Smith, in something of an understatement, told me in a phone interview.) And there's virtually no demand in Dubai at the moment for office space. The Burj Dubai has 37 floors of office space. 
  
 Monday's ribbon-cutting, though, could hardly come at a more awkward time. Dubai, the most populous member of the United Arab Emirates, continues to deal with a massive real estate collapse that has sent shock waves through financial markets around the world and forced the ambitious city-state, in a significant blow to its pride, to seek repeated billion-dollar bailouts from neighboring Abu Dhabi. Conceived at the height of local optimism about Dubai's place in the region and the world, this seemingly endless bean-stock tower, which holds an Armani Hotel on its lower floors with apartments and offices above, has flooded Dubai with a good deal more residential and commercial space than the market can possibly bear. 
  
 Designed by Adrian Smith , a former partner in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Burj Dubai is an impossible-to-miss sign of the degree to which architectural ambition -- at least the kind that can be measured in feet or number of stories -- has migrated in recent years from North America and Europe to Asia and the Middle East. It is roughly as tall as the World Trade Center towers piled one atop the other. Its closest competition is Toronto's CN Tower, which is not really a building at all, holding only satellites and observation decks, and is in any case nearly 900 feet shorter. 
  
 One of the odder, more complicated moments in the history of architectural symbolism will arrive Monday with the formal opening of the Burj Dubai skyscraper . At about 2,600 feet high -- the official figure is still being kept secret by developer Emaar Properties -- and 160 stories, the tower, set back half a mile or so from Dubai's busy Sheikh Zayed Road , will officially take its place as the tallest building in the world. 
  
 Though Emaar is understandably reluctant to disclose how much of the tower is or will be occupied -- it did not reply to e-mails sent this week on that score -- it's fair to assume that like many of Dubai's new skyscrapers it is a long, long way from being full. In that sense the building is a powerful iconic presence in ways that have little directly to do with its record-breaking height. To a remarkable degree, the metaphors and symbols of the built environment have been dominated in recent months by images of unneeded, sealed-off, ruined, forlorn or forsaken buildings and cityscapes. The Burj Dubai is just the latest -- and biggest -- in this string of monuments to architectural vacancy. 
  
 The combination of overbuilding during the boom years, thanks to easy credit, and the sudden paralysis of the financial markets in the fall of 2008 has created an unprecedented supply of unwanted or under-occupied real estate around the world. At the same time, rising cultural worry about environmental disaster or some other end-of-days scenario has produced a recent stream of books, movies and photography imagining cities and pieces of architecture emptied of nearly all signs of human presence. 
  
 And so in the same week that you could read the news that the Sahara Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas has entirely sealed off two of its three towers (and its buffet!) for the holiday season, citing slow demand, you could head to the multiplex to watch the movie version of Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road," in which a father and son wander through a post-apocalyptic landscape where buildings for the most part have been reduced to burned-out shells. 
  
 And it's not just "The Road": The Roland Emmerich destruction-fest "2012" and the upcoming Denzel Washington vehicle "The Book of Eli" are full of similar images; Jason Reitman's "Up in the Air" moves its characters through a series of downsized companies where abandoned desk chairs swim in empty space. 
  
 Or you might discover online a group of photographs called "Empty L.A.," part of a series completed recently by Matt Logue, showing a number of recognizable intersections and stretches of freeway in and around the city where people, cars and other signs of life have been scrubbed away, presumably through digital manipulation -- and in the same trip around the Internet find a Q&A in Entrepreneur magazine with a man named Mike Enos, who runs a firm that encloses foreclosed houses, half-built hotels and other objects in plastic wrap and reports a surge in business since the economic collapse last year. 
  
 This movement in the direction of emptiness is profoundly difficult for contemporary culture -- and particularly American culture -- to grapple with. Occasional recessions and other setbacks aside, we assume that our national trajectory always moves toward fullness, that our cultural progress can be measured by how much new square footage we've created and occupied. 
  
 But that process has completely reversed itself in many of cities hardest hit by economic crisis. Detroit, as Rebecca Solnit put it in Harper's Magazine, "is now so depopulated that some stretches resemble the outlying farmland and others are altogether wild." And as P.J. Huffstutter reported recently in The Times, Hantz Farms is planning to buy and plant as many as 5,000 acres of land within the Detroit city limits. 
  
 In Los Angeles, there are parking lots where great towers, planned during the exuberant middle of the last decade, were supposed to be. At Rick Caruso's Americana at Brand complex in Glendale, every one of the development's 100 condominiums sat empty during 2009, even as shoppers browsed in the stores below. Occupancy wasn't allowed until more than half of the units had been sold, a mark that was finally reached in December. 
  
 As super-tall buildings go, the Burj Dubai is elegant. Smith is an unusually talented shaper of skyscraper form, as he proved at Shanghai's 88-story Jin Mao Tower, which he designed before leaving SOM in 2006. The Burj Dubai's profile, which Smith says is inspired by a range of local influences including sand dunes and minarets, grows more slender as it rises, like a plant whose upper stalks have been peeled away. 
  
 But the extent to which the building had to battle worries about the wisdom of its construction even before it was finished -- the way it seemed doomed, at least in financial terms, while it was still going up -- may be unique in the history of skyscraper design. In that sense it seems impossible to write about the Burj Dubai without at least mentioning the Tower of Babel, which also, if the biblical story and various historical sketches are to be believed, combined a tapering, corkscrew design with heaps of overconfidence. 
  
 Dubai's economy will recover, at least in some chastened form. But the hyper-confident Dubai that Smith's tower was designed to mark and call global attention to is already dead, as is the broader notion, which the emirate came to symbolize over the last decade, that growth can operate as its own economic engine, feeding endlessly and ravenously on itself. 
  
 If the Burj Dubai is too shiny, confidently designed and expertly engineered to be a ruin itself, it is surely the marker -- the tombstone -- for some ruined ideas. 
  
 -- Christopher Hawthorne 
  
 Top photo: The Burj Dubai. Credit: James Steinkamp. 
  
  
  
 Middle and bottom: Images from the series "Empty L.A." Credit: Matt Logue. |||||
Output:
Six years in the making, the Burj Dubai skyscraper opens Monday with the United Arab Emirates' fortunes in flux and the boom times that launched the world's tallest building a distant memory. Designed by American Adrian Smith, the Burj Dubai—the name means simply "Dubai Tower"—is 2,683 feet and 160 stories tall, with a nightclub on the 143rd floor and residences as high as the 108th. Developer Emaar Properties says the project is sold out despite the recession but won't say who's bought in, citing confidentiality, the Telegraph reports. "As super-tall buildings go, the Burj Dubai is elegant," writes Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne. "But the hyper-confident Dubai that Smith's tower was designed to mark and call global attention to is already dead."