Edging out the record-holding Burj Khalifa by just a hair, the world’s tallest tower is set to rise into the Dubai skies by 2020 as the crown jewel of a new waterfront development. Neofuturist starchitect Santiago Calatrava, known for dramatic sweeping structures with complex engineering, won an international competition to design the as-yet-unnamed superstructure offering panoramic vistas of the city in February, and new images and details have just been released.

Taking design inspiration from the contours of a lily flower, the tower features Calatrava’s signature illuminated cables stretching from its length to the floor of the plaza. Floor after floor of luxury boutique hotel rooms lead higher and higher into the air, topped with the ‘pinnacle room’ observation space. Lushly planted decks envisioned as recreations of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon offer additional views.

The shimmering spire is meant to be a landmark for Dubai Creek Harbour, a new district that developers hope will become a trendy new residential and leisure destination for the city, and a new tourist attraction completed in time for the Expo 2020. It’s a flashy addition to Dubai’s many flashy projects, from those that have actually been built to those that have been squashed and abandoned. Calatrava calls it “a symbol of an abiding belief in progress.’

Since so many of Dubai’s announced projects never actually get off the ground, it remains to be seen whether this tower will end up snatching the crown from the 2,722-foot-tall Burj Khalifa, a mega-tall skyscraper completed in 2009 as part of another large-scale mixed-use development.

Known for its extravagance and disdain for rational limits, Dubai never shies away from incredibly ambitious architectural projects – but when they fail, as they often do, the result is a whole lot of sandy half-excavated construction sites. But along with the rest of the United Arab Emirates, this hub of vast oil and gas fortunes is in a state of constant flux, with a rapidly changing landscape that can transform from a swath of desert to a strip of glittering skyscrapers in what seems like no time at all.

Lots of Luxury Vehicles

More than 3,000 abandoned luxury vehicles were counted in Dubai in a single year, left behind, as the story goes, when expats fled the nation to escape debts after the economy crashed. One such vehicle was a limited edition Ferrari Enzo, worth more than $1.65 million. Others include $100K Range Rovers, Porches, BMWs and Mercedes. Photographs show them covered in dust and sand, sometimes haphazardly protected with tarps. Under Sharia law, non-payment of debt is a criminal offense, and foreigners have been prevented from leaving the Emirates for missing a single credit card payment or bouncing a check. But according to Business Insider, it’s not just expats fleeing financial repercussions. Locals bought cars they couldn’t afford, and then struggled to make the payments. On the plus side, bargain hunters have gotten some insane deals on the cars when they’re re-sold at rock-bottom prices at police auctions.

Ongoing Wastelands of Stalled Construction Projects

Dubai itself and the surrounding areas often have large tracts of land that look like wastelands of sand and abandoned construction equipment thanks to countless projects that are started and then put on hold for financial reasons. At any given time, there are thousands of such sites in various stages of progress, and while some eventually pick back up and are completed, others stay like this for years or are eventually scrapped. Nakheel Tower, pictured top, was meant to be the centerpiece of Dubai’s famous man-made Palm Islands, and the site had been cleared and leveled before the project was canceled in 2009. Another project, the Burj Al Alam, suffered a similar fate, with trucks finally bringing in loads of sand to refill areas that had been excavated after developers decided not to go forward with the 108-story tower.

World’s Largest Artificial Islands On Hold and Sinking

Dubai’s artificial islands, including the Palm Islands, the World and the Universe, were intended to be the ultimate in luxury possessions, sold only to millionaires who could afford the hefty price tags and the yachts required to reach them. While a few of them have already been developed, with residents beginning to move in, others have sat in a state of partial completion since construction began in 2001. The 2008 financial crisis led developers to pull back from actively working on the project, and by 2011, some of the islands began sinking into the sea. Despite the developers’ denials, third-party inspectors confirmed that the islands were already eroding, and aerial photographs show that those intended to make up the shapes of the world map are becoming little more than a patchwork of rounded blobs.

Jebel Ali Village And Its Namesake Palm Island

Jebel Ali Village, built outside Dubai i 1977, was a settlement of about 300 villas for expatriates along with schuss, a club, a park, medical clinics and a desalination water plant. It didn’t have its own supermarket, requiring residents to make a long, hot drive without air conditioning all the way to Dubai to purchase supplies back when Abu Dhabi Road was a single-lane unlit carriageway used by camels as well as vehicles. By 2011, the once-treasured community was entirely abandoned. One of the artificial islands built off the coast of Dubai was named in its honor, but that project has been put on hold, leading to even more abandonments with the Jebel Ali name. The monolithic structures pictured above were built as part of a flyover going to Jebel Ali Palm Island, but as construction was halted, they’ve just been left like this, looking like a row of ancient ruins. But as with many other projects in Dubai, they’re in transition – the village is being rebuilt.

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Derelict Dubai 7 Sandy Abandoned Wonders Of The Uae

How can architecture autonomously grow and expand when it is not constructed with living materials? It almost sounds like a nonsensical riddle, but such a thing might actually be possible if Faulders Studio ever gets a chance to build its ‘GEOtube Building‘, a concept for Dubai that features a self-built exoskeleton made from accumulated sea salt deposits.

The GEOtube building is covered in a vascular pipe system following a grid of structural lattice and is situated in a salt-water pond, carried to the building from the adjacent Persian Gulf via an underground viaduct. Utilizing floating solar panels for power, the seawater is pumped from basement level to the rooftop and is then gravity-fed through the vascular system.

The lace-like skin forms once the seawater, misted onto its exposed mesh, evaporates and leaves a layer of salt behind. Because the Persian Gulf has the world’s highest salinity for oceanic water, the salt deposits accumulate quickly, making the transparent skin take on a new crystalline appearance.

Faulders Studio imagines that after 15-30 years, the salt accumulation would make the skin nearly opaque. At this ‘mature stage’, sea salt could be harvested for commercial use. It’s a visually stimulating, sculptural, ever-evolving approach to architecture, tailored to a specific location, and would certainly add yet another weirdly wonderful building to Dubai’s growing collection.

As the global recession has put a stop to all manner of construction projects around the world, perhaps no place has been hit quite so hard as Dubai. Long known for its outrageous architecture and even more astounding plans for the future, Dubai is now littered with half-built structures – which happen to provide quite a striking backdrop for some otherworldly characters.

‘The Dark Lens’ series places stormtroopers, droids, AT-ATs, Darth Vader and more in eerie, blighted landscapes that seem as if they could be from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Dubai is just the latest setting in a trilogy of Star Wars photo series by photographer Cedric Delsaux and digital artist Pierrick Gueneugue, which previously featured Paris and Lille, France. The Dubai installment was released in February 2010. Delsaux won the Kodak prize for landscapes and architecture for the series.

In an interview with the French magazine Amusement, Delsaux explained that he didn’t originally intend for Dubai to become part of the series. He traveled there to take photos of Dubai in its state of half-completion. The photographer was simply entranced by the surreal look of the construction sites and the feeling of loneliness they seemed to radiate.

“In a city that is essentially superlative (the tallest, the biggest, the most expensive…), even the craziest of places can wind up looking almost banal… I instantly knew that all the characters from the Star Wars galaxies would be at home here… The series is really a question about fiction. Where does it begin? What role does it play within our perception of reality?”