Dubai will open the world's tallest skyscraper on Monday, boasting new limits in design and construction, hopeful of polishing an image tarnished by the debt woes afflicting the Gulf emirate.

Emaar, the giant property firm part-owned by the government and which developed the needle-shaped concrete, steel and glass structure, has declined to reveal Burj Dubai's exact height.

Apparently wanting to maintain the suspense, the company will say only that the tower exceeds 800 metres (2,640 feet), putting it far higher than Taiwan's Taipei 101 tower (508 metres).

Bill Baker, a structural and civil engineer and partner in Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), which designed the tower, said Burj Dubai has set a new benchmark.

"We thought that it would be slightly taller than the existing tallest tower of Taipei 101. (Emaar) kept on asking us to go higher but we didn't know how high we could go," he said, according to a report by AFP.

"We were able to tune the building like we tune a music instrument. As we went higher and higher and higher, we discovered that by doing that process... we were able to reach heights much higher than we ever thought we could.

"We learned quite a bit from Burj Dubai. I would think we could easily do a one kilometre (tower). We are optimistic about the ability to go even higher."

The 160-floor tower, containing 330,000 cubic metres (11.55 million cubic feet) of concrete and 31,400 tonnes of steel, can be seen from as far as 95 kilometres (59 miles) away.

Burj Dubai contains 57 lifts, which will whisk people to 1,044 apartments and 49 floors of office space, as well as a hotel bearing the Giorgio Armani logo.

A spiralling Y-shaped design by SOM architect Adrian Smith was used to support the structural core of the tower, which narrows as it ascends. Higher up it becomes a steel structure topped with a huge spire. For the full report continue reading here.