Burj Khalifa (Adrian Smith)

Thinking Through Alfred Gell (1945-1997)’s “Art and Agency” and “The Technology of Enchantment”

Towering as Agency: Monumental Index of Global Intent

In Alfred Gell’s anthropology of art, the Burj Khalifa emerges as an overwhelming agent—not merely a structure, but a performer of power, vision, and techno-aesthetic enchantment. Its sheer verticality—soaring to 828 meters—renders it an index of human aspiration and geopolitical intent. Dubai’s skyline is not just a place, but a medium through which messages of economic prowess, futurity, and spectacle are delivered. The building acts as a social agent, enacting the will of a city reinventing itself as a mythic capital of the 21st century.

According to Gell, the power of art lies not in contemplation alone but in its ability to act on people, and the Burj Khalifa does precisely that. Standing before it, one is immediately struck by its enchanted scale. Its reflective surfaces and endless ascent confound ordinary perception. As Gell notes, the technology of enchantment is the enchantment of technology—the building is an architectural sorcery of structural daring and formal precision.

Burj Khalifa’s form—rooted in the Hymenocallis desert flower and Islamic spirals—is not arbitrary: it is the aesthetic camouflage for a radical technological act. Like an enormous time-signature written across the desert, it is both rooted in tradition and entirely futuristic—a hybrid of cultural coding and cosmopolitan branding. This duality makes it a distributed personhood, inhabited by multiple agencies: historical, technological, political, and mythopoetic.

Global Icon as Ritual Object

In Gell’s terms, the Burj Khalifa is an object with cumulative agency. It influences how we perceive cities, success, and even the Earth itself—as visible from space, it transforms into a cosmic signal. It does not merely symbolize modernity; it operationalizes it through spectacle, tourism, media, and cultural hegemony. It acts in global consciousness, its shape burned into the digital mind of Earth’s networked humanity.

The Burj is also a ritual object: millions travel, look up, photograph, and share it in a global act of aesthetic pilgrimage. Its enchantment lies in its unthinkable bigness, echoing Gell’s observation that the artist (or architect) becomes a magician whose effects surpass comprehension.