The place was a bar called Vu in Dubai. The date was April 3, 2003. There, George J. Efstathiou, a managing partner in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Mark Amirault and Robert Booth, executives of Emaar Properties PJSC, Dubai, shook hands to seal the deal for SOM to design a 550-meter-tall skyscraper that would be the icon of a $20-billion development in Dubai (see p. 26). Nothing was put on paper. “We cemented the deal and a three-way friendship,” says Efstathiou.