World’s tallest buildings*, 2600 BCE to present
YEAR BUILDING HEIGHT
2010 2,716 feet (Burj Khalifa, UAE)
2004 1,666 feet (Taipei 101, Taipei)
1998 1,482 feet (Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur)
1974 1,450 feet (Sears Tower, Chicago)
1972 1,368 feet (World Trade Center, New York)
1931 1,250 feet (Empire State Building, New York)
1930 1,046 feet (Chrysler Building, New York)
1913 792 feet (Woolworth Building, New York)
1908 612 feet (Singer Building, New York)
1901 548 feet (City Hall, Philadelphia)
1311 525 feet? (Lincoln Cathedral, UK)
~2550 BCE 481 feet (Great Pyramid, Egypt)
Stone buildings can’t get much above 500 feet, since the weight of the upper tiers will crack and break the load-bearing pillars and walls beneath. This is why the 481-foot Great Pyramid outside Cairo held the world’s-tallest-building title for 3,800 years, until topped by a few slightly higher Gothic cathedrals in the 13th century. The cathedrals in turn held their lead until the early 20th century — unless you count free-standing towers like the 555-foot Washington Monument (1884) or 986-foot Eiffel Tower (1889) — when Chicago engineers devised the steel-skeleton frame, using curtain walls held in place by steel girders to add another 750 feet of space, metal, and glass.
Computer-aided design and new alloys — for example, twisting facades to minimize wind torque, and lightweight cladding to resist heat — enabled another jump during the 1990s. The results accelerated in the last decade with a bloom, or rash, of ultra-high skyscrapers at 1500 feet and above, mostly in Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. As 2022 begins, 49 of the world’s 100 tallest buildings, and four of the top ten, have opened since 2017. Only 13 20th century buildings remain among the top 100, and only four opened before 1990. Eleven-year-old Burj Khalifa in Dubai remains largest of all, more than a half-mile tall at 2,717 feet or 828 meters. By location, the top 100-list maintained by the New York-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat breaks down as follows:
Once unrivalled in the count of very high buildings, the U.S. now ranks third. The American intellectual role in skyscraper design and construction, though, remains central. Specialized U.S. architecture firms in Chicago, New York, New England, and California remain at the core of worldwide tall building design, having designed seven of the current top ten and 24 of the 49 most recent entries to the list.
New York’s Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat lists the world’s 100 tallest buildings.
Burj Khalifa features 160 floors, a spiral shape to minimize wind torque on the upper levels, specialized glass and heat-resistant glazed aluminum/stainless steel cladding on the outer walls.
San Francisco-based Gensler designed the 2,073-foot Shanghai Tower, with “sky gardens” on the 37th of its 127 floors. BEA unromantically considers this an export of “architectural services”; in this sense, U.S. exports average about $900 million per year, against $135 million in imports. Read more from Gensler on the Shanghai Tower.
One World Trade Center (2014), at 1,776 feet, ranks sixth worldwide (pictured below).
Is China slowing down? Central government puts a cap on ultra-tall, weird, or “xenocentric” buildings.
A brief survey of three earlier tall-building eras:
1. Pyramids & Ziggurats, Middle East, 2600 BCE to 2000 BCE: Pyramid-building began with Djoser’s 203-foot Step Pyramid around 2650 BCE and peaked a century later with Khufu’s 481-foot Great Pyramid. Just outside modern Cairo, this building held the world’s-tallest-building title for 3,800 years, even if nobody was around to measure and compare. Not just a lame pile of rocks, the G.P. is a “smart pyramid” with a complex interior design of chambers, tunnels, and ventilation shafts meant for practical, religious, and perhaps astronomical purposes, all pointing to sophisticated architectural drafting and engineering as well as lots of donkeys and human labor. The slightly younger ziggurats in neighboring Sumer and Akkad were made of brick. The squishier material means they couldn’t be as tall, and topped out at about 170 feet, with small temples on top.
Egypt’s Great Pyramid homepage can be found here.
The Ziggurat of Ur is solid brick all the way through, with a (long-vanished) moon goddess temple on top, built around 2100 BCE per order of Sumerian King Ur-Nammu. Read more from Iraq Heritage.
Book recommendation: The Babylon ziggurat “Etemanki” supposedly had “hanging gardens”, like the Shanghai Tower but open-air. Herodotus describes the ziggurat — eight tiers also with a temple on top — but doesn’t mention any gardens. British Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley investigates, and concludes that they probably existed but were somewhere else.
2. Gothic Cathedrals, Europe, 1200 to 1400: “It was as though the world had shaken herself and cast off her old age, and clothed herself everywhere in a white garment of churches…” Large buildings with enormous glass windows, hundred-foot stone pillars, and flying buttresses to relieve stress on load-bearing walls. Designed without printing presses, standardized weights and measures, or mathematics beyond flat-plane geometry, cathedrals overtook pyramids in the 14th century and with the exception of Philadelphia’s 548-foot City Hall (1901) remain the world’s tallest stone-on-stone buildings. Lincoln Cathedral, completed in 1311, is said to been the highest Gothic cathedral, with a central spire rising to 525 feet. But the spire fell down in 1549 so we can’t be sure. The largest one still standing is Germany’s 512-foot Ulm Cathedral.
Read about the Ulm Cathedral.
Read about Abbot Sugar and the 12th-century Gothic boom.
3. Skyscrapers, United States, 1908 to 1974: Steel-skeleton buildings surpassed cathedrals with the completion of the Singer Building (referring to the sewing machine company, not the arts) in New York City in 1908. The Otis hydraulic elevator system made sure people could get to the top floors, and architects devoted occasional floors to water tanks and pumps so penthouse suites and executive offices could get toilets that flush and faucets that spout water rather than sucking air. Woolworth quickly overtopped Singer, Chrysler hit 1,000 feet in 1930, then the Empire State Building in 1931.
Read more about the Empire State Building.
Chicago’s William LeBaron Jenney, a Union army engineering corps vet, and Paris-trained architect, designed the first girders-and-curtain wall “skyscraper” — the 180-foot Home Insurance Building on South LaSalle, demolished to make way for the Field Building in 1931.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.