Before skyscrapers: why cities stayed low
For most of human history, cities were low. Load-bearing masonry limits a building to roughly six or seven stories before the walls at the base become too thick to fit useful rooms behind them. Water pressure could not reach higher floors. Nobody wanted to climb ten flights of stairs every day. Fire was a constant threat and ladder-and-bucket firefighting became useless above a certain height. The tallest structures in a pre-industrial city were almost always religious: cathedral spires, minarets, pagodas, bell towers. Everything else was an even plain of four- and five-story housing.
Three nineteenth-century inventions changed the math. The safe elevator, patented by Elisha Otis in 1852, meant people would actually use upper floors. Bessemer steel, produced industrially from 1856 onward, gave builders a material strong enough to carry weight in a skeleton rather than in walls. And improved plumbing and pumping got water to heights that had been impossible a generation earlier. Everything in skyscraper history is built on those three changes.
The Chicago School (1885 to 1910)
The first true skyscrapers appeared in Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871 cleared huge portions of the downtown. Insurance companies wanted bigger buildings on small lots. The Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885 by William Le Baron Jenney, is usually cited as the first, at ten stories and 42 meters. More important than its height was its skeleton: a steel and iron frame that carried the load, with walls reduced to a weather-proof skin.
Over the next twenty-five years, Chicago architects like Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root worked out the grammar of the new type: a clear base, a long middle shaft of repeated floors, and a decorative top. Sullivan's maxim "form follows function" dates from this period. New York quickly followed; the Flatiron Building (1902) and the Woolworth Building (1913) announced that the skyscraper was no longer a Chicago specialty.
Art Deco and the race to the sky (1920s and 30s)
In 1930 and 1931, New York produced three landmarks in eighteen months: the Chrysler Building, 40 Wall Street, and the Empire State Building. All three briefly held the title of world's tallest. The Empire State settled the matter at 381 meters (443 with its later antenna) and held the record for forty years.
These buildings are the Art Deco skyscrapers most people picture when they hear the word. They are ornamental in a way modernists would later reject: Chrysler's eagle gargoyles and stainless-steel sunburst crown, the Empire State's tiered setbacks and aluminum spandrels. Setbacks were partly aesthetic but mostly legal, a response to New York's 1916 zoning law that required taller buildings to step back so they did not cast their neighborhoods into perpetual shadow. The setback-ziggurat silhouette that became an Art Deco trademark is really a legal document expressed in stone.
International Style: glass boxes (1950s to 1970s)
After World War II, skyscraper design was taken over by European modernism. Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building (1958) in New York and Lever House (1952) across Park Avenue redefined the type: flat tops, no ornament, curtain walls of glass and aluminum, plinths set back from the street to make a plaza. The ethic was functionalist and universal; a Miesian tower in Chicago looked almost identical to one in Frankfurt or Tokyo.
This era produced the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower, 1973) in Chicago, the original World Trade Center towers (1973) in New York, and dozens of near-identical corporate headquarters in every major city. Critics came to call the style "curtain-wall boredom," but it defined the look of downtown North America for a generation and was widely exported.
Postmodernism and its discontents (1980s and 90s)
By the late 1970s, architects were tired of glass boxes. The postmodern reaction brought ornament back, often ironically. Philip Johnson's AT&T Building (1984), now known as 550 Madison, put a Chippendale pediment on top of a thirty-seven-story tower. Cesar Pelli's Petronas Towers (1998) in Kuala Lumpur crowned a modernist form with Islamic geometric detail and passed the Sears Tower as the world's tallest.
The Petronas record turned out to be important: the tallest building in the world was no longer in North America, and would not be again. Asian cities started building taller than Western ones in the 1990s and the gap has widened since.
Supertalls: the Burj Khalifa era (2010 to today)
A building over 300 meters is called a supertall; over 600 meters is a megatall. In 2010, Dubai's Burj Khalifa opened at 828 meters, by some margin the tallest structure ever built. It is not alone. Shanghai Tower (2015) reached 632 meters. The Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur (2023) hit 679 meters. Saudi Arabia's Jeddah Tower, paused and restarted multiple times, is still officially pursuing 1,000 meters.
The engineering behind supertalls relies on two innovations. The first is the buttressed core: a central concrete core with wings radiating outward, like the Burj Khalifa's Y-shaped footprint, which stiffens the tower against wind. The second is the outrigger system, where horizontal trusses tie the core to the perimeter columns so the whole building resists sway as one unit. Tuned mass dampers at the top, giant pendulums or water tanks that counter-swing during gusts, are now standard above a certain height.
What comes next
The economics of supertalls are shaky. Above roughly 500 meters, each additional floor costs more than it can ever earn in rent. Many recent supertalls are branding exercises paid for by states or state-connected developers, not pure real estate plays. The next frontier is therefore less about raw height and more about sustainability: mass-timber skyscrapers like Mjøstårnet in Norway (2019, 85 meters), structural carbon reduction, and integrated renewable generation.
For a sense of where the current records sit, play the Skyscrapers filter in the game. For related reading, try our piece on brutalism, which shaped mid-century tall buildings, or famous architects to know, which profiles several of the designers mentioned above.
Think you can spot supertalls on the skyline? Try a round.
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