The World's Tallest Buildings Through History

The Great Pyramid of Giza, about 146 metres high when it was built 4,500 years ago, was the world's tallest building for almost four thousand years. Then the medieval cathedrals took over with their spires, and Cologne Cathedral was the tallest in 1880–1884, at 157 metres. Iron and steel gave the Eiffel Tower, 300 metres in 1889, and the skyscrapers of New York, where the Empire State Building reached 381 metres in 1931. Since 2010 the Burj Khalifa in Dubai has been the tallest, at 828 metres. The diagram below shows them on the same scale, with a human figure as a measure.

Facts

What counts as tallest?

The question of the world's tallest building sounds simple, but the answer depends on what is counted. A building is something one can be inside, whereas towers, masts and obelisks are structures. Spires are usually counted in a building's height, since they belong to the architecture, but antennas and masts on the roof are not. That is why the Empire State Building stands at 381 metres and not at the 443 metres the mast reaches, and why the masts are drawn with dashed lines in the diagram below.

Height is not the same as size, either. The Pantheon in Rome is only about 43 metres high, but its dome was the largest in the world for more than a thousand years. Hagia Sophia reaches about 55 metres to the top of the dome and was for almost a thousand years the world's largest church. Height records are about how high one can reach, space records about how large one can vault.

The pyramid and the cathedrals

The Great Pyramid was built around 2560 BC and was 146.6 metres high when new. Today it is about 138.5 metres, because the outer casing of smooth limestone and the tip have disappeared. A pyramid can become so tall because it is almost entirely mass: each stone rests on stones below, and the form narrows towards the top. It remained the tallest for almost four thousand years.

Only the medieval cathedrals surpassed it. The system of buttressing, explained in the guide to buttresses and flying buttresses, made it possible to build tall, light stone skeletons, and spires were set upon them. By most calculations Lincoln Cathedral in England passed the pyramid in the 14th century, but its wooden spire blew down in 1548. After several collapses and new spires, Strasbourg Cathedral held the record with its 142-metre tower from the 17th century until the 1870s. In England the spire of Salisbury Cathedral still stands, 123 metres high, dating from the 14th century.

Cologne Cathedral was begun in 1248 but completed only in 1880, following the medieval drawings, and its twin towers of 157 metres made it the world's tallest building for four years. In 1890 Ulm Minster received its west tower of 161.5 metres, which is still the world's tallest church tower. The best-known cathedrals are compared in the guide to the most famous Gothic cathedrals.

Iron, steel and lifts

The Washington Monument in the capital of the United States, a stone obelisk of about 169 metres, was completed in 1884 and passed Cologne. But the age of stone as a material for height was over. For the Paris World's Fair of 1889, Gustave Eiffel's company built a tower of about 18,000 iron parts, riveted together into a lattice that offers little resistance to the wind. The Eiffel Tower was 300 metres high and remained the world's tallest structure for forty years.

For people to be able to live and work so high up, more than a strong material was needed. It required a steel frame that carries the whole building, so that the walls need not be thick at the bottom, and lifts that are safe. Elisha Otis demonstrated a lift with a safety brake in 1854, and in the 1880s the first skyscrapers with steel frames were built in Chicago. How the frame takes over from the load-bearing wall is shown by the drawing in the basics on materials, and the whole development is described in the guide to the history of the skyscraper.

In New York the developers competed over height around 1930. The Chrysler Building reached 319 metres in 1930 and surpassed the Eiffel Tower, and the following year the Empire State Building was completed at 381 metres. It remained the world's tallest building for almost forty years. The city is covered in the guide to architecture in New York.

From Chicago to Dubai

After 1970 the record moved first to the World Trade Center in New York and the Sears Tower in Chicago, and then to Asia: the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur in 1998 and Taipei 101 in 2004. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, completed in 2010, is 828 metres, more than twice as tall as the Empire State Building. It is supported by a reinforced concrete core with three wings that buttress one another, and the tower narrows in steps towards the top so that the wind cannot get an even grip on it.

Tall buildings have always been signs of power and ambition: those of the pharaohs, the Church, cities and companies. Technology has determined how high it has been possible to reach, but the wish to be seen has determined that people tried.

Tall buildings in Sweden

Sweden has few truly tall buildings. For a long time church towers were the tallest: Uppsala Cathedral received its tall spires in the 1880s and is still the largest church in the Nordic countries. Stockholm City Hall, inaugurated in 1923, has a tower of 106 metres, crowned by the three crowns, and it is included in the diagram below.

After the war came the Hötorget skyscrapers in Stockholm, five office buildings in a row from the 1950s and 60s. The Turning Torso in Malmö, designed by Santiago Calatrava and completed in 2005, was at 190 metres the tallest building in Scandinavia when it was finished, and has since been surpassed by the Karlatornet in Gothenburg. The map below shows where the buildings in this guide are located.

The records in order

Exercise

Which building was the world's tallest for almost four thousand years?