The World's Tallest Buildings

Burj Khalifa
Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Height: 2,717 feet
Completion Date: 2010

An innovative tripedal design, along with the projecting shapes of its edges to cut through the wind like the front of a boat to reduce turbulence, both affording greater stability, are but a few of the smart ways the Burj Khalifa succeeded in rising to its record-setting height. The building soars more than 700 feet over its nearest competitor.

The race upward as accelerated In the last couple decades, as governments and citizens have pulled together the means for erecting record-breaking tall buildings, particularly in emerging economies in East Asia and the Middle East. "It's a recognition that they want to project their image out into the global scene," says Daniel Safarik of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) located at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "One easy way physically to do that, in a relative sense, is with a skyscraper."

The same designer of the Burj Khalifa, Adrian Smith, has drawn up an even more ambitious project, the Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia. It is slated to open in 2017 and soar to 3,281 feet—a full kilometer.


Makkah Royal Clock Tower Hotel
Location: Mecca, Saudi Arabia
Height: 1,972 feet
Completion Date: 2012

Big Ben done bigger, the Makkah Royal Clock Tower Hotel was built to afford comfortable accommodations to wealthy Muslim pilgrims making the Hajj. A factor that contributes to the building reaching so high: its gigantic footprint—a broader base supports greater height, as we've all learned first-hand playing with blocks as kids. "I think this building is getting by on sheer mass," said Safarik. "You can see the way that the other buildings around it have a stabilizing effect."



One World Trade Center
Location: New York City, United States
Height: 1,776 feet
Completion Date: 2014

The spire of One WTC attains a height of exactly 1,776 feet—a shout-out to the birth year of the United States. The building proper is only around 1,300 feet tall, but the CTBUH chose to count spire toward the building's official height. That decision saw the new building controversially eclipse the Willis Tower in Chicago (later in this list) as the tallest building in North America. Safarik said spires have accordingly provoked controversy within CTBUH itself. "We continue to have this debate," he says.


Taipei 101
Location: Taipei, Taiwan
Height: 1,667 feet
Completion Date: 2004

Taipei 101 "adopts some of the vernacular architecture of the region where it's built," Safarik says. "Here you have a classic, stacked pagoda look, which is a common thing throughout Asia." Furthermore, the building has eight segments of eight floors each, a nod to the auspicious nature of the numeral 8 in the Chinese-speaking world.


Shanghai World Financial Center
Location: Shanghai, China
Height: 1,614 feet
Completion Date: 2008

"What's special about this one is pretty obvious," Safarik says. "It has a big hole in the top." The Shanghai World Financial Center's passing resemblance to a bottle opener is not lost on its operators, who sell miniature, functional bottle opener replicas of the tower in the observation deck gift shop.


International Commerce Centre
Location: Hong Kong, China
Height: 1,588 feet
Completion Date: 2010

This big building was a big gamble for its developers, given its relative isolation from the rest of Hong Kong's high-rises, but the International Commerce Center is doing just fine. The mixed-use office and hotel building has a 97 percent occupancy rate and excellent in-building services such as a 24-hour concierge.

According to the 2009 book Exploring Hong Kong: A Visitor's Guide to Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories, ICC's designers had wanted to make it the tallest building then on the planet. But a local ordinance, which outlaws structures from rising higher than nearby mountains, stymied the dream.


Petronas Towers 1 and 2
Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Height: 1,483 feet, each
Completion Date: 1998

A two-story skybridge connects these twin towers at the 41st and 42nd floors. It not only gives the structure its iconic look, but it also "speaks to the future of tall buildings" and urban development, Safarik says. That future will involve connecting tall buildings at height, he argues, so that people in large buildings can cross from one to another without going all the way down to the ground and up again. Few but the Petronas towers have that feature today.


Zifeng Tower
Location: Nanjing, China
Height: 1,476 feet
Completion Date: 2010

Zifeng was designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, the firm behind the Burj Khalifa, and the resemblances are easy to spot. Here, the cutaway look is meant to mimic a dragon wrapping around the structure. Another neat detail Safarik noticed during his visit is that many windows pop out several degrees, a little like those tiny smoking windows found in the back seat of older cars. "It's pretty rare you can open windows in a building that tall," Safarik says.


Willis Tower
Location: Chicago, United States
Height: 1,451 feet
Completion Date: 1974

Formerly and still better known as the Sears Tower, this hefty, blocky office building's design is unusual, and it will probably stay that way. "I don't think you're going to see something like this built again," said Safarik. "It's just so gigantic in its lower floors." When the tower was constructed, huge typing pools filled whole floors, with armies of employees cut off from windows and natural lighting—a big no-no nowadays.


KK100
Location: Shenzhen, China
Height: 1,449 feet
Completion Date: 2011

The Kingkey, or KK100, is the jewel of the Shenzhen, a major manufacturing metropolis just north of Hong Kong. The building's distinctive, transparent, glassed-over top portion hosts a restaurant and mall.


Guangzhou International Finance Center
Location: Guangzhou, China
Height: 1,439 feet
Completion Date: 2010

This skyscraper's exoskeleton prominently displays a diagrid structural system, in which steel support beams crisscross diagonally, forming diamond shapes made up of two triangular sections. These sections cut down on the amount of steel needed compared to conventional frames while remaining structurally sound.


Trump International Hotel & Tower
Location: Chicago, United States
Height: 1,389 feet
Completion Date: 2009

This recent addition to the Windy City's skyline appears to reflect the signature angular styling of the Willis Tower, but the story setbacks—those ledges where the building steps back from its lower heights—were more explicitly designed to align with the heights of nearby structures such as the Wrigley Building and the Marina City Towers. The Trump International Tower and Hotel also stands as the tallest building in the world to use reinforced concrete as its primary structural material.


Jin Mao Tower
Location: Shanghai, China
Height: 1,380 feet
Completion Date: 1999

This tower, which shares the pagoda styling of Taipei 101, harbors a secret: a 31-story atrium, part of the Grand Hyatt Shanghai hotel, with corridors winding around it in a vertigo-inducing spiral. "It's one of the most spectacular spaces you'll see in a supertall [building]," Safarik says. The Jin Mao Tower is a neighbor to the Shanghai World Financial Center, number 5 on this list, which served as the perch for this photograph.


Princess Tower
Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Height: 1,356 feet
Completion Date: 2012

The Princess Tower is the tallest residential building in the world. At least, it will be until New York City's 432 Park Avenue officially opens in the winter of 2014-2015.


Al Hamra Tower
Location: Kuwait City, Kuwait
Height: 1,354 feet
Completion Date: 2011

"It looks quasi-impossible," Safarik says. The Al Hamra Tower's draped curtain styling is intended to block out the Sun where its rays would fall most intensely, thus aiding in the passive cooling of a building that must endure Kuwait's sweltering climate.


Two International Finance Centre
Location: Hong Kong, China
Height: 1,352 feet
Completion Date: 2003

Across the harbor from the International Commerce Center (number 6 on this list) this building has the fortune of being sited over relatively shallow bedrock, about 100 feet down. (Closer bedrock means a foundation does not have to run as deep.) Still, for stability, Two International Finance Center sits on a "raft" foundation—a thick slab of concrete reinforced with steel, typically used in soft soil or marshy conditions.


23 Marina
Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Height: 1,289 feet
Completion Date: 2012

Fun fact about this luxury residence: 57 of its nearly 300 apartments come with a private swimming pool on a balcony. Excessive? Perhaps. Baller? Surely.


CITIC Plaza
Location: Guangzhou, China
Height: 1,280 feet
Completion Date: 1996

CITIC stands for China International Trust and Investment. This skyscraper is the second tallest building in the world to use reinforced concrete as its key structural material, having leapfrogged Hong Kong's Central Plaza completed in 1992.


Shun Hing Square
Location: Shenzhen, China
Height: 1,260 feet
Completion Date: 1996

As this skyscraper clearly shows, spires were "in" in the 1990s. While pointy towers dominated the 1980s, Safarik says that the next decade saw "a return of the spire," showing its "evolution as a simple piece of the architecture." Shun Hing Square helped put Shenzhen on the map. A city of just 30,000 people in 1979, it is now a megalopolis of 15 million.


World Trade Center Abu Dhabi - The Residences
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Height: 1,251 feet
Completion Date: 2014

Called the Burj Mohammed Bin Rashid or the Domain Tower, this new residence building in Abu Dhabi is yet another example of Persian Gulf buildings stretching to extreme altitudes. Its sloped-top design complements a neighboring tower in Abu Dhabi's big development Central Market Project.


Empire State Building
Location: New York City, United States
Height: 1,250 feet
Completion Date: 1931

Although the U.S. has mostly stayed out of the recent mega-tall building craze, Uncle Sam set the whole thing in motion with the first king of the skyscrapers, the Empire State Building. The Midtown behemoth held the record as the world's tallest building for 40 years—the longest anyone's held the title. "From the early '30s to the 1970s, it was the boss," Safarik says, "and nobody's topped the Empire State Building as a pure icon."