The title was taken from France by American skyscrapers in the mid-twentieth century, then by Malaysia, Taiwan, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where it still resides in the 828 meter Burj Khalifa, an extraordinary structure more than two Empire State Buildings tall. The history of building height is most often told as a story about the competition for the world’s tallest structure. At 300 meters it was almost twice the height of the tallest structures of any era – the ancient Egyptian pyramids, the tallest cathedral spire of Europe, or the tallest in the world in 1884, the 555-foot tall Washington Monument – all of which were built of masonry. Only one structure in world history – the Eiffel Tower – had achieved the height of 1,000 feet/ 300 meters before 1929, when the Chrysler Building reached its spire to 1,046 feet and 1930 when the Empire State stretched to 1,250 ft., our determinant of supertall.Īt the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle engineer Gustave Eiffel constructed the then-controversial, but now beloved wrought-iron tower as an income-producing tourist attraction and a demonstration of France’s technological progress. The exhibition features about a dozen of the most extraordinary recent towers, exploring ideas about formal and structural innovation, as well as the place of a signature tower in a master-planned, mixed-use complex that creates community and value on both the ground and in the sky. Supertalls are expensive and exceptional buildings, but they are also now well established as 21st-century type. In New York, where after 9/11 many believed there would be no new skyscrapers, there are now six towers taller than the Empire State, the most of any city on the planet.Ī contest for superior height is not the driving force in all these projects, although status and commanding views clearly are important. Southeast Asia is emerging as a sphere of ambition, and Russia completed Europe’s first supertall. China dominates all countries with 30 supertalls in sixteen different cities. In Dubai, the Burj Khalifa, completed in 2010, stretched to 2,717 feet/ 828 meters. Where are the world’s tallest buildings today? The early 2000s saw a surge in international construction, especially in the emerging economies of the Middle East and China. But towers of 380 meters remain exceptional: our survey counts only 58. Today, 300 meters is fairly common, with more than 200 buildings of that height worldwide. Skyscrapers began to exceed 300 meters only in the late 1920s in New York City, where the Chrysler Building and Empire State were the only structures of that height until the World Trade Center in the 1960s. The popular benchmark of 300 meters – about 1,000 feet – favors round numbers, but represents a 19th-century standard, the Eiffel Tower. How tall is Supertall? The Skyscraper Museum sets its bar high: 1,250 feet/ 380 meters, the height of the Empire State Building.
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