The World’s Tallest Buildings From Ancient Times to Today

Completed circa 2530 B.C.

Built as a tomb for Pharaoh Khufu, the Great Pyramid is the biggest of the 100-plus known pyramids in Egypt and endured as the tallest man-made structure for more than 3,800 years. An architectural and engineering marvel featuring symmetrical sides that are aligned to the four cardinal directions, this lone remnant of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World reached its apex of roughly 481 feet by the back-breaking process of stacking millions of stones atop one another.

“The pyramids are super tall, but their structure is also ridiculously simple,” says Thomas Leslie, an architect and professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “Stone can carry a tremendous amount of weight if it’s just coming straight down. So, to me, the height achievement is really one of labor.”

Just who filled out the pharaoh’s workforce and how they hauled the 2-ton stones into place remain a mystery after all this time, with scholars debating points such as paid versus slave labor as well as ramps and pulley systems. Due to erosion, the Great Pyramid now stands around 450 feet.

Central spire completed A.D. 1311

By the 12th century, European cathedral builders had honed the architectural techniques that became Gothic style hallmarks and led houses of worship to reach unprecedented heights. Such achievements built on the work of the Romans, who developed arched vaults that could bear heavy loads by funneling weight through their curves and down supporting piers.

“What the Gothic builders realized is that the shape of the vault doesn’t just have to be a circle, it can also be a pointed arch,” that allows for taller buildings, Leslie says. Flying buttresses further enabled soaring, open ceilings. Leslie calls spires a “natural outgrowth” of these lofty developments.

The first such structure to surpass the Great Pyramid’s height was the Lincoln Cathedral in Lincoln, England. Originally built in the late 11th century, the cathedral underwent numerous renovations before the spire atop its central tower, placed in 1311, pushed its tallest point to approximately 525 feet.

After a storm blew over the spire in 1548, a half-dozen other cathedrals took turns as the world’s tallest known buildings, but none stood taller than the Lincoln Cathedral once had.

Completed 1884

With its obelisk form designed to evoke the grandeur of earlier civilizations, the Washington Monument was initially intended to reach 600 feet and be surrounded by another 30 columns measuring 100 feet apiece. After a scaled-back plan allowed the privately funded project to get off the ground in 1848, financial problems and the outbreak of the Civil War resulted in the monument being left only partially finished for more than 20 years. When construction resumed under the watch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1870s, the new supply of marble eventually produced a noticeable color change from the earlier portion of the obelisk. Despite all the difficulties, the monument located in Washington, D.C., proved a worthy tribute to President George Washington when a small aluminum tip was added to the capstone to top the structure off at a record 555 feet, 5 1/8 inches.

Completed 1889

Before the Washington Monument opened, French officials were seeking proposals for a structure to serve as the main attraction of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Gustave Eiffel’s winning design, a 300-meter open-lattice wrought iron tower, was a novel architectural concept but not unfamiliar to his line of work.

“Eiffel was very clever about taking things that he knew from his job as a railway engineer and… scaling them up to something that was just orders of magnitude bigger than anything anyone had ever seen,” Leslie says. The design looked more like the era’s wrought iron railway bridges and viaducts than its brick, stone and cast-iron skyscrapers.

Comprised of some 18,000 metallic parts and anchored by four converging curved piers that optimize wind resistance, the Eiffel Tower was completed about a month before the Exposition opened in May 1889. Although it was meant to be dismantled after 20 years, the tower cemented its future by becoming a scientific observation and telecommunications hub, with the addition of an antenna eventually pushing it to its current height of 1,083 feet.

Completed 1930

With the transition from stone to steel building frames in the late 19th century, the New York City skyline climbed ever higher as wealthy owners and their builders engaged in a continual battle for vertical supremacy. One of the more notable competitions unfurled between the men behind the Manhattan Company Building at 40 Wall Street (today called The Trump Building) in the Financial District and the Chrysler Building in midtown Manhattan. Believing the rival structure would max out at 925 feet, 40 Wall Street architect H. Craig Severance affixed a 50-foot flagpole to his neo-Gothic skyscraper to boost it to 927 feet. But Chrysler’s architect William Van Alen played the ultimate trump card with the secret construction of a 185-foot stainless steel spire that boosted the overall height to a record-breaking 1,046 feet and provided an aesthetically pleasing cap to this triumph of Art Deco architecture.

Completed 1931

The Chrysler Building was knocked from its short-lived perch because of the astonishing speed at which the Empire State Building climbed less than a mile away. Construction began on March 17, 1930. Thanks to the rapid on-site turnaround of materials, workers raised 200,000 cubic feet of Indiana limestone and granite, 10 million bricks and 730 tons of aluminum and stainless steel to a height of 103 stories and 1,250 feet by the building’s opening date of May 1, 1931. The addition of an antenna in 1950 pushed the overall height to 1,472 feet, though that mark dropped to 1,454 feet with a replacement antenna in 1985.

Ubiquitous on the silver screen, the Empire State Building has endured as arguably the most famous New York City landmark despite not being particularly innovative from an architectural standpoint. “The innovation was in the use of labor, the use of materials and then the organization,” Leslie says. “It was almost like a military operation. Stuff would show up on site exactly when the crane was ready to pick it up and put it into place.”

Completed 1967

During a time when 1,500-plus-foot guyed mast telecommunications towers began puncturing skylines, Moscow’s Ostankino TV Tower fulfilled that broadcasting function as it assumed the title of world’s tallest freestanding structure at 1,772 feet. Mimicking an upside-down flower, the tower has a relatively shallow yet heavy foundation; 149 steel cables snake through its concrete trunk to provide additional stability. The tower’s completion honored the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Today, it provides television and radio service to 20 million people, while its three-floor restaurant and two observation decks ensure visitors still enjoy the highest views in Europe.

Meanwhile, skyscrapers such as the World Trade Center in New York City and the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) in Chicago rose higher than the Empire State Building, but none could beat Ostankino TV Tower’s record.

Completed 1975

Originally conceived as part of Toronto’s scrapped downtown Metro Centre, the CN Tower became the development’s sole focus and took shape by way of an architectural technique that was initially designed for grain elevators.

“‘Slip-forming’ is a method of pouring concrete that uses climbing formwork,” Leslie explains. “Concrete is poured into the form, and as it cures, the form is gradually moved upward so that the next layer can be poured.”

Completed in April 1975 after its 39-piece antenna was installed and opened to the public the following June, CN Tower serves as a multipurpose telecommunications station, office space and tourist destination. It reigned as the world’s tallest freestanding structure more than 30 years, outmatching later developments like Taipei 101 in Taiwan.

Completed 2010

Not so far from Egypt’s architectural marvels of yesteryear, Burj Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates reigns as the current king of the high-risers at 163 floors and 2,717 feet. Reaching such extraordinary heights required the unveiling of new tricks: Among them were the development of a pressurized pumping system to deliver the high-strength concrete mix to 2,000 feet as well as the building’s Y-shaped buttressed core and spiraling wings designed to offset dangerous high-altitude winds. Still, architects embraced the tried-and-true method of bolstering the building’s height with a steel spire that stands at 700 feet.

“Burj Khalifa was built to put Dubai on the map, and it sure did that,” Leslie notes, adding that it will be challenging for builders to overcome the mechanical difficulties of soaring even higher. “We’re about at the limit right now, not of the structure—we could build taller structures—but we’re at the limit of some of the services of elevators in particular.”