History of the world's tallest buildings

The tallest building in the world, as of 2025,[update] is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Before the modern skyscraper era emerged, between c. 1311 and 1884 the tallest buildings and structures were mostly Christian churches and cathedrals.

For instance, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, which was completed in approximately 280 BC, has been estimated to have been 100 m (330 ft) tall,[1] but its true height is not known.

In the early 1970's they promulgated the criteria that height is measured "from the sidewalk of the main entrance to the structural top of the building including penthouse and tower."

The Pantheon in Rome, finished in the early 2nd century CE, has an ancient Roman height record from floor to top of 43.45 m (142.6 ft),[3] which exactly corresponds to the diameter of its interior space and was only slightly surpassed by the Pont du Gard structure.

The ancient Kushan stupa of Kanishka, located in the present-day Pakistan, near Peshawar, completed around AD 200, had a height of between 120 and 170 m (390 and 560 ft).

The Chinese explorer Xuanzhang described it as the tallest building in the world in his book Records of the western Region.

Completed in the 7th century, the enormous nine-storey structure was built entirely of interlocking timbers with no iron nails.

In the 8th century, two seven-storied pagodas with a height of 100 m (330 ft) were constructed at Todaiｰji (東大寺) in Nara, Japan.

The Vimana of the Brihadisvara Temple, Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, completed in 1010 is 66 m (217 ft) tall, slightly taller and older than Angkor Wat, Cambodia.

St. Mary's Church in Stralsund became the world's tallest building after the collapse of the Lincoln spire.

In 1647, the bell tower of St. Mary's burned down, making the shorter Strasbourg Cathedral the world's tallest building.

[13] In 1890, Ulm Minster became the tallest church ever built, but it was the last church to claim the position of tallest building, which eventually went to the Philadelphia City Hall in 1894, the first skyscraper taller than 150 m (490 ft) (or, depending on definition, the Mole Antonelliana in 1889).

This would still make it the tallest building in the world but only by 2 meters over the Shanghai Tower,[22] a substantially smaller margin than before.

In Asia, there has been an increase in the number of supertall skyscrapers beginning with the completion of the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong in 1990.

[20] By 2010, fewer than half of the 100 tallest buildings in the world were office towers, the majority being for residential and mixed use.

[20] Only four of the ten tallest buildings in the world, and twenty-eight of the top fifty, were used primarily as offices.

[24] A mixed-use tall building is defined as having two or more functions that occupy a significant proportion of the tower's total space.

[A] Support areas such as car parks and mechanical plant space do not contribute towards mixed-use status.

[26] The following list of tallest buildings is based on the default metric of CTBUH,[18] that of measuring to the highest architectural element.

Shanghai World Financial Center is not on the above list, but it surpassed Taipei 101 in 2008 to become the building with the highest occupied floor.