Six Towers That Reached Higher: An Illustrated History of How Steel, Concrete, and Ambition Conquered the Sky
Chicago, 1884–1885 • Where the Steel Frame Was Born
Conceived after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 had cleared the Loop and quadrupled land values, the Home Insurance Building was the first tall structure to use a steel skeleton to carry its own weight rather than rely on thick masonry walls. William Le Baron Jenney's invention freed the wall from its load-bearing duty, allowing windows to grow large and buildings to soar. Every later skyscraper is its descendant.
1832–1907 • Engineer, architect, Civil War major
A Massachusetts-born engineer trained at the École Centrale Paris. He served as a Union Army engineer under Sherman and Grant before opening his Chicago practice in 1868. His office trained Sullivan, Burnham, Holabird, and Roche — nearly the entire first generation of skyscraper architects.
The client. Founded 1853. Wanted a Chicago office that signaled both fire safety (post-1871) and modernity. The building's success cemented Chicago's commercial dominance.
Trained briefly in Jenney's office. Coined "form follows function" and designed the Auditorium and Wainwright Buildings, refining Jenney's structural innovation into a coherent architectural style.
His Bessemer steel mills supplied the beams above the sixth floor. The skyscraper made structural steel a billion-dollar business and Carnegie the richest man in America.
Another Jenney alumnus who carried the steel-frame method to the Flatiron, the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and the Plan of Chicago. The "Chicago School" was effectively Jenney's office, dispersed.
The structural revolution that made every later tower possible. While only 138 feet tall — barely more than today's 12-story walk-up — it solved the geometry: a frame that carried itself, walls hung like curtains, and a foundation that floated on Chicago's swampy clay. Every entry that follows is its child.
New York, 1910–1913 • The Gothic Tower Frank Woolworth Paid for in Cash
Frank Winfield Woolworth, who had built a five-and-dime empire on nickels and dimes, paid $13.5 million ($430 million today) in cash for a 792-foot Gothic tower at 233 Broadway. Cass Gilbert clad its steel frame in 17 acres of cream terra-cotta carved as flying buttresses, gargoyles, and traceried windows. At the dedication banquet, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button in Washington and lit 80,000 bulbs — a continent-spanning ribbon-cutting that made the Woolworth a symbol of American commercial confidence.
1859–1934 • Designer of the U.S. Supreme Court Building
Trained at MIT and in the Paris atelier of McKim, Mead & White, Gilbert favored historicist styles applied to modern programs. The Woolworth was the most ornate skyscraper of its era, earning the nickname "Cathedral of Commerce" from Reverend S. Parkes Cadman at the 1913 dedication.
The retail mogul who paid the entire $13.5 million construction cost in cash. Died of septic poisoning from an untreated tooth in 1919, six years after dedication.
Norwegian-American structural engineer. Designed the steel frame and the portal-arch wind bracing system that held the slender tower against Manhattan gales.
Brooklyn pastor whose dedication speech gave the building its enduring nickname. He framed Woolworth's commerce as a kind of public worship.
Fired the 17 acres of glazed terra-cotta cladding. Their fragile, ornate panels survived almost a century before extensive restoration in the 1970s and 2000s.
The Woolworth proved that the skyscraper could be cathedral-grand, not merely tall. Its Gothic vocabulary, paid for in nickels and dimes, defined the Manhattan skyline for a generation and made commercial offices a legitimate subject of high architecture — a path Empire State and Chrysler would extend in the Art Deco mode 17 years later.
New York, 1930–1931 • 102 Stories Built in 410 Days
Built in the depths of the Great Depression on the cleared site of the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the Empire State Building rose 102 stories in 410 days — an average of more than four floors per week. The architects of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon delivered a clean Art Deco silhouette that became, more than any single image, the icon of the American skyscraper. Its mooring mast for dirigibles was never used; instead, a King Kong climbed it on 1933 movie screens and made it eternal.
Lamb (1883–1952) of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon
Lamb sketched the final massing on a paper napkin in two weeks: a tall slender shaft set back from a wide five-story podium, crowned by a mooring mast. Working with developer John J. Raskob — former GM/DuPont executive — and former NY governor Al Smith as front man, Lamb drove the design to permit speed of construction above all else.
Former GM/DuPont financier and DNC chair. Backed Al Smith's 1928 presidential campaign and put the building's financing together as a kind of consolation prize after Smith's loss to Hoover.
Former four-term New York Governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee. Public face of the project and its first president; his grandchildren cut the dedication ribbon.
Members of the Kahnawake and Akwesasne Mohawk nations made up much of the riveting crew. Photographs of them lunching on naked beams became defining images of New York labor.
Photographed the construction in 1930–1931 with vertiginous compositions later collected in Men at Work. His images shaped how generations imagined the building of the modern city.
The Empire State perfected the setback Art Deco profile permitted by NYC's 1916 zoning resolution. It demonstrated that height could be delivered fast, on budget, and with iconic clarity — a feat unequaled until 1970 and rarely since. Every subsequent altitude record (WTC, Sears, Petronas, Burj Khalifa) measures itself against the Empire State's 1,250-foot benchmark.
Chicago, 1970–1973 • Fazlur Khan's Engineering Revolution
When Sears, Roebuck and Company decided in 1969 to consolidate its 350,000 employees into a single Chicago headquarters, structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill answered with the bundled-tube system: nine 75-by-75-foot square tubes joined at the base, each terminating at a different height. The result, finished in 1973 as the Sears Tower, surpassed the World Trade Center to become the world's tallest building — a title Chicago held for 25 years and a structural concept now used in nearly every supertall on Earth, including the Burj Khalifa.
1929–1982 • Bangladeshi-American structural pioneer
Born in Dhaka, Khan earned a Fulbright at the University of Illinois and joined SOM in 1955. His tube concepts — framed tube (DeWitt-Chestnut, 1965), trussed tube (John Hancock Center, 1969), and bundled tube (Sears, 1973) — remain the structural toolkit for nearly every supertall. He died of a heart attack at 52 while working in Saudi Arabia.
SOM design partner who collaborated with Khan on the John Hancock Center and Sears Tower. The architectural elegance of the stepped silhouette is largely Graham's contribution.
The original tenant. By the late 1980s Sears had sold the building and moved to Hoffman Estates suburbs. The building was renamed Willis in 2009.
103rd-floor observation deck. The 2009 Ledge boxes — glass cantilevers that extend 4.3 feet outside the building — sit 1,353 feet over Wacker Drive. They have cracked at least three times under tourist weight.
The firm that produced the Lever House, Sears Tower, John Hancock, Burj Khalifa, and One World Trade. It dominates supertall design largely through Khan's structural systems.
Sears was the first true engineered supertall — designed by structural logic rather than by adding floors to a hand-me-down frame. Khan's bundled tubes made 1,500-foot heights economical, and his innovations propagated directly through SOM's portfolio to the Burj Khalifa. Without Khan, no Burj.
Kuala Lumpur, 1992–1998 • The First Supertall Outside the United States
Commissioned by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad as the centerpiece of his "Vision 2020" modernization plan, the Petronas Twin Towers were the first buildings outside the United States to claim the world altitude crown since the 1894 Philadelphia City Hall briefly held it. César Pelli's twin shafts were modeled on a Rub al-Hizb — an eight-pointed Islamic geometric figure — and clad in 65,000 square meters of stainless steel. They opened the supertall era to Asia and redefined Kuala Lumpur as a global capital.
1926–2019 • Argentine-American, Yale Dean of Architecture
Argentine-born, naturalized American. Designed the World Financial Center in New York and Canary Wharf's One Canada Square in London. For Petronas he won an international competition against Kohn Pedersen Fox and Murphy/Jahn with a plan that referenced Islamic geometry without imitating any historical mosque.
Malaysia's longest-serving prime minister (1981–2003, 2018–2020). Drove Vision 2020 and personally supervised the towers' siting and design choices.
The state-owned oil and gas company. Funded the entire project from oil revenues. Tower 1 is its corporate HQ; Tower 2 was leased to multinationals including ExxonMobil, Reuters, and Microsoft.
Austrian BASE jumper who illegally leapt from the Sky Bridge in January 1999, becoming the first to BASE-jump the towers. Charged with trespass; the towers added security barriers afterward.
The 1999 Sean Connery / Catherine Zeta-Jones thriller used the Petronas Sky Bridge as its climactic set piece, beaming the towers into global cinemas a year after they opened.
Petronas marked the moment the supertall left America. Asia's economic rise — first Japan, then Malaysia, then China and the Gulf — would build nearly every world's-tallest record between 1998 and the present. The CTBUH spire-vs-roof controversy that erupted with Petronas still shapes how the title is awarded.
Dubai, 2004–2010 • The World's Tallest Building, Twice as Tall as the Empire State
The Burj Khalifa is so tall — 828 meters, more than twice the Empire State Building — that residents on the upper floors observe sunset four minutes later than those at ground level. It was designed by Adrian Smith of SOM (a direct descendant of Khan's bundled-tube lineage), built by Samsung C&T in just over five years, and inaugurated in January 2010 with the property bust well underway. Originally branded "Burj Dubai," it was renamed at the opening for Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, whose $25 billion bailout had just rescued Dubai's finances.
Smith (b. 1944) & Baker (b. 1953)
Smith led design at SOM for 33 years before founding AS+GG. For Burj Khalifa he conceived a three-lobed plan inspired by the desert flower Hymenocallis ("spider lily"). Bill Baker, SOM's chief structural engineer, invented the "buttressed core" system — a hexagonal core flanked by three buttresses, stepped back at intervals to disrupt wind vortices.
Ruler of Dubai. Drove the property boom and the master plan that put Burj Khalifa at the center of Downtown Dubai. The tower's name change at opening reflected Dubai's $25B debt to Abu Dhabi.
Chairman of Emaar Properties, the project developer. Now-public-listed Emaar still owns and operates Burj Khalifa, the Dubai Mall, and the surrounding Downtown Dubai district.
SOM structural engineer who invented the "buttressed core" used in Burj Khalifa. The 2009 ASCE Civil Engineer of the Year. His system has since been adapted for Jeddah Tower, Merdeka 118, and others.
The bulk of the 12,000-person workforce came from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the Philippines on kafala-system contracts. Strikes in March 2006 over wages and conditions briefly halted construction.
Burj Khalifa is the direct descendant of every previous entry: Jenney's frame, Cass Gilbert's cladding ambition, Lamb's setback profile, Khan's tube logic (refined by Khan's SOM successor Baker into the buttressed core), and Pelli's globalization of the form. Half a mile of concrete and steel summarizes 125 years of skyscraper evolution in a single tower.
| Tower | Year | Height | Stories | Architect/Engineer | Innovation | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home Insurance | 1885 | 138 ft / 42 m | 10 (12 by 1891) | William Le Baron Jenney | First steel-frame skyscraper | Demolished 1931 |
| Woolworth | 1913 | 792 ft / 241 m | 57 | Cass Gilbert / Gunvald Aus | Gothic terra-cotta cladding | Standing |
| Empire State | 1931 | 1,250 ft / 381 m | 102 | Shreve, Lamb & Harmon | Speed of construction (410 days) | Standing |
| Sears Tower | 1973 | 1,450 ft / 442 m | 110 | SOM / Bruce Graham & Fazlur Khan | Bundled-tube system | Standing (Willis 2009) |
| Petronas | 1998 | 1,483 ft / 452 m | 88 | César Pelli | First non-US world's tallest | Standing |
| Burj Khalifa | 2010 | 2,717 ft / 828 m | 163 | SOM / Adrian Smith & Bill Baker | Buttressed-core, all-concrete | Standing (current record) |
Each generation solved a structural problem the prior generation had created. Jenney's frame replaced masonry. Khan's tubes replaced inefficient framed-tube walls. Baker's buttressed core replaced the bundled tube. Each move enabled roughly twice the previous height.
Every record-setter required either a single ambitious patron (Woolworth, Raskob) or a state hand (Petronas, Burj Khalifa). The Empire State Building's near-bankruptcy and the Burj's 2009 renaming reveal how thinly the financing of such projects can stretch.
Chicago invented the skyscraper (1885), New York perfected it (1913–1931), Chicago reclaimed altitude leadership (1973), and after 1998 every record-setter has been outside the United States — a near-perfect proxy for global economic power shift.
King Kong, Entrapment, Mission: Impossible: the supertall has always doubled as cinema. The visual signature of a city — Manhattan, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai — is increasingly defined by its tallest single building.
The Empire State buried five workers, Sears five, Burj Khalifa officially four (likely more). Migrant labor, kafala contracts, and questions about safety culture run from Mohawk ironworkers in 1930 to South Asian crews in 2009.
Each successive record costs disproportionately more per useful square foot. Burj Khalifa devotes ~30% of its height to spire and decorative volumes. The "vanity height" critique has grown alongside the towers themselves.
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