For almost four thousand years the tallest thing people had built was a tomb in Egypt. Then came the spires of Lincoln, Stralsund and Strasbourg, the skyscrapers of New York and Chicago, and since 1998 the towers of Asia. Who held the record, for how long, and where the world's tall buildings stand today.
Ask which is the tallest building in the world and the answer, since 2010, is easy: the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, 828 m. Ask which was the tallest building in 1500, or 1890, or 1970, and the answer depends on what you call a building, how you measure it and which spire was still standing. I followed the title through Wikipedia's history of the record, from the Great Pyramid of Giza to the cathedrals of medieval Europe, the race up Manhattan and the move to Asia, and put every holder on a map beside 1,343 of today's tall buildings from Wikidata and Wikipedia.
The record has moved between 15 cities. Lincoln held it longest, then Strasbourg. For a century it belonged to the United States. Since 1998 it has been in Asia, and the next holder is already rising in Jeddah.
Drag the slider or press play to follow the title through time. The two boxes show the tallest building and the tallest structure of any kind at that moment, because for long stretches they were not the same thing: the Great Pyramid and the Eiffel Tower held the record for structures but were never buildings. The dots are tall buildings of 100 m or more, coloured by the decade they were finished, and only the ones finished by the slider's year appear (buildings since demolished are not included). Click anything for details.
Record-holders: English Wikipedia, 'History of the world's tallest buildings' (tables for buildings; text for the pyramid, the Washington Monument and the Eiffel Tower; the pyramid's date from Wikidata). Dots: 1,343 buildings of 100 m or more from Wikidata after unit checks, with the List page's 98 buildings of 350 m or more (13 of them, missing from Wikidata, at their city centre). United States records whose height could not be checked are hidden unless you turn them on under Map layers. Year: official opening, else inception, in Wikidata. Outlines: Natural Earth. Base map tiles © Esri.
Here is every holder of the title, drawn to the same scale of height in the order they took it. Filled shapes are buildings in the sense Wikipedia's history uses, which counts churches and cathedrals; hatched shapes are structures that held the overall record but were not buildings. The outline on the right is Jeddah Tower, which the List page shows under construction at a planned 1,008 m.
Every tallest building, to scale
Heights from the Wikipedia tables; outlines are simplified sketches. Hover for the years each held the title.
The Great Pyramid of Giza, 146.5 m when new, was the tallest structure in the world for over 3,800 years, about 3,870 if it was finished around 2560 BC, as Wikidata gives. But it is a tomb, not a building, and Wikipedia's history says the tallest buildings before the 14th century cannot be determined. The first building on its list is London's Old St Paul's Cathedral (149 m, 13th century to 1311), overtaken by Lincoln Cathedral, whose spire reached 159.7 m in 1311. Lincoln's spire stood for 238 years until it collapsed in 1549, the longest reign of any building.
Collapse and fire then handed the title around northern Europe: to St Mary's in Stralsund, to Beauvais Cathedral (whose tower fell four years later), back to Stralsund until its bell tower burned in 1647, and then to Strasbourg Cathedral, which held it for 227 years at 142 m, the shortest record-holder of all. Hamburg, Rouen, Cologne and Ulm followed in a burst of 19th century spires. Ulm Minster, 161.5 m in 1890, was the last church to hold the record.
Then the skyscraper. Philadelphia City Hall took the title in 1894, and from 1908 to 1973 it never left Manhattan: the Singer Building, the Metropolitan Life Tower, the Woolworth Building, 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building (both in 1930), the Empire State Building, which held it for 39 years, and the World Trade Center. Chicago's Sears Tower took it in 1973. In 1998 the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur ended a century of American records, Taipei 101 followed in 2004, and in 2010 the Burj Khalifa beat Taipei 101 by 318 m, 62%, the biggest jump in the record's history.
How long each city held the record
Years as home of the world's tallest building, 1311 to 2026, from Wikipedia's tables (the pyramid is a structure, so it is shown apart). Hover a block.
Count the years and the medieval cathedrals dominate: churches held the title for 583 of the 715 years since 1311 (82%). Lincoln (238 years), Strasbourg (227) and Stralsund (94) lead, ahead of New York (65), Chicago (25) and Dubai (16 so far). Wikipedia's introduction says New York held the record for 86 years and Chicago for 30, but its own table gives 65 and 25; I use the table.
"Tallest building" sounds simple. It is not, and the two Wikipedia pages behind this study use different rules, so I say which one each part of the page uses.
Even the buildings argue. In 1930 the Chrysler Building secretly assembled its spire inside the building and hoisted it to beat 40 Wall Street, whose top floor was higher. In 1996 the Petronas Towers were ranked above the Sears Tower because their spires count and the Sears Tower's antennas do not. And the medieval heights are uncertain: Lincoln's 159.7 m is "disputed by some, but accepted by most sources", and Christopher Wren put Old St Paul's spire at 140 m, not 149 m. The dots on the map come from a third source, Wikidata, which I cleaned as described in section 07.
For most of the 20th century tall buildings were an American story. In 1930, says Wikipedia, 99 of the world's 100 tallest buildings were in North America. Among the 464 buildings of 200 m or more that I could check in Wikidata, 73% of those finished before 1990 are in North America. Then Asia takes over: its share of new 200 m buildings rises from 27% in the 1980s to 52% in the 1990s and 75% in the 2010s, the busiest decade by far, with 212 completions.
Tall buildings finished per decade, by region
Buildings of 200 m or more in Wikidata after unit checks, or the 98 buildings of 350 m or more on Wikipedia's list. The figure above each bar is Asia's share (including the Middle East). The 2020s run to 2026. Hover a bar.
The complete list of the very tallest tells the same story more sharply. Of the 98 buildings of 350 m or more, 81 (83%) are in Asia: 55 in East Asia, 20 in the Middle East and 6 in Southeast Asia. North America has 13, Europe 3 and Africa 1. 82 were finished in 2010 or later, and only 9 before 2000; the oldest is still the Empire State Building of 1931.
Wikidata, after my checks, lists the most buildings of 200 m or more in New York (43), Dubai (37) and Shenzhen (36), then Chicago (18) and Tokyo (16). That ranking is a ranking of records as much as of buildings. Wikidata is patchy for China: 10 of the List's 52 buildings of 350 m or more in China and Hong Kong (19%) are missing from the extract, against 3 of the other 46 (7%), and the gaps are surely wider lower down. The complete list of 350 m buildings is more trustworthy for the very top, and it puts Dubai first with 15, then Shenzhen (12) and New York (9).
Cities with the most tall buildings
Bars: buildings of 200 m or more in Wikidata after unit checks. Dark marks: how many of them are 350 m or more (from the complete list). Hover a bar; click to see the city on the map.
For 238 years the tallest building in the world stood in Lincoln.
Jeddah Tower, Saudi Arabia: planned architectural height 1,008 m, 167+ floors, planned completion 2028, listed under construction on Wikipedia's 'List of tallest buildings'. If it is finished as planned it will be 180 m taller than the Burj Khalifa and the first building of a kilometre.
The same page lists 46 buildings of 350 m or more under construction. 42 of them are in Asia, 29 in China alone, and two would pass 600 m: Jeddah Tower and Dubai's Burj Azizi (725 m, planned for 2030). Only 1 is in the United States. I use only what the page says about their status: planned heights and dates change, and some towers stall for years.
Record-holders. The two tables of Wikipedia's 'History of the world's tallest buildings' give each holder's years, city and height: 10 rows for churches and cathedrals and 12 for skyscrapers (21 buildings; St Mary's in Stralsund appears twice). The structures track (the pyramid, the churches, the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower, the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, the masts, the Burj Khalifa) follows the page's text. Neither page dates the Great Pyramid, so I use Wikidata's date, 2560 BC, which fits the page's "over 3,800 years". Years held run from one record to the next, with 2026 as the end of the Burj Khalifa's reign so far. Positions come from Wikidata, except Lincoln and Beauvais cathedrals, entered by hand, and the original World Trade Center, shown on its site.
Today's buildings. The Wikidata extract holds 4,669 structures with a height of 100 or more. Heights came without units, and many are feet or centimetres, so I kept only buildings (skyscrapers, offices, hotels, homes, churches and other occupied buildings: 2,543 towers, bridges, dams, memorials and the like left out), dropped 29 unfinished or destroyed ones, 11 taller than the Burj Khalifa and 319 without a year. Buildings of 350 m or more had to be on the List page's complete table, which then supplied their height, year and city (99 were not and were dropped). In the United States, where Wikidata often gives feet as metres, I kept a height under 350 m only if the CORGIS skyscrapers dataset, taken from the CTBUH's Skyscraper Center, had the same building within 8% (156 did; 14 disagreed and 242 could not be checked, so they are not counted). Outside the United States I kept heights as given, apart from 4 that were plainly feet. Cities are the largest Natural Earth place within 40 km.
Churches. The 82 churches, mosques and temples of 100 m or more in the extract are in the data file but not on the map or in the counts, because Wikidata dates them by their founding, not by when they reached their height.
What this cannot say. Wikidata is not a census of skyscrapers. It is fullest for famous buildings and thinnest for China's, so the counts in sections 04 and 05 are counts of records, and some heights outside the United States will still be wrong. Leaving out unchecked American records lowers North America's share: counting all of them, Asia's share of new 200 m buildings in the 2010s would be 65% rather than 75%. Years are opening dates where Wikidata has them (426 buildings), otherwise inception (819), which is sometimes the start of construction.