How did humans go from five-story walk-ups to buildings that brush the clouds? The answer is a surprisingly short chain of inventions — and an apparently bottomless appetite for height. From a 10-story iron-framed experiment in 1880s Chicago to a kilometer-tall tower now rising from the Saudi coast, the skyscraper’s history moves fast and shows no signs of slowing down.
In the Beginning
The skyscraper didn’t spring from a single great idea. It was the product of several forces arriving at roughly the same moment. Land in America’s booming industrial cities was running out, at least at street level. The economic pressure to build upward was real. What was missing were the tools to actually do it.
Three inventions changed that. The Bessemer process made structural steel cheap and abundant — stronger and far lighter than the cast-iron frames that buildings had relied on before. Safe passenger elevators made upper floors worth occupying in the first place. And improved fire sprinkler heads allowed buildings to break through the 23-meter height limit that fire codes had imposed. Steel, elevators, sprinklers: an unlikely trio that together made the modern city possible.
The World’s First Skyscraper
The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, completed in 1885, is where it began. Ten stories tall — modest by today’s standards, revolutionary for its time. Architect William Le Baron Jenney used a steel frame to carry the building’s weight rather than relying on thick masonry walls, then hung a brick exterior off it like a curtain. The approach became known as the “Chicago Skeleton” and spread rapidly to other cities. The building itself was demolished in 1931, but its logic is everywhere.
Success bred resistance almost immediately. By 1893, Chicago had imposed a 40-meter height limit, worried about shadows and overcrowding. New York had no such qualms. It raced ahead with taller and taller structures, eventually introducing its own zoning rules in 1915 — not to cap height, but to force buildings to step back from the street as they rose. That requirement gave New York its signature wedding-cake skyline.
Changing Styles
Once the engineering was settled, architecture took over. Early Chicago designers, including Jenney and Louis Sullivan, used vertical columns to play up a building’s height. The Neoclassical revival brought in Greek flourishes. Then the 1920s arrived, and with them Art Deco: stepped profiles, metallic ornament, and a barely concealed delight in the machine age.
The competition for New York’s skyline reached its most dramatic point in 1930, when the Chrysler Building opened — its architect having secretly assembled a 185-foot steel spire inside the building before hoisting it into place to beat a rival tower going up downtown. The Chrysler held the world height record for less than a year. The Empire State Building opened in 1931 and surpassed it by 200 feet, holding the title for over four decades.
The Depression, the war, and an office glut killed the Art Deco moment. Construction stalled through the 1940s. When it resumed in the 1950s, the International Style had taken hold: glass curtain walls, steel boxes, minimal ornament. Much of Denver’s downtown dates from this era.
The Race for Height Resumes
The postwar decades brought fresh ambition. In 1972, the World Trade Center’s twin towers topped out as the world’s tallest buildings — architect Minoru Yamasaki using a dense perimeter column grid to reach 1,368 feet on Tower 1 and 1,362 feet on Tower 2. A year later, the Willis Tower in Chicago (then the Sears Tower) took the record and held it for 25 years. The title then passed to the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur in 1998, and to Taipei 101 in 2004. One World Trade Center, completed in 2014, stands at 1,776 feet — the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.
But by then, the center of gravity in tall building construction had already shifted decisively elsewhere.
The Burj Khalifa
When the Burj Khalifa opened in Dubai in January 2010, it didn’t just set a new record — it redefined what the record meant. At 828 meters (2,717 feet), it surpassed its nearest rival by more than 60 percent. Its 163 floors include residences, hotel rooms, corporate offices, and observation decks; the highest occupied floor sits at level 154.
The design came from Skidmore, Owings and Merrill — the same Chicago firm behind the Willis Tower — and draws its Y-shaped floor plan from the geometry of a desert flower. That shape does structural work as much as aesthetic: the three wings distribute wind loads and give every unit unobstructed views. A buttressed concrete core handles lateral forces without the outrigger trusses that earlier supertalls required. It remains, as of 2026, the tallest building on Earth.
What Comes Next: The Jeddah Tower
That may not be true much longer. Rising along the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia, the Jeddah Tower is designed to clear one kilometer — a threshold no building has ever crossed. The project, designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, refines the same buttressed core logic as the Burj Khalifa, with three tapering concrete wings that shed both weight and wind resistance as they climb.
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The path to the skyline has not been smooth. Construction began in 2013, stalled in 2018 amid contractor disputes and political turmoil, and didn’t restart in earnest until January 2025. Since then the pace has been striking: roughly one floor every three to four days. As of April 2026, the tower has passed its 100th floor, and completion is targeted for 2028 as a flagship project of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 agenda.
The engineering at this scale requires solutions that don’t yet exist off the shelf. Finnish elevator specialist KONE is developing carbon-fiber lift cables — traditional steel rope becomes too heavy to function at such heights — for 59 lifts traveling at over 10 meters per second. The foundation alone involved a five-meter-thick concrete mat anchored by 270 bored piles driven up to 110 meters into limestone and coral rock. For a look at what the next generation of tall buildings may bring globally, see our roundup of the tallest planned skyscrapers in the U.S. and worldwide.
A History Still Being Written
More than 140 years after William Le Baron Jenney hung brick off a steel frame in Chicago and changed how cities grow, the underlying logic of the skyscraper hasn’t changed much. What has changed, dramatically, is the scale of the ambition. The buildings that first earned the name were 10 stories tall. The next milestone will be a thousand meters.
The history of the skyscraper is far from over — and if the pace of the Jeddah Tower’s construction is any guide, the next chapter is coming fast.
Matthew Preston
Content Writer, CRE News & Market Analysis
Matthew has covered commercial real estate for CommercialCafe since 2022. He focuses on the office and industrial sectors, reporting on leasing, development, and investment across national markets and individual submarkets. His work draws on data and original research. He also writes about demographic shifts and urban innovation in U.S. cities. The New York Times, The Real Deal, Bisnow, The Business Journals, and Yahoo Finance have cited his reporting.
