Built to Impress: How the Skyscraper Became Every Nation's Proof It Had Arrived

Nobody has ever announced that their country had arrived by publishing a pamphlet. They have, for a hundred and forty years running, done it by building something enormous instead. Walk into any conversation about which countries matter now and somebody will eventually gesture at a skyline: Dubai's forest of glass, Kuala Lumpur's twin towers lit up at night, the old, stubborn silhouette of Manhattan. Height has become a kind of shorthand, a way of saying "we can do this" without saying anything at all. What almost nobody brings up in that conversation is where the habit actually started, which is a very specific, very unglamorous burned-out lot in Chicago, in 1885, and a building that was only ten storeys tall.

The fire that cleared the way

The story has to start with a disaster. In October 1871, the Great Chicago Fire tore through roughly three square miles of the city, destroying some 17,000 buildings and leaving around 100,000 people homeless in a single catastrophic night. It was, by any measure, a horror. It was also, for the men who rebuilt the city over the following two decades, an almost unimaginable gift: a blank canvas the size of a small city, freed of the old brick-and-timber construction that had just proven exactly how badly it burned, sitting on some of the most valuable, tightly bounded downtown land in the country. Chicago's Loop had nowhere to expand outward, hemmed in by the lake, the river, and the railyards. If the city's business district was going to grow, it had exactly one direction left to go: up. Two other things had to arrive first before "up" was actually possible.

Two inventions nobody remembers arguing about

The first was cheap, strong steel, made possible by the Bessemer process, which by the 1870s had turned steel from a rare, expensive luxury material into something that could be rolled into standardised beams by the ton. The second, stranger one was a brake. In 1852, an obscure mechanic named Elisha Otis invented a safety mechanism that stopped an elevator car from plunging to the bottom of its shaft if the hoisting rope snapped, and in 1854, at New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition, he climbed onto a platform, had an assistant cut the rope with an axe in front of a watching crowd, and let the platform drop a few inches before the brake caught it. It is a small, theatrical fact that the entire skyscraper era, arguably the most visible expression of urban ambition in modern history, hinges on a man proving in public that people would not die falling down a shaft. Without a safety elevator, nobody was climbing forty flights of stairs to reach an office, no matter how strong the steel underneath them was.

The first skyscraper, and it wasn't much to look at

With steel available and elevators trusted, the last problem was structural, and it belonged to an architect named William Le Baron Jenney. Every tall building before his was, in effect, a very thick brick tower: the lower floors had to carry the weight of every floor above them, which meant that beyond a certain height the ground-floor walls had to be absurdly, space-wastingly thick just to hold the building up. Jenney's solution, applied to the Home Insurance Building, which opened in Chicago in 1885, was to stop making the walls do that job at all. He built a full internal skeleton of iron and steel columns and beams, and hung a comparatively thin masonry skin off the outside of it, almost the way a modern building hangs a glass curtain wall. The building itself, ten storeys and 138 feet, would not turn heads in any city today. What it proved is what mattered: a building's height no longer had to be paid for in ground-floor wall thickness. It could, in principle, go as high as the steel and the elevators would allow.

New York takes the idea and starts a race

Chicago invented the technique. New York turned it into a competition, for the entirely unglamorous reason that Manhattan sits on solid bedrock and had, even by the early 1900s, run out of room to spread sideways. The Woolworth Building opened in 1913 at 792 feet, tall enough and church-like enough in its detailing to earn the nickname the "Cathedral of Commerce." Then came 1930, and one of the best stories in the entire history of construction. Two buildings, 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building, were racing to be declared the world's tallest, and 40 Wall Street's team believed they had won when their building topped out taller than the Chrysler's. What they did not know was that the Chrysler Building's architect, William Van Alen, had secretly assembled a 185-foot stainless steel spire inside the building's fire shaft, out of public view, and in May 1930 had it hoisted up through the roof and bolted into place in about ninety minutes, instantly and unanswerably making the Chrysler Building the tallest structure on Earth. It held that title for less than a year. The Empire State Building overtook it in 1931, built in a jaw-dropping 410 days by thousands of men desperate for any work at all in the depths of the Great Depression, and kept the world's-tallest title for the next forty years, longer than almost anything before or since. A country flattened by its worst economic collapse in a century had, almost as an act of defiance, just put up the tallest thing anyone on the planet had ever built.

The style gets exported

For about three decades after the Empire State Building opened, the skyscraper was still, in most of the world's imagination, a specifically American trick, the kind of thing only Chicago or New York seemed to know how to do. What changed that was not a new material or a new safety device, but a new look. In 1958, the German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe completed the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, a bronze-and-glass tower stripped of almost every ornamental flourish the Woolworth and Chrysler Buildings had been covered in, built instead on the principle that the steel structure and the glass skin were the only decoration a serious building needed. It became the template for the International Style, and, more importantly for this story, it became copyable in a way the Chrysler Building's hand-crafted Art Deco detailing never really was. A glass box on a steel frame did not require importing an entire city's worth of specialist stonemasons and metalworkers. It required a construction industry that could pour concrete, erect steel and hang curtain wall glazing to a schedule, which was a far shorter list of things a newly confident economy had to prove it could do. The skyscraper, in other words, stopped being an American monument and became an internationally available kit. Once it was a kit, it was only a matter of time before somebody outside the United States decided to use it to make the largest possible statement.

The torch, and the title, move on

For most of the twentieth century, "world's tallest" was a title that stayed comfortably in the United States. That stopped in 1998, when the Petronas Towers opened in Kuala Lumpur and became the first buildings outside the country to hold the record. It was not an accident of engineering. Malaysia's government under Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad had explicitly framed the towers as a statement of the country's arrival as a modern, industrialising economy, a physical rebuttal to the assumption that this kind of engineering feat only happened in wealthy Western cities. Taipei 101 took the record next, in 2004. Then, in January 2010, Dubai opened the Burj Khalifa at 828 metres, over triple the height of the Empire State Building and more than three hundred metres taller than anything that had ever stood before it anywhere on Earth, a monument to a small Gulf city-state's decision to turn itself into a global finance and tourism hub. Each of these buildings did the same job the Home Insurance Building's height had implicitly done in 1885: it told everyone watching, unmistakably and without a press release, that a serious amount of capital, engineering talent and long-term political confidence now lived in this specific place.

The uncomfortable pattern nobody built on purpose

Here is the detail that makes the whole habit stranger than it first looks. In 1999, a property economist named Andrew Lawrence noticed something that has held up disturbingly well since: the world's tallest new building keeps finishing right around the moment the economy that built it turns downward. The Empire State Building opened in 1931, deep in the Depression it seemed to be defying. The Petronas Towers opened in 1998, months before the Asian financial crisis tore through the same region's markets. The Burj Khalifa opened in January 2010, a little over a year after Dubai's own property bubble had burst so badly that neighbouring Abu Dhabi had to step in with a bailout. Nobody plans a skyscraper as a warning sign. But a record-breaking tower takes the better part of a decade of confident, cheap borrowing to finish, and by the time the ribbon gets cut, the conditions that made the borrowing look like a good idea have often already started to curdle. The building becomes the last, largest monument to a boom that ended slightly before it opened.

Why height still works as a proxy at all

None of this means the skyscraper is just vanity dressed up as ambition, even if a fair amount of vanity is genuinely involved. Putting one up for real, not as a rendering but as a completed, occupied building, requires things that are much harder to fake than the building itself: capital markets deep enough to fund a project that won't turn a profit for a decade, an engineering and construction industry that can execute at that scale without the thing falling down, building codes and enforcement rigorous enough to make that safety credible, and, underneath all of it, enough political and economic stability that lenders are willing to bet on where a country will be in ten years. That is precisely why the title keeps moving toward wherever a rising economy most badly wants to prove those things are now true of it, and why the current record-holder's would-be successor, Jeddah Tower, designed to be the first building on Earth to pass a full kilometre in height, has spent years stalled, a reminder that wanting the title and being able to finish the building are still two different things.

That is the whole trick, in the end, and it has not changed much since a ten-storey building went up on a burned patch of Chicago real estate in 1885. A skyline is the one kind of press release that cannot be faked, backdated or talked its way out of an audit. It has to actually be poured, riveted and wired, floor by floor, by people who were willing to bet years of their careers that it would still be standing, and worth something, when they finished. Every country that has ever put up the tallest building in the world was making the same argument the Home Insurance Building made without saying a word: look at what we can now build, and draw your own conclusions about what else we can do.

Sources

• Library of Congress, "Home Insurance Building" (Chicago Architectural Photographing Company image and the building's 1885 construction).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Home Insurance Building" (William Le Baron Jenney's steel-skeleton design).
• Otis Worldwide, "Elisha Otis and the Safety Elevator" (the 1852 invention and the 1854 Crystal Palace demonstration).
• Chicago History Museum, "The Great Chicago Fire" (the 1871 fire's scale and its role in the city's rebuilding).
• The Skyscraper Center (CTBUH), "Chrysler Building" (the 1930 secret spire and the race with 40 Wall Street).
• History.com, "Empire State Building" (the 410-day construction during the Great Depression).
• The Skyscraper Center (CTBUH), "Petronas Towers" (the 1998 completion and its status as the first non-US world's-tallest building).
• The Skyscraper Center (CTBUH), "Burj Khalifa" (height, completion date, and Dubai's 2009 debt crisis).
• Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein / cited widely via Reuters, "Skyscraper Index" (Andrew Lawrence's 1999 research linking record towers to economic downturns).
• The Skyscraper Center (CTBUH), "Jeddah Tower" (construction status of the planned kilometre-tall tower).