Cities in the Sky: The Quest To Build the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers

Architects, engineers, developers and visionaries who shaped great world cities are described in-depth.

Roughly two-thirds of the way through Jason M. Barr’s new book, Cities in the Sky: The Quest To Build the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers, are a pair of striking images: the Dubai World Trade Centre (WTC) when it was completed in 1979, accompanied by only a lonely sand dune half cast in shadow, and the Dubai WTC now, surrounded by the many skyscrapers that have sprung up around it. Although the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa (which graces the book’s cover), typically gets all the glory, the WTC was Dubai’s first skyscraper at 39 floors and 489 ft and remains a favorite to many in the city, “as it retains a quiet Modernist charm compared to the over-the-top structures that have risen recently.” Construction of the Dubai WTC was a gambit on the part of Dubai leaders based on their conviction that successful cities are also great transportation and trading hubs. They were proven right: The WTC had no trouble finding tenants, and Dubai had no trouble diversifying its economy beyond oil and gas. “Taking the long view, one could say that big and bold investments were in the DNA of Dubai,” Barr observes. 

Those big, bold investments (and aspirations) reached new heights literally and figuratively with construction of the half-mile-high Burj Khalifa on a former Army base by Emaar Properties, whose chairman “wanted to build a downtown that would command the world’s attention.” At the center of that downtown, of course, is the magnificent Burj Khalifa, from which the chairman drew inspiration from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and Taipei 101 in Taiwan. The Burj Khalifa opened in January 2010. As architects were working on the design, the first iterations were met with “Go taller.” What Dubai ended up with was a tapering, 2,717-ft-tall structure with a flowerlike profile and a buttressed core — just like, if it’s ever built, the Jeddah Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which aspires to be the tallest building in the world at 3,307 ft. Containing a hotel, residences, shops, offices and a (highly lucrative) observation deck, the Burj Khalifa’s height is like “if someone put an Empire State Building on top of Taipei 101.” Barr states:

“Back on the ground, staring up at the massive tower, one might easily conclude that it is the result of excessive wealth, the craving for spectacle and egos gone wild. While there are hints of all these, to say they were the driving forces behind the world’s tallest structure is an oversimplification — an attempt to shrink the structure’s gigantism to something we can comprehend. If anything, its creation is maniacal genius, having emerged from a clairvoyance that it would succeed when most people thought it a folly. The project’s sheer boldness is reminiscent of the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower and is but one maniacal project in Dubai’s long chain of them.”

Dubai’s story is but one of many in the book, part of Chapter 7, “Oil Rich Cities: Tales From the Arabian Heights.” Chapter 7 is in Part II, which focuses on Eurasia and also includes the following chapters: 4. “London: From No to Yes”; 5. “Hong Kong: From Barren Rock to the World’s Densest City”; and 6. “China: Skyscraper Fever.” Richly illustrated throughout, the book begins with Part I, America, with the chapters: 1. “Chicago: From Dismal Swamp to Second City”; 2. “New York City: The Height King in the Zone”; and 3. “The American Century: Hive Minds in the Sky.” Part III is A Global View and includes the chapters: 8. “Sky Prizes: The Value of Height”; 9. “Cities and Civilization: Skyscrapers and Their Discontents”; and 10. “Futureopolis: The Quest for the Cities of Tomorrow.” An epilogue covers “Cities and Skyscrapers in a Post-COVID World.” 

Part and parcel of the quest upward, elevators are a frequent topic, with the word appearing more than 80 times in the book’s 330-plus pages. Elevators are first mentioned in the introduction, when initial plans for Manhattan’s Empire State Building included a mast at the top to which airships, or zeppelins, would dock. (This was a good decade prior to the Hindenburg tragedy in 1937.) Empire State directors said: 

“Building with an eye to the future, it has been determined to erect this mooring tower with elevator facilities through the tower to land people directly on Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue after their ocean trip, seven minutes after the airship connects with the mast.”

Needless to say, those plans were dashed after the Hindenburg — the largest rigid airship ever constructed — caught fire and crashed at an Air Force base in New Jersey, killing 36. Elevators are last mentioned toward the book’s end in a passage exploring the future possibility of 1-mi.-high towers, which would, of course, require superfast, high-tech elevators. 

Delving deep into the architects, engineers, developers and visionaries who helped make the seemingly impossible reality, each chapter is an engrossing story in itself. The reader gets a complete tour of the world’s great cities to see why they are building their skyscrapers and skylines. The book begins in Chicago in the 1880s, moves on to NYC in the Roaring Twenties and then to post-World War II America. The stories of how iconic skyscrapers such as the original NYC Twin Towers came to be include fascinating sidenotes, such as engineers setting up a fake optometrist’s office to test the effects of building sway on human physiology. “America was the world’s fist skyscraper laboratory, and each city was like a lab bench on which a unique experiment could take place,” Barr observes. Those unique experiments are continuing to occur all over the world, and are continuing to evolve. 

About the Author

Jason M. Barr is a professor of economics at Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey. One of the world’s foremost experts on the economics of skyscrapers, he is the author of Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan Skyscrapers (2016). His research has been featured in The New York Times (NYT), The Washington Post, The Economist, Curbed and Architectural Record. A Long Island, New York, native, Barr received his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, his MFA in creative writing from Emerson College and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His writings have appeared in NYT, StarTrek, Dezeen, Scientific American and the Irish Independent. He currently writes the Skynomics Blog, a blog about skyscrapers, cities and economics.