Burj Khalifa stands as the tallest building in the world
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The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the tallest building in the world at 828 meters, or 2,717 feet, with 163 floors above ground. It opened in January 2010 and still stands about 149 meters taller than the next completed building on this list.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the tower around a buttressed core. Three wings extend from a central hexagonal spine, and each braces the others against lateral wind forces that strengthen with altitude. The wings step back at intervals as the tower rises, so the profile narrows and the wind never strikes the same flat face twice. Those setbacks disrupt vortex shedding, the rhythmic swirling that can set a slender tower swaying. The plan draws on the Hymenocallis, a desert flower with radiating petals, and on geometric patterns common in Islamic architecture.
Inside are apartments, offices, the Armani Hotel Dubai and the At the Top observation deck on the 148th floor. The elevators travel at more than 10 meters per second, among the fastest in service when the building opened. The tower anchors the Downtown Dubai development, next to The Dubai Mall and the Dubai Fountain.
Concrete was the central construction problem. High temperatures can weaken a mix before it cures, so crews poured at night through the hottest months and pumped concrete to heights no project had reached before.
The building holds height marks beyond the overall figure, including the highest occupied floor and the longest single elevator run in a building.
Rivals have been announced and then shelved. Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia was designed to pass 1,000 meters, but work stopped in 2018 amid funding and contractor problems, and the structure remains unfinished. Until a taller building is completed and verified against Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat criteria, the record stays in Dubai.
Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur is the second-tallest building
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Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, is the second-tallest building in the world at 678.9 meters, or 2,227 feet. The tower topped out in 2021 and was completed in 2023, which makes it the newest structure in the global top seven.
The Australian firm Fender Katsalidis designed the building and wrapped it in faceted glass that splits the facade into angular planes. Those planes catch daylight differently as the sun moves across the city. The form refers to a photograph of Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia's first prime minister, with his arm raised as he declared independence from British rule in 1957. "Merdeka" is the Malay word for independence, and the figure in the name matches the count of 118 floors.
The site carries the same reference. The tower rises beside Stadium Merdeka, the arena where that 1957 declaration was made, placing a record-setting skyscraper next to a preserved site of national memory. The wider development adds retail space at ground level.
Office floors fill most of the shaft. A luxury hotel occupies levels near the summit, and an observation deck sits among the highest publicly accessible viewpoints in Southeast Asia. A long spire carries the structure to its official architectural height, measured from the ground to the tip.
Kuala Lumpur already held a place in this history. The Petronas Towers, elsewhere in the city, were the world's tallest buildings from 1998 until 2004, when Taipei 101 passed them. Merdeka 118 returned Malaysia to the upper tier of the rankings nearly two decades later. It stands more than 200 meters taller than the twin towers that first put the city on the list.
Wind shaped much of the engineering. No neighboring structure of comparable scale stands close enough to break up the airflow around the tower. The tapering, irregular profile helps disrupt the vortices that form along a tall, smooth shaft.
Shanghai Tower ranks as the tallest building in China
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Shanghai Tower is the third-tallest building in the world and the tallest in China, rising 632 meters, or 2,073 feet, across 128 floors. It opened in 2015 in the Lujiazui financial district of Pudong, on the east bank of the Huangpu River.
The defining feature is its rotation. The tower turns about 120 degrees from base to crown, a form the architecture firm Gensler used to break up oncoming wind rather than meet it flat. The twisting shape cuts wind load by roughly 24% compared with a non-twisting tower of the same height. Less wind pressure meant less structural steel, which trimmed material cost and weight.
Inside, the building splits into nine vertical zones stacked one above the other. Each zone has its own atrium, planted public space and sky lobby, so the interior reads as a series of smaller neighborhoods instead of one continuous shaft of corridors. People transfer between zones rather than riding from the ground to the top in a single trip.
The facade is double-skinned. An outer glass curtain wall wraps an inner tower, and the air caught between the two layers acts as insulation. That buffer reduces heating and cooling demand in a city with humid summers and cold winters. Wind turbines mounted near the crown generate electricity for parts of the building.
Shanghai Tower shares its block with two towers that each previously held the title of tallest in China. The Jin Mao Tower, finished in 1999, and the Shanghai World Financial Center, finished in 2008, stand directly beside it. The three together mark how Chinese supertall construction advanced across three decades.
The program mixes offices, retail, a conference center and the J Hotel, whose rooms occupy floors near the top of the tower. An observation deck sits close to the summit, reached by high-speed elevators that run through the building's upper zones.
Abraj Al-Bait Clock Tower overlooks Islam's holiest site
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The Abraj Al-Bait Clock Tower in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, is the fourth-tallest building in the world at 601 meters, or 1,972 feet. Also known as the Mecca Royal Clock Tower, it opened in 2012 on a site facing the Masjid al-Haram, the mosque that encloses the Kaaba.
The tower is the central element of a seven-building complex, with shorter towers grouped around it. The development exists to house pilgrims. Mecca draws millions of visitors each year for Hajj and Umrah, and hotel capacity beside the mosque is scarce. Building upward was the way to add rooms on a site with almost no space to spread out.
Hotel floors fill most of the main tower, and the Clock Towers Museum sits near the summit. The building takes its name from the four-faced clock mounted on its upper section, among the largest clock faces ever constructed. The dials are illuminated after dark and readable from across the valley. A crescent finial caps the structure above the clock.
Construction drew sustained criticism. The site was previously occupied by the Ajyad Fortress, an Ottoman-era citadel dating to the 18th century, demolished to clear ground for the complex. The fortress had looked down on the mosque from a hill that was leveled during the works. Turkish officials and heritage preservation groups objected to its loss, describing the demolition as part of a wider erasure of historic architecture around the holy sites.
The tower is less familiar internationally than the supertall buildings of Dubai, Shanghai and New York, in part because its visitors come for pilgrimage rather than sightseeing. Its scale follows its function: rooms within walking distance of the Kaaba, stacked as high as the structure allows. No other building of comparable height stands this close to the center of Islamic worship, and the clock faces serve as a reference point for the crowds moving through the streets below.
Lotte World Tower is South Korea's tallest building
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Lotte World Tower in Seoul is the sixth-tallest building in the world and the tallest in South Korea, rising 555.7 meters, or 1,823 feet, across 123 floors. It opened in 2017 in the Jamsil district of eastern Seoul.
The tower narrows as it climbs, its two curved faces drawing together until they meet in a tapered crown. Kohn Pedersen Fox took the profile from Korean craft traditions — the swell and taper of a porcelain vessel, and the stroke of a calligraphy brush lifting off the page. A ribbed facade of glass and metal catches the light differently depending on the hour and the angle of view.
The program is stacked by altitude. A retail podium and mall occupy the base, offices fill the lower and middle sections, and residences sit above them. The Signiel Seoul hotel takes the upper floors and includes an indoor pool high above the city. Seoul Sky, the observation deck, spans floors 117 to 123 and includes a glass-floor section that lets visitors look straight down at the streets below.
Engineering the tower meant planning for typhoon-strength wind and the moderate seismic risk of the Korean Peninsula. The structure pairs a reinforced concrete core with outrigger and belt truss systems that tie the perimeter columns back to the center, spreading lateral loads rather than concentrating them. A thick mat foundation anchored into bedrock carries the weight on a site of soft alluvial soil.
Construction ran about six years and drew public scrutiny along the way. Regulators reviewed the tower's height against flight paths at a nearby military airfield, and safety questions about the adjoining mall complex delayed full approval for occupancy.
The site also holds Lotte World, an indoor theme park that has operated in Jamsil since 1989, creating a dense cluster of shopping, entertainment, hotel and office space around a single transit hub. Lotte Engineering & Construction led the project, with South Korean firms handling the bulk of the work.
One World Trade Center anchors lower Manhattan's skyline
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One World Trade Center is the seventh-tallest building in the world and the tallest in the Western Hemisphere. It reaches 541.3 meters, or 1,776 feet, to the tip of its spire — a figure chosen as a reference to the year of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
The tower opened in 2014 on the northwest corner of the 16-acre site where the original twin towers stood until the attacks of September 11, 2001. David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed it. The form begins as a square at street level, then chamfers along its edges into eight elongated triangles that meet in an octagon at the midpoint. Above that, it narrows again to a square glass parapet rotated 45 degrees from the base. Seen head-on, the facade reads as a set of tapering prisms that shift with the light and the viewing angle.
The spire accounts for the gap between the roofline and the official height. The roof sits at 417 meters, or 1,368 feet, and the 124-meter spire carries the measurement the rest of the way. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat classified that spire as a permanent architectural element rather than attached equipment, which allowed the 1,776-foot figure to stand.
The tower rises from a windowless concrete podium clad in glass fins, built to shield the core and mechanical systems at street level. A reinforced concrete core houses the elevators, stairwells and risers, with wider-than-standard pressurized stairs for evacuation.
Tenants include Condé Nast, which moved its magazine titles downtown from Times Square $SQ. One World Observatory occupies floors 100 through 102 and draws visitors for views across the harbor, the Hudson and the five boroughs. At ground level, the building faces the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, where the footprints of the original towers remain as recessed reflecting pools.