The first skyscraper in the world, and how skyscrapers are built: from Chicago 1885 to Burj Khalifa

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The first skyscraper is usually named as the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, ten storeys and 138 feet (42 m), designed by William Le Baron Jenney and finished in 1885: the first tall building whose weight was carried by an iron and steel frame rather than by its walls, so the walls could be thin and full of windows and the building could go on rising. It was demolished in 1931 and the title is disputed, but the idea it proved, a metal skeleton with the outer wall hung on it, together with the safety elevator, fireproof floors and cheap steel, is what made every tower since possible, from the 792-foot Woolworth Building of 1913 to the 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa of 2010. Below: why Chicago, what Jenney did, the other candidates for first, how a skyscraper is built today from the foundations up, and the record-holders, with the towers of the Buildings by style collection.

Why Chicago invented the skyscraper

The Great Fire of 1871 burned the centre of Chicago flat, and the city rebuilt it in twenty years while its population went from 300,000 to a million. Land in the Loop, squeezed between the lake, the river and the rail yards, became the most expensive in America, so an office block had to make money from a small lot by going up. Three things made that possible in the 1880s. The safety elevator, which Elisha Otis had demonstrated in 1854 and which by 1870 ran on steam and then hydraulics, meant the top floors rented as well as the bottom; before it, nobody would climb more than five flights. Cheap steel from the Bessemer process, in use in American mills from the 1860s, gave a material stronger than cast iron in tension and cheaper than wrought iron. And the fire had taught the city that iron columns melt: from the 1870s Chicago wrapped its ironwork in hollow terracotta tile, and the fireproof floor of tile arches between iron beams became standard. What was missing was a way to make the walls stop carrying the building. Chicago school.

The Home Insurance Building, 1885

A masonry building is limited by its own walls: the 16-storey Monadnock Block of 1891, the tallest load-bearing brick office building ever built, needed walls six feet thick at the base, which ate the rentable ground floor. William Le Baron Jenney, a former Civil War engineer who had studied in Paris, was asked by the Home Insurance Company of New York for a fireproof office block with maximum daylight on the corner of LaSalle and Adams, and in 1884 he designed the walls as a skin carried floor by floor on a frame of cast-iron columns and wrought-iron beams, changing to Bessemer steel beams above the sixth floor when the Carnegie mill offered them, the first structural steel in a building. The frame carried the floors and most of the outer wall; the granite and brick facade was thin and the building weighed a third of a masonry block of the same size. Two floors were added in 1890 to make twelve. When it was demolished in 1931 to make way for the Field Building, a committee of engineers examined the frame and declared it the first true skyscraper, though the outer walls turned out to carry part of the load; the argument continues. Home Insurance Building.

The other candidates

• Equitable Life Building, New York, 1870. Seven storeys and 130 feet, the first office building with passenger elevators; masonry walls, so not a skyscraper in the structural sense, but the first building designed around the elevator.
• Ditherington Flax Mill, England, 1797. The first iron-framed building in the world, five storeys; the grandparent of the idea, not a skyscraper.
• Rand McNally Building, Chicago, 1890. By Burnham and Root; the first building with a complete all-steel frame, so engineers who dismiss Jenney's mixed iron give first place here.
• Wainwright Building, St. Louis, 1891. By Louis Sullivan; the first skyscraper to look like one, with unbroken vertical piers, the design Sullivan explained in his essay on the tall office building "artistically considered": "form ever follows function".
• Tacoma Building, Chicago, 1889. The first with a true curtain wall, the outer wall hung from the frame and built from the top down as well as up.
• Tower Building, New York, 1889. Bradford Gilbert's eleven-storey steel cage on a 21-foot-wide lot, the first skeleton building in New York; the public expected it to blow over.

The word "skyscraper" was a sailor's term for the topmost sail and then a name for tall men and horses, and it was applied to buildings by Chicago newspapers in the late 1880s.

How a skyscraper is built today

• Foundations. In Chicago the early towers floated on rafts of timber and steel in the clay; New York sits on bedrock, which is why Midtown and Downtown have towers and the soft ground between them did not until modern piles. A modern tower stands on a raft of concrete up to 20 feet thick on piles driven to rock or dense sand: Burj Khalifa's raft is 12 feet thick on 194 piles, each 5 feet wide and 160 feet deep.
• Core. A concrete core, poured with slipform or jump-form shuttering that climbs a floor every three to four days, holds the elevators and stairs and takes most of the wind load; the floors and columns are built around it, so the core rises a dozen storeys ahead of the rest.
• Frame. Steel columns and beams bolted and welded on site, or reinforced-concrete columns; the modern answer to wind is to make the whole outside a tube, as in the Willis Tower's bundle of nine tubes, or to hang the floors on outriggers from the core, or, at Burj Khalifa, to buttress a core with three wings so the tower cannot bend in any direction.
• Floors. Steel decking with a thin concrete topping, or flat concrete slabs; a floor every few days, with the trade crews following one another up the building in a "jump" cycle.
• Curtain wall. The outer skin of glass and aluminium panels, made in a factory, hung on brackets from the floor edges and carrying nothing but its own weight and the wind; the Lever House of 1952 set the type.
• Cranes and lifts. Tower cranes climb the building on their own masts; a construction hoist runs outside the core; the elevators of the finished building are the limit on height, which is why Burj Khalifa has sky lobbies and double-deck cars.
• Wind. Tall thin towers sway: a 1,400-foot tower may move a few feet at the top. Engineers test the shape in a wind tunnel and add a tuned mass damper, a pendulum weighing hundreds of tons near the top, as at Taipei 101, where the 730-ton gold ball is a tourist attraction.
• Time and money. The Empire State Building went up in 410 days at four and a half storeys a week; a modern supertall takes five to seven years and costs one to two billion dollars.

The height race

New York overtook Chicago as soon as the skeleton frame reached it: the Park Row Building of 1899 (391 ft), the Singer Building of 1908 (612 ft), the Metropolitan Life Tower of 1909 (700 ft), the Gothic Woolworth Building of 1913 (792 ft), which held the record for seventeen years, then the 1930 race in which 40 Wall Street, the Chrysler Building (1,046 ft, with a spire secretly assembled inside and hoisted through the roof) and the Empire State Building (1,250 ft, 1931) passed one another within eighteen months. The Empire State stood tallest for forty years until the World Trade Center (1,368 ft, 1972) and the Sears Tower (1,451 ft, 1974), which took the title back to Chicago for 24 years. Then the record left America: Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur (1,483 ft, 1998), Taipei 101 (1,667 ft, 2004) and Burj Khalifa in Dubai (2,717 ft, 2010), with the Shanghai Tower (2,073 ft, 2015) second and the Jeddah Tower aiming at 3,281 ft. The rules for measuring are in the tallest buildings in the world; the style of the 1930 towers in Art Deco architecture; the glass box that followed, from the Lever House to the Seagram Building, in Mid-century modern architecture.

Versions and theories

• Was Home Insurance really first? The 1931 committee said yes, later historians say its walls shared the load and its iron was mixed; the Rand McNally or Tacoma buildings are the strict answer, and New York claims Equitable for the elevator. It is a question of definition, and Chicago wins on any definition that includes the frame.
• Did the skyscraper come from the balloon frame? The light timber frame of Chicago houses, invented there in the 1830s, is often called the skyscraper's ancestor; Jenney is said to have got the idea from a birdcage, or from bamboo houses in the Philippines. All are stories told after the fact.
• Empire State and the airship mast. The tower's spire was announced as a mooring mast for airships; one attempt in 1931 lasted three minutes in the updraught, and the mast was always a device to beat Chrysler's height.
• The Chrysler spire trick. Van Alen built the 185-foot spire in secret inside the fire shaft and raised it in ninety minutes to snatch the record from 40 Wall Street, whose architect had already announced victory: documented and true.
• Skyscrapers and the crash. The "skyscraper index" claims record towers are topped out just as booms end: Singer and Met Life in 1907–09, Chrysler and Empire State in 1930–31, the World Trade Center and Sears in 1973–74, Petronas in 1997, Burj Khalifa in 2009. A pattern, not a law, but a good one.

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