Let the Rich Have Their Supertalls
Every year, the word skyscraper sounds less like a metaphor and more like a description. Right now, the world’s tallest building—at 828 meters, or 2,717 feet—is Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. But if Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah Tower is completed as planned, it will claim that mantle, reaching one kilometer, or 3,280 feet.
Properly, buildings that exceed 300 meters, or 984 feet, aren’t even skyscrapers but “supertalls”: an indication that linguistic creativity diminishes as the air thins. As Stefan Al writes in his new book, Supertall: How the World’s Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives, we are living in the “era of the ‘supertalls.’” He notes that the number of supertalls has risen sharply over the past few years. In 2017, 15 new supertalls were built. Another 17 went up in 2018, and now, “with more than one hundred supertalls in the works from Melbourne to Moscow, there seems to be no stopping the supertall frenzy.”
[Read: The skyscraper of the future]
My home city of Washington, D.C., has no supertalls. Its deficiencies on this point can be blamed on a 19th-century law implemented after the erection of the Cairo Hotel, a 164-foot building that at the time towered over the nation’s capital. New buildings in the in 2003 that “its ghoulish veneer and scowling gargoyles were considered a blight on the neighborhood”—the Cairo soon became a stayed there. By its 100th birthday in 1994, it had been added to the . referred to it at the time as “a fashionable condominium” and noted that a local city-council member called it “a real monument to the area.”
