Buildings

Since the meeting of the U.S. Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in 1997, there have been five specifications to determine the highest building in the world (that’s habitable):

Height to structural top, height to top of spire, height to highest public observation deck, height to top floor, and height to roof of top floor.

(A structural top is whatever thing is built above the roof besides the spire)

Before 1997, the structural top measurement was the only one, which is why the Petronas Towers, opened in 1996, was called the highest building in the world at 0.45 kilometers.

However, the World Trade Center towers in New York have the highest spire (0.52 kilometers) and public observation deck among all buildings in the world.

The Sears Tower in Chicago has the world’s highest top floor and highest roof.

Since the World Trade Center and Sears Tower both hold two world height records, they are tied for first place. The Petronas Towers hold one record; they are in third place.

This year (2001) will be the 70^th anniversary of the construction of the Empire State Building. Although it has more people than Canada, the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area failed to build a higher building than the Empire State Building in 70 years.

The highest self-supporting tower in the world is the CN Tower in Toronto at 0.56 kilometers.

The city with the most skyscrapers is New York with 162. The second place city is Chicago. It has 72 skyscrapers, less than half of New York. Houston, number 6 on the list has only 27. Hong Kong, the city with the greatest population density in the world (11 times as dense as NYC, 2.5 million times as dense as the Yukon), only has 41 skyscrapers. Tokyo has approximately only one skyscraper per million people. Chicago has 24 per million.

The fact that best illustrates America’s economical superiority is the internet. In 1998, there were 23.6 million internet hosts in America. The country in second place on the list had a figure that was 14.5 times less (1.6 million). As America is the center of modern culture, the most prosperous nation, and among the ones with the cleanest environments, the only things that America lacks are colossal bridges and people who know how to dress decently.

All figures true for 2000.