The high-rise giants of this world – where most of the skyscrapers are

The top 10 tallest buildings in Switzerland will soon be tripled. In Dübendorf – not far from the Stettbach train station – three residential towers have been growing into the sky since mid-July 2020.

The structural work has now been completed and the towers of the “Three Point” project have reached their planned heights: 113, 111 and 103 meters high, according to ADT Innova representative Stephan Meier. After their final completion in the spring of 2024, they will occupy positions 4, 5 and 7 in the ranking of the tallest buildings in Switzerland.

Since September 2, 2022, Switzerland’s tallest building is the second Roche Tower in Basel at 205 meters. This surpassed the first Roche tower by 27 metres. But what is currently Switzerland’s tallest skyscraper will soon be surpassed: Basel-based pharmaceutical company Roche is already planning a third skyscraper in addition to the previous two.

Building 3 will be 221 meters high. However, a concrete construction project is not yet available, the super high-rise only exists as a sketch. So the excavators would not go up until 2025.

From a global perspective, even the third Roche tower would be just a child. There are now 2073 buildings over 200 meters in the world, of which 2011 are over 300 meters high and are therefore considered “supertall”. The top 10 tallest skyscrapers in the world all exceed the 500m mark.

The top 10 has remained unchanged since 2019 and the completion of the Tianjin CTF Finance Center, but here too a drastic change is coming soon: in Kuala Lumpur, the Merdeka 118 skyscraper is about to be completed – this should happen in mid-June. With a height of 678.9 meters, the tower will be the second tallest building in the world.

However, the roof height of Merdeka 118, which cost about $1.57 billion to build, is only about 500 meters. This is followed by an almost 150 meter high peak, which, unlike an antenna or a flagpole, is counted as part of the building structure.

But the race to the top has another dimension, namely breadth. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a non-profit organization based in Chicago, registers all skyscrapers worldwide and, among other things, maintains a list of the cities with the most high-rise buildings. From a minimum height of 150 meters they make it to the rankings.

China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is at the top by a wide margin. With the Jardine House, the first skyscraper was built in the 7.5 million metropolis in 1973, since then another 552 have been added. This makes Hong Kong the ‘tallest city in the world’.

In second place is nearby Shenzhen with 367 skyscrapers. Far behind with 314 skyscrapers is New York City, still regarded by many as the epitome of sky-busting cities with its imposing street canyons.

Dubai has yet to settle for a spot off the podium, but the desert metropolis is catching up. In 1999, the Burj Al Arab became the first building in the city to exceed the 150-meter mark. There are now 251 skyscrapers in Dubai and the trend continues. This year alone, 19 more will be added.

The "old continent" lags behind in the skyscraper statistics. With 30 high-rises over 150 meters, London is the top ranked city in Western Europe. This is followed by Frankfurt (18), Paris (18) and Warsaw (11), which just made the top 100. Of the Swiss cities, only Basel appears in the ranking. Thanks to the two Roche towers, the city on the knee of the Rhine is tied for 212th place out of 263 places.

Looking at the countries, China is clearly ahead: 3088 skyscrapers are in the Middle Kingdom. In 2023, despite the ongoing real estate crisis, another 266 will be added. But not all that glitters is gold. In the past 15 years, more construction has been done in China than anywhere else in the world. The result: an oversupply of apartments. And so many older high-rise buildings are now empty, while the new ones continue to grow merrily.

In the US, the country with the second most skyscrapers, people have other concerns: a research team from the United States Geological Survey in California has calculated that New York is sinking an average of one to two millimeters per year. In addition to natural subsidence, the reason for this would be the ever-increasing weight of the buildings in the "Big Apple" - they would weigh about 764 million tons and push the city more and more underground.

Every child knows the tallest building in the world: the Burj Khalifa with its 828 meters is located in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. One World Trade Center is also known to be the tallest skyscraper in the US. But which building towers tallest in the other 196 countries? You can discover it in the map below.

But we'll give you a little spoiler. The smallest, tallest buildings in the world are in Micronesia, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands. There, the Level 5 Hotel, the Kiribati Parliament Building and the Majuro Capitol Building are only 15 meters high.