In 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright designed The Illinois — intended to be the world’s first mile-high skyscraper.
Stretching to 528 stories, and with parking for 15,000 cars and 100 helicopters, The Illinois, which was planned for Chicago’s Grant Park on Lake Michigan, would have been four times the height of the Empire State Building (built in 1931) and five times taller than the Eiffel Tower (finished in 1889).
Even today, it sounds audacious.
The Illinois would also have been almost twice the verticality of the world’s current tallest building, the 2,379-foot Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and some 2,400 feet taller than Jeddah Tower — which will be the first-ever kilometer-high (3,300 foot) skyscraper when it’s finished next year in the Red Sea city of Jeddah.
“Towers have always been erected by humankind,” Wright said, shortly before his death in 1959. “It seems to gratify humanity’s ambition somehow and they are beautiful and picturesque.”
Though The Illinois was never built, Wright’s vision reflected an era when the US dominated skyscraper innovation, producing iconic towers like Manhattan’s Chrysler Building (1,046 feet), the Empire State Building (1,250 feet) and the North Tower of the original World Trade Center (1,368 feet).
Today, however, the race to the sky has shifted to the Middle East, where state-backed investment and grand ambitions are driving a new era of architectural feats.
At the forefront is the Jeddah Tower, which will become — no doubt temporarily — the world’s tallest building.
In January, construction had already climbed past 80 floors toward its final total of 168. With new floors being added every three to four days, it is on track to surpass 100 floors by the end of February.
Once completed in August 2028, it will measure nearly double the size of New York City’s One World Trade Center, which, at a patriotic 1,176 feet tall, is currently the tallest skyscraper in the US.
But even though the big money and big dreams are coming out of the Middle East, it’s still American ingenuity driving the towers of power.
Chicago-based architects Gordon Gill and Adrian Smith of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG) designed the Jeddah.
As Gill tells The Post, the nature of such projects has changed from commercial opportunity to showcasing technological innovation and engineering excellence.
“You can see leadership attempting to inspire their people and advance their communities,” he explained of the Saudi consortium — including Prince Alwaleed bin Talal — that has raised more than $1.2 billion for the project. “They see these types of buildings as representations of a new future.”
Historically, skyscrapers in the US were often speculative investments by private entrepreneurs, going back to the world’s very first: the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, completed in 1885 and standing 138 feet/10 stories tall before an additional two floors brought its height to 180 feet a few years later.
By contrast, the record-breaking new towers in the Middle East are government-backed.
“The economic incentive there is not a return on a fixed investment, and the investors in this case are often state actors who aren’t really looking to make a profit at all in the conventional sense of the American real estate market,” Benjamin Flowers, Professor of Architecture at Ohio State University, explained.
Instead, he added, it’s purely about bragging rights: “But there is still that kind of original aspiration to be the center of this kind of building typology, with all its associations of power, wealth, and authority — and with capturing the eyes of the world.”
After all, a tower like the Burj Khalifa — with its glamorous starring role in the 2011 movie “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” in which Tom Cruise death-defyingly scaled the exterior of the world’s tallest building — is a tourist attraction that brings people to Dubai on its own.
The Jeddah Tower, meanwhile, will be the centerpiece of the 57-million-square-foot Jeddah Economic City, a new development for business and luxury tourism.
(American skyscrapers, like the World Trade Center, have typically been occupied by major corporations, though buildings like the 1,550-foot Central Park Tower on Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row is a residential exception — and home to many globetrotters with apartments all over the world.)
“They see these types of buildings as representations of a new future,” Gill said of consortiums like the Jeddah Economic Company.
And there’s always a race to come out on top.
The current mega-contender — of which some experts are skeptical — is the proposed Rise Tower in the Saudi capital of Riyadh.
With an estimated budget of $5.3 billion, backed by the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, the Rise is planned to reach a height of 1.24 miles (678 floors, or 18 football fields laid end-to-end). That wouldn’t just leave the Jeddah in the dust, it would easily trump Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision.
According to Skyscraper.com, of the top 100 “supertall” structures currently being built in the world, the highest going up in the United States is The Torch on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, ranking just 63rd.
The vast majority are being built in China, such as the 1,959-foot Golden Finance 117 in Tianjin, and the Middle East — with Dubai boasting four of the top five, including the 2,379-foot Burj Azizi, due for completion in 2028.
Lower construction costs have helped shift tall ambitions overseas.
“A skilled carpenter in Manhattan might make several hundred dollars a day whereas studies have shown the equivalent worker in the Middle East might make ten dollars a day,” said Benjamin Flowers, author of “Skyscraper: The Politics and Power of Building New York City in the Twentieth Century.”
Case in point: the new JPMorgan Chase Tower at 270 Park Avenue. Having torn down the old Union Carbide Building and replaced it with a new Norman Foster-designed tower measuring 1,388-feet, the final bill was a reported $3 billion.
Contrast that with Dubai’s Burj Khalifa: “It’s the tallest and also the heaviest building in the world and, as it’s a site-cast concrete build, unlike the steel-framed structures we see in the US, it’s incredibly labor-intensive,” added Flowers.
“And yet the construction costs were still roughly half of that of the JPMorgan Chase building.”
Tall dreams come with tall challenges beyond finances.
“We have increasingly sophisticated material modeling systems that can help us understand how we think materials will perform under many extremes of height. But then there are unknown unknowns, and I think those are the ones that, again, make the risk-reward ratio a little unclear,” Flowers said of designing supertalls.
“You’re definitely kind of stepping off into the unknown with even higher buildings, and you have to be extremely careful with the design because they’re very unforgiving animals,” added Gill, noting wind, seismic conditions and the internal circulation of people moving around the building.
At Jeddah Tower, for example, 59 elevators — including five double-decker units — will transport occupants at speeds over 22 miles per hour.
There’s also the issue of how people themselves react and adapt to living at such heights, especially since skyscrapers must be engineered to sway to absorb wind force.
A 40-story building, Gizmodo reported, “may sway a foot to the left, a foot to the right,” a process lasting about four seconds.
But a hundred-story building can sway up to three feet on each side, “cycling through a 10-second period.”
It’s not the movement humans feel so much as the acceleration.
And residents at 432 Park Avenue supertall, which reaches 1,400 feet above Central Park and has attracted buyers like Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez, have complained the buildings sways and groans like a ship on the high seas.
“We also have to consider the quality of life and the psychology of comfort,” says Gill.
Still, architects see ambitious skyscrapers like Jeddah Tower as a daring leap into the future — although how long it remains the world’s tallest remains to be seen.
One thing seems sure, however. It’s unlikely to be a skyscraper in America that breaks the record.
Said Flowers: “I suspect that ship has sailed.”
Alice J. Roden started working for Trending Insurance News at the end of 2021. Alice grew up in Salt Lake City, UT. A writer with a vast insurance industry background Alice has help with several of the biggest insurance companies. Before joining Trending Insurance News, Alice briefly worked as a freelance journalist for several radio stations. She covers home, renters and other property insurance stories.