The Most Striking Modern Skyscrapers in the World

13 places in 8 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Taipei 101

   Taiwan · 0.4 km from Taipei25.034° N 121.565° E

   

   The single most photographed part of Taipei 101 isn't visible from the street. Between the 87th and 92nd floors hangs a bright yellow steel sphere weighing 660 tonnes — the largest tuned mass damper ever installed in a building, and one of the few designed to be seen rather than hidden. It's suspended on cables like a giant pendulum; when wind or an earthquake pushes the tower one way, the ball's inertia keeps it lagging behind, and hydraulic pistons bleed that relative motion off as heat, cancelling out a meaningful share of the sway before it ever reaches the people inside. After a 2015 typhoon made the ball swing hard enough to be filmed swaying nearly a metre, the building's operators leaned into it rather than downplaying it, giving the damper a cartoon mascot and its own gift shop.

   Did you know? In January 2026 Alex Honnold climbed the outside of the tower without ropes in about an hour and a half, in an authorised free solo.

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2. 02 Petronas Towers

   Malaysia · 3.2 km from Kuala Lumpur3.158° N 101.712° E

   

   From 1998 to 2004 the Petronas Towers were the tallest buildings in the world, and they are still the tallest twin towers anywhere, at 451.9 metres. The Argentine-American architect César Pelli designed them for the Malaysian state oil company. He deliberately drew on Islamic geometry: each tower's floor plan is an eight-pointed star made of two overlapping squares, with rounded lobes fitted into the angles to gain office space. The steel and glass cladding repeats the pattern as it steps up towards the spires. The Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, opened the towers on 31 August 1999.

   Did you know? Climber Alain Robert was stopped at the 60th floor in 1997 and again ten years later, before scaling Tower Two barehanded in 2009.

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3. 03 Torre Glòries

   Spain · 2.1 km from Barcelona41.403° N 2.190° E

   

   Before it had the name it carries now, this tower belonged entirely to a water utility. Aigües de Barcelona commissioned it as a new headquarters, and the French architect Jean Nouvel gave the company something that looked less like an office block than a geological event — a rounded, tapering form he described as evoking a geyser bursting up through Barcelona's grid. He borrowed the idea of a shimmering, broken-up surface directly from Antoni Gaudí's ceramic trencadís mosaics elsewhere in the city, and the tower's silhouette was meant to echo the jagged outline of Montserrat, the mountain that dominates views inland from Barcelona.

   Did you know? The tower is built as two concentric concrete cylinders that never touch; the inner core holds the lifts and stairs, the outer shell is pierced by about 4,500 windows.

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4. 04 30 St Mary Axe

   United Kingdom · 3 km from London51.514° N 0.080° W

   

   30 St Mary Axe, known to everyone as the Gherkin, gave London its first great piece of twenty-first-century skyline. Designed by Foster + Partners with the engineers Arup and built by Skanska, it was completed in December 2003 and opened in April 2004: 41 storeys and 180 metres of tapering glass in a spiral diagrid of steel. In 2004 it won the Stirling Prize, Britain's most prestigious architecture award.

   Did you know? Builders on the site found the skeleton of a teenage girl from Roman London, about 1,600 years old; she was reburied at the foot of the tower in 2006.

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5. 05 Shanghai Tower

   People's Republic of China · 6.6 km from Shanghai31.235° N 121.501° E

   

   The Shanghai Tower is the tallest building in China and one of the tallest in the world, a 632-metre spiral of glass that completes the trio of supertall towers in Lujiazui, the financial district on the eastern bank of the Huangpu river in Pudong. Its neighbours, the Jin Mao Tower of 1999 and the Shanghai World Financial Center of 2008, were planned together with it as early as 1993, and the three form the world's first cluster of adjacent supertall buildings. Construction started in November 2008, the tower topped out in August 2013 and opened in stages from 2015.

   Did you know? Its tuned mass damper is a pendulum of about 1,000 tonnes that uses eddy currents, generated by magnets moving over copper plates, to resist the sway.

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6. 06 Burj Khalifa

   United Arab Emirates · 2.3 km from Dubai25.197° N 55.274° E

   

   At 829.8 metres to the tip of its spire, the Burj Khalifa has been the tallest building on Earth since it opened in January 2010, taking the title from Taipei 101. It rises out of Downtown Dubai beside Sheikh Zayed Road, and it was conceived less as an office tower than as the anchor of an entire new district: the Dubai Mall, an artificial lake, hotels and residential blocks were all planned around it. Construction started in January 2004 and the exterior was finished in October 2009. During the build it was called Burj Dubai; it was renamed at the opening ceremony after Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE, whose federal government had helped Dubai through the debt crisis that followed 2008.

   Did you know? During Ramadan, residents above the 150th floor break their fast a few minutes later than those at street level, because they see the sun set later.

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7. 07 Jin Mao Tower

   People's Republic of China · 6.7 km from Shanghai31.237° N 121.501° E

   

   The Jin Mao Tower was the first of the supertall buildings that now crowd the Lujiazui peninsula in Pudong, across the Huangpu River from the Bund, and it is still the most graceful of them. Completed in 1999 to a design by Adrian Smith of the Chicago firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it rises 420.5 metres to the tip of its spire. Its name translates roughly as "Golden Prosperity Building", and the whole design is built around the number eight, associated with prosperity in Chinese culture: 88 floors, divided into sixteen segments, each one-eighth shorter than the sixteen-storey base, with an octagonal concrete core ringed by eight great composite columns and eight steel ones. It was officially dedicated on 28 August 1998, a date chosen for its eights.

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8. 08 Empire State Building

   United States · 3.1 km from New York City40.748° N 73.986° W

   

   The Empire State Building is the skyscraper against which other tall buildings are still measured, and it earned that status in a single burst of work at the start of the Great Depression. It stands on the west side of Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets, on the site of the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Construction began on 17 March 1930 and the building opened on 1 May 1931, a building time of about 410 days for a 102-storey tower. The architects were Shreve, Lamb & Harmon. At 1,250 feet (381 m) to the top floor and 1,454 feet (443 m) with its spire and antenna, it was the tallest building in the world until the North Tower of the World Trade Center overtook it in 1970.

   Did you know? On 28 July 1945 a B-25 bomber flying in thick fog struck the north face between the 78th and 80th floors, killing 14 people.

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9. 09 CCTV Headquarters, Beijing

   People's Republic of China · 5.6 km from Beijing39.915° N 116.457° E

   

   Seen from Beijing's East Third Ring Road, the headquarters of China Central Television refuses to behave like a skyscraper. Instead of a single shaft rising to a point, two leaning towers climb out of a shared base and are joined at the top by an overhanging bridge that turns sharply in mid-air, so the whole building forms a closed, three-dimensional loop around an empty centre. The angled upper section reaches out 75 metres into space with nothing below it. Its surface is wrapped in an irregular grid of steel bracing that grows denser where the forces are greatest, making the structure's own stresses visible on the façade. Beijingers quickly gave it a nickname — dà kùchǎ, "big shorts" — said to have been coined by a taxi driver.

   Did you know? The headquarters was built on the 20-hectare site of an abandoned motorcycle factory in Beijing's new Central Business District.

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10. 10 Woolworth Building

    United States · 1.5 km from New York City40.712° N 74.008° W

    

    For sixteen years the tallest building on Earth was a Gothic cathedral built for a five-and-dime fortune. The Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway rises 792 feet (about 241 metres) over City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, its pale terracotta tower climbing through setbacks to a copper-roofed pyramid crowned with pinnacles. When it opened in 1913 it took the title of world's tallest building from the Metropolitan Life Tower, and held it until 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building overtook it in 1929–1930.

    Did you know? A private swimming pool was built in the basement for F. W. Woolworth himself; long drained, it was restored in the 2010s for the new apartments.

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11. 11 Turning Torso

    Sweden · 3.3 km from Malmö55.613° N 12.976° E

    

    The Turning Torso turns a residential tower into sculpture. Santiago Calatrava based it on one of his own works, a white marble piece called Twisting Torso that suggests a human body turning at the waist, and translated it into nine blocks of five storeys each, stacked around a central core and rotated one after another so that the top stands a full 90 degrees from the base. At 190 metres and 54 storeys, it was the tallest building in the Nordic countries when it opened in 2005.

    Did you know? The tower cost about 1.8 billion Swedish kronor, more than double its original budget of around 800 million.

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12. 12 Chrysler Building

    United States · 3.7 km from New York City40.751° N 73.976° W

    

    The Chrysler Building is the purest expression of the optimism New York built for itself at the end of the 1920s. It was designed by William Van Alen and paid for by Walter P. Chrysler out of his own pocket, as an investment for his children rather than as a headquarters for his car company. Work started in January 1929 and the building opened in May 1930, sixteen months later, with 77 floors and a height of 1,046 feet (319 metres). For eleven months it was the tallest building in the world, and the first structure of any kind to pass 1,000 feet.

    Did you know? Van Alen sued Walter Chrysler for his unpaid architect's fee and won, but the lawsuit hurt his reputation so badly that he received few major commissions afterwards.

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13. 13 Bank of China Tower

    People's Republic of China · 3.8 km from Hong Kong22.279° N 114.161° E

    

    On a crowded waterfront of towers, the Bank of China Tower is the one that looks cut from crystal. Designed by I. M. Pei and completed in 1990, it rises at 1 Garden Road in Central, on the plot once occupied by the colonial Murray House. Pei had a personal tie to the client — his father had been a manager of the Bank of China — and he answered the commission with an image drawn from Chinese painting: a stalk of bamboo, growing section by section towards the light.

    Did you know? Murray House, the colonial building that once stood on the site, was taken apart stone by stone and rebuilt in Stanley on the south side of the island.

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