The Most Striking Skyscrapers in the United States
6 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most striking skyscrapers in the United States are Flatiron Building, Empire State Building and Woolworth Building. The list covers 6 skyscrapers. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The skyscraper is an American invention, born of expensive land and new technology. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, architects in Chicago combined steel frames, fireproofing and the safety elevator to build higher than load-bearing masonry ever allowed, and New York soon turned the race for height into a contest of prestige. The city's 1916 zoning law, which forced towers to step back as they rose, gave the next generation its wedding-cake silhouettes and fed directly into the Art Deco boom of the late 1920s.
The Flatiron Building of 1902, designed by Daniel Burnham, fills a wedge of land where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue, and its prow-like corner became one of the most photographed façades in New York. The Woolworth Building by Cass Gilbert wrapped a steel frame in Gothic terracotta and was the tallest building in the world from 1913 until 1930. That title then passed briefly to the Chrysler Building, crowned with stainless-steel arches and a spire assembled inside the tower and raised in one piece, and soon after to the Empire State Building, finished in 1931 after little more than a year of construction.
Outside Manhattan the form took other directions. Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning applied Gothic Revival to a university tower whose Nationality Rooms are each decorated in the style of a different culture, while Detroit's Guardian Building dressed its Art Deco banking hall in orange brick and glazed Pewabic tile.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Flatiron Building | Skyscraper | |
| 2 | Empire State Building | Skyscraper | |
| 3 | Woolworth Building | Skyscraper | |
| 4 | Cathedral of Learning | Skyscraper | |
| 5 | Chrysler Building | Skyscraper | |
| 6 | Guardian Building | Skyscraper |
01 Flatiron Building
United States · 2.2 km from New York City40.741° N 73.990° W
Image by kokygonzalez from Pixabay The best views are free and from the street: from Madison Square Park at dusk, when the windows light up, or from a few blocks up Fifth Avenue or Broadway, where the wedge closes the view like a ship moored in the grid.
Did you know? While it was going up, New Yorkers took bets on how far the debris would scatter when the wind blew it over, and some called it Burnham's Folly.
02 Empire State Building
United States · 3.1 km from New York City40.748° N 73.986° W
Image by Olga_Fil from Pixabay The tower stands in Midtown Manhattan, with Macy's at Herald Square a block to the west, Koreatown on 32nd Street just south, and the Murray Hill neighbourhood to the east; it is so large that it has its own ZIP code.
Did you know? The accident helped push Congress to pass the Federal Tort Claims Act of 1946, which first allowed Americans to sue the federal government.
03 Woolworth Building
United States · 1.5 km from New York City40.712° N 74.008° W
No machine-readable author provided. Aude assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain Lower Manhattan, the oldest part of New York City, holds the city's first generation of skyscrapers, and the Woolworth Building faces the city's own City Hall across the park. Its silhouette, with the copper crown visible from miles away, was designed to be read from a distance.
Did you know? The inventor Nikola Tesla rented an office in the tower from 1914, but was evicted about a year later for failing to pay the rent.
04 Cathedral of Learning
United States · 4.4 km from Pittsburgh40.444° N 79.953° W
Pjah73 at English Wikipedia · Public domain Pittsburgh grew where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio, and for a century it was the steel capital of the United States. Oakland, east of downtown, is its main university and museum district.
Did you know? Chancellor Bowman insisted on Guastavino acoustic tiles in the Commons Room vaults to keep it quiet, overruling the architect's objections about cost.
05 Chrysler Building
United States · 3.7 km from New York City40.751° N 73.976° W
Image by RJA1988 from Pixabay Inside, the lobby is one of the great Art Deco interiors of New York: walls of African red granite, lights banded in Belgian blue marble and Mexican amber onyx, and a vast ceiling mural by Edward Trumbull, "Transport and Human Endeavor". The doors and cabs of its elevators are works of wood marquetry in their own right. The private Cloud Club once occupied the 66th to 68th floors; today the upper storeys are offices, and only the lobby is open to visitors. The building has been a New York City landmark since 1978.
Did you know? The tower began as the Reynolds Building of developer William H. Reynolds; Chrysler bought the plot, lease, plans and architect in October 1928 for over $2.5 million.
06 Guardian Building
United States · 0.6 km from Detroit42.330° N 83.046° W
Crisco 1492 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The building was also inventive. Rowland chose Monel metal instead of brass or bronze for the exposed metalwork, a choice later echoed on the Chrysler Building, and the Monel screen dividing the lobby from the banking hall carries a Tiffany-designed clock. The lifts were among the first to stop level with the floor and open their doors automatically. During the Second World War the tower housed the U.S. Army command for wartime production; later it served as headquarters of the gas utility MichCon, which restored the lobby in 1986. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1989 and has housed Wayne County offices since the late 2000s.
Did you know? The lobby, about 150 feet long, has a vaulted ceiling of interlocking multicoloured hexagonal tiles in an Aztec-inspired pattern.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most striking skyscrapers in the United States?
- On our list, Flatiron Building ranks first, followed by Empire State Building and Woolworth Building.
- What was the first skyscraper in the United States?
- The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, completed in 1885 to a design by William Le Baron Jenney, is usually called the first skyscraper because it was among the first tall buildings carried on a metal frame. It was demolished in 1931.
- How long did it take to build the Empire State Building?
- Construction began in March 1930 and the building opened on 1 May 1931, roughly thirteen months later. It remained the tallest building in the world until 1970.
- Why is the Flatiron Building triangular?
- It was built to fill a triangular lot formed where Broadway cuts diagonally across Fifth Avenue at Madison Square. Its shape, which reminded New Yorkers of a clothes iron, gave the building its popular name.
- How many skyscrapers are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 6 skyscrapers.