Ranking criteria and alternatives

The international non-profit organization Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) was
formed in 1969 and announces the title of "The World's Tallest Building" and sets the standards by
which buildings are measured. It maintains a list of the 100 tallest completed buildings in the
world.[3] The organization currently ranks Burj Khalifa in Dubai as the tallest at 828 m (2,717 ft).[3] The
CTBUH only recognizes buildings that are complete however, and some buildings included within
the lists in this article are not considered finished by the CTBUH.
In 1996, as a response to the dispute as to whether the Petronas Towers or the Sears Tower was
taller,[4] the council listed and ranked buildings in four categories:

 height to structural or architectural top;

 height to floor of highest occupied floor;
 height to top of roof (removed as category in November 2009);[5] and
 height to top of any part of the building.
Spires are considered integral parts of the architectural design of buildings, to which changes would
substantially change the appearance and design of the building, whereas antennas may be added or
removed without such consequences. The Petronas Towers, with their spires, are thus ranked
higher than the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) with its antennas, despite the Petronas
Towers' lower roofs and lower highest point.
Until 1996, the world's tallest building was defined by the height to the top of the tallest architectural
element, including spires but not antennae. This led to a rivalry between the Bank of Manhattan
Building and the Chrysler Building. The Bank of Manhattan Building (aka 40 Wall Street) employed
only a short spire and was 282.5 m (927 ft) tall and had a much higher top occupied floor (the
second category in the 1996 criteria for tallest building). In contrast, the Chrysler Building employed
a very large 38.1 m (125 ft) spire secretly assembled inside the building to claim the title of world's
tallest building with a total height of 318.9 m (1,046 ft), although it had a lower top occupied floor and
a shorter height when both buildings' spires were excluded.
Upset by Chrysler's victory, Shreve & Lamb, the consulting architects of the Bank of Manhattan
Building, wrote a newspaper article claiming that their building was actually the tallest, since it
contained the world's highest usable floor, at 255 m (837 ft). They pointed out that the observation
deck in the Bank of Manhattan Building was nearly 30 m (98 ft) above the top floor in the Chrysler
Building, whose surpassing spire was strictly ornamental and inaccessible.[6]
At present, the Burj Khalifa tops the list by some margin, regardless of which criterion is applied.[7][8]

Tallest buildings in the world

As of 2019, this list includes all 64 buildings (completed and architecturally topped out) which reach
a height of 350 metres (1,150 ft) or more, as assessed by their highest architectural feature. Of
these, 27 (48%) are in China. Six of the last seven buildings to have held the record as 'tallest
building' are still found in the list, with the exception being the North Tower of the original World
Trade Center at 417 metres (1,368 ft) after its destruction in the September 11 attacks of 2001. If the
twin towers were still standing today they would occupy numbers 24 and 25 on the list (or 23 and 24
since it can be assumed the rebuilt One World Trade Center would have never been built).