Building Height Controversies Explained

A building's official height is not a simple measurement. It is a ruling. The gap between what a building physically is and what gets recorded as its height depends on decisions made by committees, governments, and developers about what counts as a spire, what counts as an antenna, and what counts as too tall to build at all.

That gap is where every dispute on this page starts. Three cases below show the pattern from three different angles: a technical ruling on a single structure, a government policy shutting down an entire category of construction, and a decade-long stall that has left one building's final claim to the record still unresolved.

In May 2012, design changes to One World Trade Center removed the fiberglass covering (a radome) planned for the top of its mast. Without that covering, the 407.9-foot structure looked less like an architectural spire and more like a bare antenna - and antennas do not count toward official height under CTBUH convention.

The distinction was not cosmetic. With the mast included, the building reached 1,776 feet and became the tallest in the Western Hemisphere. Without it, the building measured 1,368 feet and dropped to seventh-tallest in the United States, behind Chicago's Trump International Hotel and Tower.

On November 12, 2013, CTBUH ruled the mast qualified as a permanent spire, not an antenna, based on its architectural significance rather than its function. The building kept its 1,776-foot height and its Western Hemisphere title. The ruling was contested at the time and remains the clearest example on record of how much a single classification call can move a building up or down a global ranking.

In June 2020, China's National Development and Reform Commission banned construction of new buildings taller than 500 metres nationwide, citing safety concerns and resource waste. In October 2021, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development went further, announcing broader restrictions on extremely tall buildings and citing cost, energy consumption, safety, and environmental impact.

China had built more supertall towers than any other country in the preceding decade. The restrictions did not touch buildings already completed or under construction, but they closed off the pipeline that had been producing a large share of the world's new tallest-building contenders. Any future record attempt from a Chinese city now has to clear a policy ceiling that did not exist before 2020, not just an engineering one.

Jeddah Tower broke ground in April 2013 with a planned height of at least 1,008 metres - enough to surpass Burj Khalifa by roughly 180 metres and become the first structure to cross the one-kilometre mark. Construction reached the 63rd floor by January 2018, when the owner halted structural work amid labour issues tied to a contractor following a period of anti-corruption arrests in Saudi Arabia. The pandemic extended the pause through 2020, and the site sat largely inactive for nearly five years.

Construction officially restarted in January 2025 following a September 2023 request for proposals. Progress since has been steady - the 66th floor by April 2025, the 80th by January 2026, the 100th by April 2026, and 113 floors by September 2026 - with completion projected for August 2028.

The developer has kept the tower's exact final height confidential, and architect Adrian Smith has suggested the design could reach well beyond 1,008 metres. Until it tops out, Jeddah Tower's claim to the tallest-building title is a construction schedule, not a fact - a five-year gap already separates its groundbreaking from its restart, and any title it eventually holds will have been earned slower than almost any supertall in the modern era.

None of these three stories is about a building lying about its height. Each is about the measurement convention itself moving under a real structure: a committee redefining spire versus antenna, a government redefining what may legally be built, a developer redefining its own timeline in public.

That instability is exactly why we track occupied height alongside architectural top for every building in the Honest 100. A ranking built only on the official record inherits every one of these disputes without flagging them. A ranking that also shows what a building's occupants actually experience gives you a number that a committee ruling, a government ban, or a stalled construction site cannot quietly move.