A Brief History
On August 16, 2008, the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, Illinois, topped out, and immediately became the tallest residence above ground level of any building in the world.
Digging Deeper
Towering, an appropriate adverb, 1,389 feet high, the skyscraper bearing the name of the future President of the United States cost about $847 million dollars in those-days dollars and would not open until January 30, 2009. When completed with its spire in 2009, Trump International became the 7th tallest building in the world, and boasted 98 floors with 2.6 million square feet of floor space.
No longer laying claim to the “tallest residence in the world,” Trump Tower is eclipsed massively by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which boasts a roof height of over 2700 feet!
(Click on this link for more information about tall structures.)
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Al, Stefan. Supertall: How the World’s Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022,
Dupre, Judith. Skyscrapers: A History of the World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings. Black Dog & Leventhal, 2013.
The featured image in this article, a diagram by Ali Zifan of the tallest buildings in the USA in 2014, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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