In 1930 the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street, the Bank of Manhattan Building, raced for the title. The Chrysler Building's builders secretly assembled a 38-meter (125-foot) spire inside the building to claim 319 meters (1,046 feet), even though it had a lower top occupied floor and was shorter when both spires were excluded. Van Alen got permission to add a 125-foot spire to the Chrysler Building and had it built in secret inside the frame, so that Severance did not know the building's final height until the end. The spire came to the site in four sections and was raised in about 90 minutes, bringing the tower to 1,046 feet. The Chrysler Building in 1930 and the Empire State Building a year later were the first two supertall skyscrapers. After that no supertall building was completed for 38 years, until the John Hancock Center in Chicago in 1969, the first supertall built outside New York City.

Urban legend says the Empire State Building's spire was designed as a mooring point for airships, called dirigibles. The CTBUH says it was actually built to make sure the building would be taller than the Chrysler Building. The Willis Tower, formerly the Sears Tower, was designed so Sears could have both very large office floors and some smaller ones for tenants needing less space. That need led to the first bundled tube structure, a design later used in most supertall buildings, including the Burj Khalifa. The Willis Tower rests on nine 75-foot-by-75-foot tubes bundled together up to the 50th floor, and then the tubes end at different heights so the tower narrows as it rises. The tubes stand on concrete caissons that go down to bedrock. The sections of its steel frame were pre-assembled and bolted into place.

Sears' naming rights expired in 2003, but the building was still called the Sears Tower for years. After an insurance broker, Willis Group Holdings, leased part of the building and got naming rights, it was renamed the Willis Tower on 16 July 2009. Two construction teams built the Petronas Towers, one tower each, with the right to build the skybridge as the prize for the team that reached the top first. Tower 2 won the race, and the whole project took six years instead of the eight years first expected. The Petronas Towers' two-story skybridge, 170 meters above the ground and 58.4 meters long, joins the towers on the 41st and 42nd floors. It is more than a walkway: it is an important design feature that helps people move between the towers during high winds, and it is part of the fire evacuation plan.

Taipei 101 has a 728-ton tuned mass damper, a huge steel pendulum that cancels out the swaying caused by strong wind. It hangs in a multi-story space near the top of the tower, where it is best placed to counter overturning forces, which is a necessary precaution in a typhoon-prone part of the world. The Burj Khalifa has a Y-shaped plan so every apartment and hotel room has windows. As the tapering tower rises, setbacks spiral up the three wings and cut the mass of the tower as it gets higher. Engineers tested the setbacks and the shape in the wind tunnel to minimize the wind forces. The Burj Khalifa took about six years to build: construction began on 21 September 2004, the exterior was finished on 1 October 2009, and the building opened on 4 January 2010. It was the first building to hold the title of the world's tallest freestanding structure since the Empire State Building lost it to the Ostankino Tower in 1967.

As of October 2026 there are 260 completed supertall or taller buildings, in 70 cities. A supertall building is 300 to 599 meters tall, and a megatall building is 600 meters or taller. Most supertall skyscrapers are in Asia. The Empire State Building packs its steel columns in a close grid. That grid supports the tower, but it also means the building has virtually no open spans, or column-free spaces, on each floor. Tube designs, by contrast, put the structure in the outside walls so the interior needs only a few columns at the core. In the 1990s a notable boom in skyscraper building began in East Asia and Southeast Asia. Since then China has built more skyscrapers than any other country, and skyscrapers are now found in over 70 countries. Before that, building slowed sharply in the 1930s Great Depression and did not fully resume until the 1950s.

Words to know

• spire: pointed tower top
• supertall: over 300 meters
• caissons: deep concrete shafts
• dirigibles: airships