The world’s skyscrapers have brought us awe and wonder, and yet they remain controversial – for their high costs, shadows, and overt grandiosity. But, decade by decade they keep getting higher and higher.  Jason Barr explains What is driving this global building spree of epic proportions, in Cities in the Sky, and why they appeal to cities and nations: how they get financed, why they succeed economically, and how they change a city’s skyline and enable the world’s greatest metropolises to thrive in the 21st century.

When the Empire State Building ( 1250 feet) was completed, its roof deck was, designed as a docking port of bumps. The idea was to moor airships to mast and facilitate a new era in transatlantic travel, depositing visitors to the New York streets via high-speed elevators. It was a massive failure, the winds were too high and unpredictable and only one airship ever managed to dock there. The owners quickly repurposed the dock as an observation deck and in its first year of operation, made $800, 000   plus the $1mn from the office rentals for the entire year. Skyscrapers is always about spectacle as much as speculation. 

Skyscrapers are engines of progress – the future for densifying cities,  increasing housing equity, and even improving the environment. If building mile-high skyscrapers is a real possibility he suggests, “a city of 9million (size of London, New York, Hong Kong) could be housed in a mere three hundred buildings”.

Hong Kong boasts more skyscrapers in a denser area than any other in the world. Its towers are mostly not super-tall or super flashy, instead they are an extrusion of land values; with prices for limited space so high, the only way is up.

While New York’s new breed of “skinny scrapers” casting shadow along the southern edge of Central Park, a third of Hong Kong’s high-rises are social housing.

In the mainland China and the Gulf, skyscrapers represented arrival in the world of modernity and affluence. In London, the presence of the empty Centre Point, a sleek 1960s West End office tower, which for decades looked like a Swinging Sixties property scam, and much-derided local authority high-rises tainted the image of the skyscraper. 

Barr chronicles the genesis in Chicago to the second wave of globalisation at the end of the 20th century. He begins with developers rather than architects, and onto stories of bankruptcies, corruption and over-reach are largely absent.

He mentions the latest spiky “ego scraper” the kilometre-high Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, which began construction more than a decade ago but remains a scaffolded stub- a concrete expression of the architecture of pointless. 

How Chicago kicked off the vogue for highness but lost to New York. The Mohawks who dominated steel-framed construction with a seemingly total lack of fear of heights or the Central Americans who currently make up the crews erecting these gargantuan towers. In Gulf Towers  the construction was completed by underpaid immigrant workers.

The new skinny supernal, 262 Fifth Avenue, is currently irritating New Yorkers as it blocks view of the Empire State, as New York City has no controls on height, you could build upwards for ever. The megafauna of the architecture world will continue to excite or frustrate.

Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers by Jason M Barr, Scribner £25/$32.50, 384 pages.