Top 10 world's tallest concrete buildings

Chicago's skyline. Photo: Getty
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Steel was the structural material of choice for skyscrapers in America for much of the last century, but the advent of the Falzur’s tube frame system and a desire to build more elaborate buildings with better working spaces led to a shift in thinking during the latter half of the millennium.

Climbing concrete formwork had been used to exceptional effect during the construction of the CN Tower in Toronto and has since become the most popular form of high rise construction.

Concrete cores in tall buildings are much more complex than in conventional buildings.

They need to be: their design is not only structurally imperative, by they are fundamental to the efficiency and effectiveness of the building.

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Interestingly, raw materials aren’t the primary limiting factor on sky scraper design. Wind, elevators and budget often cap the height on a building well before the limits of either steel or concrete are exceeded.

Architects and structural engineers now centre their efforts on minimising the overall size of a building’s core while also maintaining acceptable levels of access, services distribution and other key considerations that minimise effects on the structural integrity of the core.

Concrete buildings not only offer designers flexibility in the shapes they’re able to form and designs they’re able to create, but they also offer more uninterrupted and usable floor space than steel-framed buildings.

The following is a list of tallest buildings that use concrete as their main structural element. While it’s true that all concrete buildings use steel rebar to reinforce the structure, this list (and others compiled using Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat data) uses the following definitions.

• A steel tall building is defined as one where the main vertical and lateral structural elements and floor systems are constructed from steel.
• A concrete tall building is defined as one where the main vertical and lateral structural elements and floor systems are constructed from concrete.
• A composite tall building utilises a combination of both steel and concrete acting compositely in the main structural elements, thus including a steel building with a concrete core.

This list eliminates buildings like the Burj Khalifa and Taipei 101 because they're considered composite buildings. We've included them in our overall list of Top 50 World's Tallest Buildings because composite building construction methods are, by far, the most common in current practice.

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