(upbeat music)
Why are we obsessed with building skyscrapers?
We're just like, yeah, let's see if we can do this.
Like, hey, can we make buildings go more up?
The higher up you go, the closer you are to the birds.
I'm not supposed to be here.
Look at me, the homo sapien.
Men have to break records.
Constantly.
Just always seems to be a size competition, doesn't it?
Whoever has the biggest skyscraper wins, you know.
Not so long ago, our cities looked like this.
A hundred years and 5,400 skyscrapers later,
they look like this.
Today, we are building skyscrapers
around the world collectively at something
like 26 feet every hour.
As long as it just keeps going up that fast,
doesn't come down equally fast, I think we're okay.
Skyscrapers have
transformed the world we live in.
They literally and figuratively
are bringing the world closer together.
Urbanization is probably the most important social
and economic phenomena in human history.
They've inspired our imaginations.
Who's to say what's too tall?
You ever watch the sunset on top
of the Empire State Building?
It's breathtaking.
And they've stoked our darkest fears.
I mean, King Kong did not climb a house.
He climbed the Empire State Building.
(King Kong roars)
This is the history of the skyscraper
and the race to the top.
From the 10th floor to the 163rd.
(upbeat music)
How tall do I think a skyscraper is?
Probably like 200 feet?
I bring it at least a hundred feet, right?
I'm gonna say 500 feet.
1,000 is what I'm gonna guess.
The question about what is the height
that makes a skyscraper a skyscraper
is a debatable question.
(tools bang) (wrench ratchets)
The word first was used to mean a building
that was 10 stories or more.
Today, most experts would agree
that a skyscraper ain't a skyscraper
unless it's at least 492 feet high.
If we were to stack all 5,400 skyscrapers
on the planet one on top of the other,
they would reach four times as far
as the International Space Station.
(upbeat music)
But our dream of touching the sky is nothing new.
(upbeat music)
Skyscrapers are just part of a long line
of a human desire, really a need, to build grand projects.
We told ourselves the heavens are up there.
And so we're that much closer.
I think humans have long tried to ascend to the heights,
whether it's climbing a mountain or building a tower.
To dream big is to build high.
But how high is too high?
If you lived 5,000 years ago in the land of Babel,
you'd find the answer lies in the number 5,433,
give or take.
According to the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament,
the people of Babel tried to build a tower so tall,
it will reach as high as heaven.
The closer we get to the gods,
the better connected we are to the gods.
You're trying to tickle God, baby.
That's what we're doing.
Ah, we're trying to tickle the Lord.
You know what I mean?
Scripture describes a tower precisely 5,433,
and a bit, cubits high, making it three times taller
than the tallest skyscraper today.
See, now I'm concerned.
Like these are people trying to go to heaven
without earning the right to.
You wanna knock on God's bathroom door?
Stop.
But even the number 5,433
isn't big enough to reach heaven.
(thunder crashes)
So God comes down to Earth instead and destroys the tower.
[Disembodied Voice] Why?
He scatters the people about the Earth
and they end up speaking different languages.
(characters speak foreign language)
Unable to understand each other,
the dream of touching the sky has become a nightmare.
(thunder crashes)
But as history will prove, it's a dream that refuses to die.
(upbeat jazz music)
Ever since people began building,
they've been building things taller and taller.
I mean the pyramids are thousands of years old
and those were built to impress.
The pyramids at Giza, Gothic cathedrals, the Eiffel Tower.
These huge structures are built to make an impression,
but they're not meant for actual human habitation
or regular use.
Humans were originally hunter and gatherers.
And so, you know, basically evolved to work,
live, eat, play on the ground.
It turns out the dreaming big is one thing.
Being able to live and work in the sky is another.
And the higher you want to go,
the greater the technical challenge.
(upbeat music)
(boat horn blows)
New York in the 1880s.
It's the city of the future,
but surprisingly the architectural jewel
in its crown isn't a skyscraper.
It's the newly built Brooklyn Bridge,
the eighth wonder of the modern world.
Standing at 272 feet, its towers are the tallest structures
in the city because New York is still a low rise city.
Blame the number five.
There was no actual law saying
that you couldn't build higher.
And of course, engineers had figured out ways to do so,
but we don't see buildings higher than that at the time,
because of a physiological issue for humans.
The maximum height of buildings
is based on the willingness of people
to climb a flight of stairs.
Nobody is gonna climb more than five flights of stairs.
The most amount of floors I would walk up
without an elevator really depends on what's at the top.
Yeah, if I was carrying a bunch of groceries,
like I'd have to hire someone to walk up the stairs for me
and then another person to carry me on their back.
I don't wanna carry groceries up four flights.
It's probably gonna be like two flights.
No, it's gonna be three flights.
And New York might still be stuck somewhere
between the second and fifth floors.
My legs.
If not for an uplifting,
technological demonstration.
Please.
It's a story that begins 30 years earlier
at the 1853 World's Fair in New York City
where an exhibit will change the world using one ax
and two ratchets.
Factories and warehouses already have elevating systems
to lift and lower goods, but not people.
No one wants to dangle from a rope.
Now there were lifts that could hoist goods and supplies
up many stories with a rope, you know, and pulley system.
That existed for a long time before there were elevators.
Problem was, what if the rope breaks?
(rope snaps) (character screams)
Oh my God, that'd be so scary.
I would just be regretting all of the decisions
that led me up to that point.
I would be terrified.
I'm claustrophobic actually.
So that would be bad.
Panic, have trouble breathing,
might pee myself a little bit.
I'm a screamer.
And I tend to projectile vomit when I'm scared.
So it's not gonna go well for anybody
that is in that elevator, including myself.
If you think going into this elevator
is endangering your life, you're not gonna do it.
Enter a man named Elisha Otis
who rides an elevator car to the top
of a demonstration tower.
And then his assistant on the ground picks up an ax.
Don't do it.
The crowds were scared.
They were, they thought the thing was gonna fall.
They're not wrong.
The platform does fall,
but only for a few inches before it's stopped
by an ingenious locking mechanism,
comprised of two ratchets.
[Disembodied Voice] Science.
History has recorded that was the pivotal moment
in elevator technology.
Otis had come up with the first elevator
that had a breaking system
so that if the elevator rope snapped,
that the elevator wouldn't just crash to the ground,
it would stop.
Otis's safety break is a game changer.
[Disembodied Voice] Going up.
The elevator is one of the fundamental innovations
that make skyscrapers possible.
So having a form of vertical transportation that is safe,
rapid, and comfortable radically
alters the building height equation.
The first skyscraper that had elevators in it
was the Equitable Building.
It was an insurance company building right on Broadway,
and it was only eight stories tall.
But still eight stories in 1870
was a ridiculous number of stories.
In many respects, the Equitable Building it sort
of established the precedent that business
can be conducted in the clouds.
Standing at a height of only 155 feet,
it's one small step towards the sky.
But to trigger the giant leap
into the age of the skyscraper,
one really bad thing has to happen in Chicago.
At number 137 West Dekoven Street.
So in 1871, Chicago was the fastest growing city
in America.
Similar to many cities during that time,
the vast majority of the buildings were made of wood.
Even the sidewalks are made out of wood.
Not only was the city of Chicago primarily
made out of wood.
There was an aggressive drought.
All you need is a spark and the whole city is ablaze.
(siren rings)
The first spark is in a barn
behind 137 West Dekoven Street.
From there it spreads and engulfs an entire city
in a three day conflagration.
So the fire did two things.
It cleared away, for lack of a better term, the old city.
And it created a kind of a, like a blank slate
on which a new city could emerge.
The Great Chicago Fire wipes
out three square miles of the city,
destroys 17,500 buildings, and 120 miles of sidewalks.
It kills 300 people and leaves 90,000 homeless.
Chicago needs to rebuild.
Architects, draftsmen, engineers, builders,
construction workers poured in from all around the country
to rebuild this great growing young city.
And rebuild they do.
In the wake of the fire,
10,000 new building permits will be issued,
including one for Chicago's first skyscraper,
the Home Insurance Building.
At 10 stories, it's two stories higher
than New York's Equitable Building,
which might not sound like very much.
But from here on in the sky will be the limit
because Chicago's Home Insurance Building has an advantage.
The secret of 33%.
Up until now walls have been built of stone
or bricks cemented with mortar.
Since the pyramids, it's been the way to raise yourself
above the competition.
[Disembodied Voice] Time to innovate.
Fundamental problem to building tall
was that a building relied on the walls
to bear the load of the building
and those walls were made of brick or stone.
The problem with load bearing masonry walls
is that as you go taller,
walls have to get thicker and thicker and thicker
on the bottom floors.
And this creates several problems.
(upbeat music)
The medieval Italian town of San Gimignano
is famous for its towers.
They were built as displays of wealth and status,
which is all they were good for.
It doesn't really allow for a whole lot of light
to get inside it.
And other than being tall, it's not terribly useful.
As the walls get thicker,
your rentable space on the inside gets smaller and smaller.
One young Chicago architect
has a bird brain solution.
William Le Baron Jenney's inspiration is a book
and a bird cage.
[Disembodied Voice] Tweet, tweet.
And the bird cage is made
of this very skinny pieces of metal.
But that nevertheless was able
to support a stack of heavy books.
The idea was by adding iron inside the masonry wall,
you could reduce the weight of the building
by reducing some of the masonry that was needed.
Once your building doesn't need to be held up
by its exterior walls and instead it can be held up
by steel cage or framework or skeleton,
that allows a lot more space for windows.
And that, crucially, allows a lot more light
and suddenly, bing, in his mind came this eureka moment
of I can build a skyscraper.
I think that's a great story.
So I'm not going to say whether it happened
or it didn't happen.
Jenney's 138-foot Home Insurance Building
is made possible by a steel framed structure,
33% lighter than traditional masonry.
That metal steel skeleton has really been one
of the hallmarks of what is a skyscraper.
In the race to the top, it's advantage Chicago.
But New York has its own secret weapon, the five and dime.
(numbers click)
In 1889, just four years after Chicago
unveils the Home Insurance Building,
Paris reveals what's truly possible
with the new technology.
The Eiffel Tower becomes the tallest tower in the world,
breaking the 1,000 foot barrier.
One of the early sight seers is Frank Woolworth,
the five and dime king.
He starts out as a potato farm
and then he goes onto the Eiffel Tower
and he loved the Eiffel Tower.
So it wasn't very hard to convince him when he came back
to America to build the world's tallest skyscraper.
And people flocked to it.
It was the Woolworth Building in New York.
When it opened in 1913,
they called it the Cathedral of Commerce.
Unveiled in 1913, it cost $13.5 million
and was paid for in cash.
Standing at 792 feet,
it was the highest office building in the world.
And America's skyscraper frenzy was set for lift off.
(crowd cheers)
(cuckoo clocks whistles) (dominoes click)
(balls smack) (dial clicks)
(upbeat music)
It's the 1920s.
The decade when New York City becomes the Big Apple.
Since the turn of the century,
it's population has doubled.
Never before has it had such confidence
and such wealth.
1920s New York, we just got past the Spanish flu,
World War I, things are building.
People are innovating.
People are growing.
(train wheels click)
Penn Station is
a gargantuan transportation hub,
11 platforms, 21 tracks, 144 trains an hour.
Everyone wanted to be a part of what was going on
in New York City, whether you were investing
in construction or you were a construction worker.
As the city's population grows,
so grows the demand for space.
And New York City was growing at an insane rate.
And literally to the point where buildings
were being put up every single day.
So between 1924 and 1929,
the price of land in Manhattan shoots up 44%,
which says a lot.
Fundamentally, a developer builds a skyscraper to fill it
with people who are paying money.
There's a careful calculation
that anyone making a skyscraper has to go through.
And that has to do with at what point
is the height the most profitable?
If you can break even on 10 floors,
then every floor above that will be hugely profitable.
So the bigger the skyscraper
often better the rents you can charge.
But the dream of reaching the sky
isn't fueled only by money.
What kind of personality does it take
to build a skyscraper?
I think you kind of have to be a little bit
of an egomaniac to build a skyscraper
because it's very much like,
hey, look at me.
I am the tallest out of everyone.
Pay attention to me.
You have to be the big swinging D in the house
in order to be able to build one of those.
Fricking Jeffrey from my third grade
probably builds skyscrapers.
He took all the cake at my birthday party.
Not cool, Jeffrey.
It's a race to the top that's powered by money,
ego, and 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen gas.
In 1928, Walter Chrysler announces to the world
that he's gonna build the world's tallest building,
over 800 feet high.
Taller than the Woolworth Building,
the previous tallest building.
At the same time,
the Bank of Manhattan lower down on Manhattan Island
is building what it claims is going
to be the tallest skyscraper in the world.
Well, Chrysler didn't like this idea.
Chrysler, in secret, developed a plan
to make his building taller.
The people at the Bank of Manhattan Building got wind
of Chrysler's plan to extend their building.
So they went ahead and extended their building higher.
So when the Bank of Manhattan was completed,
it was looking like the tallest skyscraper in the world.
It was going to win the contest.
But secretly, as the Chrysler Building was being completed,
its architect had built on the inside of its dome,
a 120 foot tall steel spire.
On October 23rd, 1929,
Chrysler's secret spire rises like a telescoping antenna.
At the point that the Bank of Manhattan Building
was topped out.
All's fair in love and war and skyscrapers.
And not only a tallest skyscraper,
but also the first skyscraper taller than the Eiffel Tower,
at more than a thousand feet tall.
And Walter Chrysler had the tallest skyscraper in the world
and he got to brag about it for a year.
Only for a year because less than a mile away,
another group of developers is watching the competition.
61, 62, 63.
And adding floors to their design.
97, 98, 99.
The original Empire State Building
was gonna be 80 floors and 1,000 feet.
That would only have been a little bit taller
than Chrysler's building.
That wasn't a lot of room for comfort
because maybe Chrysler had something up his sleeve.
And they came up with this idea of a mooring mast.
The idea was to add another 200 feet
to the top of the Empire State Building,
really to make it taller,
but they told the world, okay,
we're gonna build this mooring mast for airships.
The Airship docking station
puts the Empire State Building over the top.
Oh yeah.
These passengers would walk down a gang plank,
102 stories above the ground and go in through the top
of the Empire State Building.
(robots beep)
But 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen gas
will prove inherently unstable.
Just six years after the Empire State Building opens,
the Hindenburg explodes in New Jersey,
killing 36 and the dream of airships over Manhattan.
So the image that you will see of the airship docked
to the top of the Empire State Building
is actually early Photoshop.
So it's faked.
[Disembodied Voice] Not the airships.
[Terri Meyer Boake] So it never happened.
But who needs an airship
when you've got an elevator to the clouds?
When it officially opens on April 11th, 1931,
the Empire State Building is beyond comprehension.
1,454 feet, 66 elevators, 102 floors,
$44 million, over 2 million square feet of office space
and a great view of the loser's building.
(numbers click)
Vision, money, ego,
but that's not all it takes to build a skyscraper
because when you're 1,000 feet in the air,
just six inches can be the difference
between life and death.
Am I scared of heights?
When I was 10,
I cried when my mom made me go
off the high diving board.
It's not the height that's the problem, right?
It's the falling that's the issue.
That was a lie.
I tried to go off the high diving board last week
and I cried.
Iron workers back then had to have
been the most courageous or foolhardy people
that there were.
[Disembodied Voice] Die if we have to.
The iron workers who built the steel skeletons
of skyscrapers were often first
or second generation immigrants.
Many first nations workers traveled from Canada,
particularly from the Mohawk nation near Montreal.
In my classroom, obviously I have the iconic picture
of the construction workers sitting
on probably a six inch beam 300 feet in the air
having lunch, but they're all white,
which therefore gives the impression
that construction workers were all white.
One reason we might not remember these workers of color
and indigenous workers is because there were
so many publicity photographs done of the construction
of these skyscrapers,
but they focused on white or European immigrant workers.
The Mohawk beam walkers are famous
for their fearlessness.
Their aerial ability is prized by the skyscraper builders.
An American judge rules that
because their historical lands
straddle the US/Canada border,
Mohawk iron workers are free to work in America.
They'd come down during the building season.
They would live in New York City, for example,
they would live in Brooklyn.
They would just save all the money that they earned.
And then they would sort of send it back home.
According to official accounts,
five workers lost their lives
building the Empire State Building.
Unofficially that number may have been as high as 42.
People did it because they were willing to take the risk.
(numbers click)
It was the heyday
of New York's skyscraper craze,
but that dream is about to turn into a nightmare
in the shape of a 55-foot gorilla.
(King Kong roars)
The rise of the skyscraper coincides
with the Great Depression.
So as people are suffering under all
of this economic collapse,
they're doing it under the shadow
of these huge monuments to capitalism.
As incredible as skyscrapers are,
when they were being built,
people were very apprehensive and suspicious.
What are our overlords plotting
high up in those towers?
Popular culture begins to reflect this fear.
Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which was filmed in 1927,
really explores the shift that's occurring in cities
at the time of these skyscrapers for the wealthy
and the exploitation of the poor working
in this underclasses below.
It's no coincidence the Empire State Building
is the backdrop to King Kong.
(airplane buzzes) (King Kong roars)
But nothing dreamt up in Hollywood
can come close to the real nightmare.
July 28th, 1945.
(dramatic music)
The Empire State Building like all New York
was hidden by fog as a Mitchell bomber,
trying to reach Newark Airport crashed
into the tallest structure in the world.
It's a horrifying moment in the city's history.
America's still at war with Japan in 1945.
And you have this iconic skyscraper hit
by one of its own bombers.
It's such an irony.
(numbers click)
After the war, the GI's return.
There's a boom in jobs, wages, and babies.
And the demand for office space skyrockets.
Developers spy an opportunity,
fueling a second skyscraper boom.
One that relies on an 80 foot high bamboo pole.
Profit margins are key.
And the skyscraper's traditional steel skeleton
is beginning to show its limitations.
There's a column and a column and the bigger the building,
the more columns.
So the floor plates were not open.
They had columns in them.
The amount of leaseable floor space
is being compromised.
A new technical solution is required.
Enter Fazlur Rahman Khan.
Many people consider him kind of like the Einstein
of structural engineering.
His innovation was to come up with new ways
to build tall buildings in a much more efficient manner.
Khan grows up in a Bangladeshi village,
surrounded by bamboo forests.
The young bamboo shoots grow into poles that soar 80 feet
and are as straight as they are strong.
But what inspires Khan is on the inside, nothing.
[Terri Meyer Boake] Khan invented a tube system based
on his understanding of the way bamboo is so strong
and bamboo is a hollow material with a void in the middle.
Khan's eureka moment is to place columns
around the perimeter of the tower
to create a tubular structure,
rigid on the outside and open on the inside.
This perimeter tube would span from that outside structure
to the elevator and stair core in the center,
and they were able to start to eliminate the columns
in the floor plate.
From bamboo jungle to urban jungle.
Khan's tubular design is the new blueprint for skyscrapers.
So we talk about revolutions in structural engineering,
but fundamentally it was about answering the needs
of developers who wanted to build taller,
but using less money.
Well, any system that allows you
to get 75% more leaseable space on a floor,
absolutely is a game changer for skyscrapers.
It triggers another orgy
of skyscraper construction
through the sixties and seventies.
The Chicago/New York rivalry rises again.
Chicago has the one, two punch.
The Willis Tower at 1,729 feet.
And the John Hancock Center at 1,499 feet.
(upbeat jazz music)
Probably the two most famous skyscrapers
that use this tube system.
And you can make a much bigger space and a much taller space
because the rigidity of each tube works
with the rigidity of the other tubes.
And together they make a much more rigid structure.
New York makes a stunning statement
with not one tower but two.
The other most famous buildings that used the tube system
were the Twin Towers completed
in the early 1970s in New York.
The American skyscraper scene holds steady
through the final decades of the 20th century.
Between 1970 and 2000, nearly 400 skyscrapers are completed.
An impressive number but innovations were few.
(upbeat jazz music)
(dramatic music)
Then a terrible tragedy threatens to change everything.
After 9/11 people thought, okay, cities are dead,
skyscrapers are over.
There were some years there where just the thought
of putting yourself at the potential risk
of another dreadful attack like that
just ruled that idea out for people.
What 9/11 taught people is that skyscrapers are necessary
and important for cities but they're going to need
to have more safety features, better fire safety,
better structural design that might help
against terrorist attacks.
So the effect of 9/11 on the skyscraper world
was basically to make them safer.
Evidence that 9/11 didn't scare off Americans
from skyscrapers is the fact that half of the skyscrapers
in America today were built after the Twin Towers fell.
(dramatic music)
The higher you go,
the greater the technical challenges.
For engineers, it often means going back to basics
and Skyscraper 101.
Take, for example, the winds.
The first use of the term skyscraper
was a reference to a tall sailing ship.
As with a tall sail, a tall building gathers more wind.
It's what we call a vertical cantilever.
When you start to build tall, you have wind resistance,
and that can cause a tower to shake.
It's imperceptible when a building
is only 30 or 40 stories high,
but if a building is 100 stories tall or more,
you can notice that swing.
It's attached at the ground
and it's just sticking out at the top.
So the wind can cause it to move.
So what about areas of the world
prone to high winds or earthquakes, or even both?
A place like Taiwan.
On average, the island is hit by 3.7 typhoons every year.
It's also located in what's known as the Ring of Fire
and is hit by an earthquake 7.0 or higher
every four to five years.
Yeah, if I was atop of skyscraper it started wobbling,
I guess I'd just pray, hold on to something and pray.
It's concrete, concrete doesn't wobble, right?
Or maybe it does.
Does it?
Disaster prone it may be,
but Taiwan has one of the tallest skyscrapers
in the world, Taipei 101.
101 floors, 1,667 feet to the tip of its spire.
(offscreen whistle) Big boy.
The reason it doesn't topple over
is an ingenious technical innovation
high up in the building.
At the top of the Taipei 101 is this giant damper.
It's basically a large pendulum.
They hang that at the top of the building.
It's attached back to the structure with shock absorbers.
So the idea is when the wind starts blowing,
the damper starts to swing in the opposite direction
and it slows down the sway of the building.
Welders sandwiched steel discs
in concentric rings creating a single giant cannon ball.
It weighs 728 tons.
Hurray.
And it swings.
Essentially a big weight hanging
in the center of the building,
which offsets the push and the sway from heavy wind.
For an engineer, it's kids' play.
Imagine you're on a swing.
Instead of pumping your legs to make yourself swing higher,
you draw your legs back beneath you.
You kill the swing.
That's what the damper does.
It counteracts and kills the structure's sway.
So you can rest easy when the wind blows.
And the earth quakes.
(numbers click)
(upbeat music)
Technical innovation is making the dream of living
in the sky a reality.
Or if you're in China, 1 billion dreams.
(train rattles)
In China, since the 1970s,
we've been seeing this huge movement of people
from rural areas to urban areas
seeking economic opportunity,
something that we saw in Europe in the previous century.
Over 1 billion people will move
from rural into urban areas over the next 20 years.
It's an unprecedented mass migration
and it promises to be vertical.
In 1979, four out of five citizens
of mainland China live in rural areas.
By 2020, over half of the population lives in a city.
Mainland China didn't have any skyscrapers
for most of the 20th century.
They got their very first one in 1976.
This is Shanghai in 1987.
This is Shanghai in 2013.
Today 10 of the tallest 20 skyscrapers
in the world are in China.
And six more of them are under constructions.
So within a couple years,
China will have 16 buildings in that top 20 skyscrapers
in the world.
China has really taken over in the race to the sky.
The Chinese are building
so many new skyscrapers, they can demolish old ones
by the dozen.
Many small cities or non-existent cities
basically get built from scratch.
So Chinese officials will create a master plan
and they'll say, okay, over here,
we're gonna have our skyscraper district.
So that is part of the reason why we're seeing them
spring up across China is they're not
quite as constrained by the profit motive.
(numbers click)
(upbeat music)
For more than a hundred years,
whether you're in New York, Taipei, or Shanghai,
skyscrapers have looked pretty much the same.
They're all tall and upward.
It's all these engineers and like architects
just trying to impress a girl, you know?
Are skyscrapers phallic symbols?
Absolutely.
A hundred percent skyscrapers are phallic symbols.
But that's about to change.
Thanks to the number 360.
In 1958, women represent only about 1%
of registered architects.
By 1988, it's up to 4%.
One of these female architects is Zaha Hadid.
Zaha Hadid's practice really began to challenge form.
And she started that very early on
in her low rise buildings.
And that just sort of naturally seemed to evolve into all
of the skyscrapers you see coming out of that office.
Zaha Hadid, an Iraq born British citizen,
famously said, "There are 360 degrees.
Why use only one of them?"
Hadid is called the Queen of the Curve.
Zaha Hadid is a good example of someone with amazing ideas
that took a really long time to actually see them realized.
She was awarded a number of contracts.
Her projects had never actually went through.
It wasn't until much later in her life
that she saw her first major construction project.
Hadid took the skyscraper and gave it a twist.
She was see first female to win the Pritzker Prize,
which is basically like the Nobel Prize for Architecture.
Hadid really challenged the idea of a skyscraper
as this obelisk phallic monolith,
and that there really are other shapes you could use,
not just from an aesthetic perspective,
but would also change how people utilized the building.
Students in architectural programs today
are about 50/50 male and female.
But when we look at registered architects,
it's still only 17% female.
So we still have a long way to go.
(numbers beep)
(upbeat music)
From Chicago to New York, Taipei to Shanghai,
it's a race to be number one.
But now there's a city where one isn't enough.
Only two will do.
When I think skyline, I think Dubai.
You wanna break records and get higher.
I mean if they're anything like me,
they just like getting real high.
It's 2003.
The oil rich Emirate of Dubai wants the world
to know there is more to life than crude.
They commission a skyscraper
that will break every height record standing.
You have a central core that's buttressed
by sort of three wings on each side of the central core.
It gives us this pyramidal shape.
When the Burj Khalifa topped out in 2009,
it surpasses the Taipei 101
as the world's tallest building.
In fact, it's the tallest structure in the world, period.
It's so high, you can watch the sunset twice.
Sunset number one from the base of the building
and sunset number two from the 124th floor.
When the Burj Khalifa was unveiled to the world,
one man was invited to the top, but not via the elevator.
I don't even know what I'm looking at.
Is this man climbing a building free hand?
Like no nothing.
Whoa.
Oh, this guy's trying to steal something.
I could do this.
No, I couldn't, I would die.
Is he okay?
Why am I asking?
He's clearly not okay.
Alain Robert is known as the French Spiderman,
but instead of eight legs, he uses only two hands,
some chalk, and one pair of rock climbing shoes.
They wanted to do a big event.
That was for the kind of for the opening of the building.
I enjoy climbing buildings
because it's a pure vertical.
It is something that actually, you cannot really find it
if you're climbing a natural landscape.
There is always a reference point.
Visually when you climb a building, you can see the cars,
you can see the trucks, and you can see people.
In his time,
Alain has climbed over a hundred skyscrapers.
I climbed the Empire State Building,
but not all the way to the top
because I get caught by the cops.
(police siren blares)
(upbeat music)
It might look like Alain's one in a million,
but he's actually one in three.
That's how many of us are afraid of heights,
including surprisingly, Alain.
Everybody is afraid of height.
It's not that you're afraid to fall, afraid to die.
I guess, not I guess, I know.
My love for climbing was bigger than my fear of height.
I'm one of those three.
I'm deathly afraid of heights.
I cannot look over a ledge
without having some sort of panic attack.
(numbers beep)
(upbeat jazz music)
The race for the sky has been driven
by a series of astonishing technical breakthroughs.
Honestly, I don't think we'll ever hit
this idea of too tall.
And the reason is because of the technology.
But what if that technology
becomes out of date, like 169 years out of date.
Right now, all of the elements of the technology
except one are in place to create a mile high skyscraper.
The invention that made the skyscraper possible
is now the hold up.
The only thing that we're missing right now
in terms of the technology is the elevator.
So elevator salesman have their jokes.
Ask me how business is doing.
How's business, Nick?
It has its ups and downs.
Da da da.
Elisha Otis introduced
the passenger elevator in 1853.
169 years later his invention will make
or break the next big thing.
(upbeat music)
In 2013, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
begins construction of the Jeddah Tower.
Planned to be over one kilometer or 3,000 feet high,
this is an ultra skyscraper.
But to get that high,
you've got to go back to the elevator drawing board.
An elevator car weighs 3,500 pounds.
It's passengers weigh 3,500 pounds.
That's three and a half tons.
The steel cable that lifts the car
weighs 1.78 pounds per foot.
A vertical run of 3,000 feet will yield a cable
that weighs 2.7 tons.
That's a total of 6.2 tons.
Well, the problem is that if you add a steel cable
stretched a kilometer, it would stretch.
It's not a stable mechanism.
(upbeat jazz music)
It's a new technical challenge to overcome.
One solution is to replace the steel cable
with carbon fiber ribbon, which is 80% lighter.
How do you test something to go a kilometer in the sky
before that building has been constructed,
knowing that everything that's being constructed in the core
of that building is relying on this technology to work.
The quest to build taller,
forces elevator engineers to go deeper.
[Terri Meyer Boake] So what they did was
to construct a test pit down into the earth.
One company constructed its test facility
in an active limestone mine.
It's the only one in the world that can test
over 984 feet vertical.
With an elevator traveling over 40 miles per hour,
you need that much distance to ensure a smooth ride
from liftoff to arrival.
But there may be another solution.
Instead of a 3,000 foot cable,
what if there was no cable at all?
The big problem with building tall
is you can't just have one elevator going
from floor 1, 2, 3, 4 up to 300, 400 and so forth.
You need different shafts
and express elevators and so forth.
Sooner or later, your ground floor has almost no room
for offices or apartments anymore.
It's just elevators.
(cars honk)
It's an elevator equivalent of a traffic jam.
But what if instead of a cable, each cabin had its own motor
and the ability to travel horizontally?
Elevator cabins would be more like passenger vehicles,
able to move independently and allow other cabins to pass.
(numbers beep)
(upbeat music)
But it turns out that the future of the skyscraper
is subject to forces more powerful than gravity.
In 2017, intrigue in the Saudi royal family
puts the Jeddah Tower on hiatus.
The planned kilometer high building is a 328 foot stump.
And in the skyscraper capital of the world,
Chinese President Xi Jinping declares a moratorium
on buildings over 1,640 feet.
And then this happens.
The COVID pandemic's really put a giant question mark
on the future of skyscrapers.
Now that employers have recognized
that employees can work from home,
they don't really need these big commercial leases
in skyscrapers.
When the Empire State Building opens
for business in 1931,
it features an astonishing 2 million square feet
of office space.
In 2021, 40% of its tenants
are reportedly exploring hybrid work options.
That's not the only problem facing the modern skyscraper.
Just ask 600 million birds.
Skyscrapers are clearly unnatural,
but they're particularly dangerous for birds,
especially at night because they're attracted to the light,
don't realize that they're flying into something.
So skyscrapers kill around 600 million birds
in the US every single year.
And the city that's the greatest offender is Chicago
because it lies on some major bird migratory routes.
Meanwhile, the carbon footprint
of the concrete industry is considered one
of the world's worst.
There's, you know, an increasing interest
in experimentation with wood high rises,
trying to reduce the embodied carbon element
and replace steel and concrete with wood.
But just goes to show you
that you can't always predict what direction technology
and development is going to go.
Sometimes it will surprise you.
For as long as there have been human beings,
there's been the dream of reaching for the sky.
(numbers beep)
The history of skyscrapers
is the history of American cities.
Skyscrapers grew up just as America's cities grew up
and became an essential part of that transformation
into the modern age.
And in a way, the technology that they manifested
has a similar story in the space program, the space race.
It's an example of what had been unthinkable technology
blossoming into something that became common place.
Because I'll be honest.
If I could, I wouldn't go to space.
I would want to build the biggest building in New York City,
because I feel like they forget about your space trip
if you're a billionaire,
but that building will be there forever.
And if you go to Rome, if you go to Paris,
you're going to look at a church.
Well, if you're in the United States,
you should look at our cathedrals of commerce,
our contribution to architectural grandiosity.
You should walk inside these buildings
and just look up at a space that was made to impress you.
That's the point of these skyscrapers.
Honestly, I don't think
we'll ever hit this idea of too tall.
Eventually we're gonna have skyscrapers in space.
I always picture this kind of Jetson thing
where the buildings are like avoiding traffic, right?
And I think we're gonna get those flying cars soon, right?
So be easier to park up by your apartment
that is in the sky.
And they're all made of glass, too.
All it takes is one little meteor.
Phew, your head explodes.
Space elevators.
It's gonna happen.
I look forward to it.
(upbeat music)