Wednesday, April 24, 2024 
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
December 19, 2017
Each year, the influential Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) conducts a review of skyscraper construction. 2017’s review reveals that it has been a bumper year for tall buildings, with the most skyscrapers ever completed in a single year.
2017 saw a total of 144 skyscrapers measuring over 200 m (656 ft)-tall completed worldwide. It’s an impressive number: if you stacked all the towers on top of each other, they’d reach 35,135 m (115,272 ft) – or well into the earth’s stratosphere. To give some perspective on the number of completed skyscrapers, it’s almost double the 74 completed in 2013, while there were just 23 completed back in 2000.
This year is a record breaker for geographical diversity too, with new skyscrapers built in a total of 69 cities and 23 countries. That said, China still leads the way, with 76 skyscrapers completed in that part of the world. The United States is in second place with 10 skyscrapers and South Korea comes in third place with seven completed skyscrapers.
As far as cities go, it’s largely as you’d expect, with Shenzhen, China, coming first with a dozen skyscrapers, followed by Nanning, China, and Jakarta, Indonesia, with seven and five, respectively. Perhaps surprisingly, Pyongyang in North Korea, managed four completed skyscrapers (the same number as NYC).
Of all the skyscrapers completed in 2017, 15 are rated supertall (exceeding 300 m/984 ft in height) and just two are tall enough to enter the Top 10rankings.
