History of the world's tallest buildings
The buildings that were the tallest secular skyscrapers, which excludes religious buildings, were:
The list of tallest buildings is based on the default metric of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), that of measuring to the highest architectural element. Other criteria would generate a different list. Shanghai World Financial Center is not on the above list, but it surpassed Taipei 101 in 2008 to become the building with the highest occupied floor. Using the criteria of highest tip (including antennae), the World Trade Center in New York City was the world's tallest building from 1972 to 2000, until the Sears Tower in Chicago (which already had a higher occupied floor than the World Trade Center) had its antenna extended to give that building the world's tallest tip; a title it held until the 2010 completion of Burj Khalifa. Petronas Towers and Taipei 101 were never the world's tallest buildings by the highest–tip criteria.
List of tallest buildings and structures
A bigger controversy was the rivalry between two New York skyscrapers built in the Roaring Twenties — the Chrysler Building and the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building, now called the Trump Building but better known as 40 Wall Street (thus avoiding confusion with the many other Trump-named buildings). The latter was tall, had a shorter pinnacle, and had a much higher top occupied floor (the second category in the 1996 criteria for tallest building). In contrast, the Chrysler Building employed a very long spire secretly assembled inside the building to claim the title of world's tallest building with a total height of , despite having a lower top occupied floor and a shorter height when both buildings' spires are not counted in their heights. Although the architects of record for 40 Wall were H. Craig Severance and Yasuo Matsui, the firm of Shreve & Lamb (who also designed the Empire State Building) served as consulting architects. They wrote a newspaper article claiming that 40 Wall was actually the tallest, since it contained the world's highest usable floor. They pointed out that the observation deck of 40 Wall was nearly higher than the top floor of the Chrysler, whose surpassing spire was strictly ornamental and essentially inaccessible. Despite the protest, the Chrysler Building was generally accepted as the tallest building in the world for almost a year, until it was surpassed by the Empire State Building’s in 1931.