List of tallest buildings and structures
The tallest artificial structure is Burj Khalifa, a skyscraper in Dubai that reached in height on January 17, 2009. By April 7, 2008 it had been built higher than the KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota, USA. That September it officially surpassed Poland's Warsaw radio mast, which stood from 1974 to 1991, to become the tallest structure ever built. Guyed lattice towers such as these masts had held the world height record since 1954.
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.