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.
Taipei 101
Various sources, including the building's owners, give the height of Taipei 101 as , roof height and top floor height as and . This lower figure is derived by measuring from the top of a platform at the base. CTBUH standards, though, include the height of the platform in calculating the overall height, as it represents part of the man-made structure and is above the level of the surrounding pavement. Taipei 101 displaced the Petronas Towers as the tallest building in the world by . The record it claimed for greatest height from ground to pinnacle was surpassed by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is in height. Taipei 101's records for roof height and highest occupied floor briefly passed to the Shanghai World Financial Center in 2008, which in turn yielded these records as well to the Burj.