Skyscrapers are the most sophisticated of buildings. They’re not easy to build, which is why the world’s first skyscraper, the Great Pyramid of Giza, 146m tall, remained the tallest for tens of thousands of years. The pyramid, constructed around 2500 BC, was superseded only in 14 AD by England’s Lincoln Cathedral, which remained the world’s tallest for the next 249 years. John Ruskin, a prominent social critic of the Victorian era, called the Lincoln Cathedral ‘the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles’. Precious though it was, and as impressive as the pyramids remain, neither of these structures was designed for human habitation.

Two ingredients are necessary to design a skyscraper: structural steel and elevators. The world’s first iron-framed, glass-clad structure arose in Liverpool, in 1864. The Oriel Chambers was ostensibly an office building, five storeys high. Twenty years later, the world’s first genuine skyscraper emerged in Chicago, the ten-storey Home Insurance Building. The steel frame chassis both distributed and bore the essential weight of the structure. The outer skin of the building, liberated by the load-bearing skeleton, could henceforth be made of anything, from tiles to glass.