The Empire State Building was built in 14 months. Since 2010, the average completion time for a 200-meter-plus building has increased from 4.3 to 5.8 years. Buildings have become more complex, and there’s more regulation than in the 1930s. Still, there are ways to make high-rise construction more efficient.

An Unlikely Benchmark From 1930

When construction began on the Empire State Building on March 17, 1930, the world was in the midst of the Great Depression. That turned out to be an advantage. Contractors Starrett Brothers & Eken had access to a vast, motivated workforce, peaking at 3,439 workers on a single day in August 1930.

Steel beams from a Pennsylvania foundry were hoisted into place within about 80 hours, each pre-marked with the specific derrick, floor, and building side to which it was destined. At their fastest, crews erected 14 floors in just 10 working days.

The project was completed a full month ahead of schedule, 410 days after groundbreaking, despite 15 design iterations before the final plan was locked.

By any modern standard, the Empire State Building was a masterclass in integrated, fast-track delivery. What made it work wasn’t just urgency. It was systematic and detailed upfront planning and pre-coordinated logistics.

Five Waves of Change

Nearly a century later, high-rise construction has undergone successive waves of transformation. Steve Watts, a board member of the Council on Vertical Urbanism (CVU), outlined this evolution at a sustainable high-rise seminar in Helsinki in February 2026, as reported by Daniel Wallenius in Rakennuslehti (February 26, 2026). The seminar was organized by CVU, Kone, Peikko, and Ramboll.

The first wave produced iconic towers, corporate headquarters built as monuments, designed to dominate a city’s skyline. The second wave abandoned showmanship in favor of efficiency: simpler floor plates, optimized layouts, and roughly halved construction costs.

The third wave brought sustainability into focus: material choices, embodied carbon, and operational emissions. The fourth shifted attention to the experience of people inside: shared amenities, flexible spaces, and community functions. The fifth wave, Watts argues, must be all of these simultaneously.

Architect Astrid Piber of UN Studio puts it more vividly: Towers of power have become cities within cities. High-rises are no longer solitary landmarks. They’re designed as clusters, interconnected ecosystems where people live, work, shop, and move through shared infrastructure. Helsinki’s Kalasatama district, with its mixed-use towers, transit hub, retail podium, and green deck, is a working example of this logic

The Numbers Behind the Shift

The scale of change is quantifiable. According to the Helsinki seminar, 84% of the world’s buildings over 200 meters have been built this millennium. In the 1990s, roughly 12 such buildings were completed per year; by the 2010s, that figure had risen to 113 annually.

Geography has shifted dramatically as well. Before September 11, 2001, nearly half (49%) of all 200m+ buildings were located in the United States. Today, that share has fallen to 15%, and the sector is now concentrated in Asia and the Middle East.

Function has changed just as much: office use has dropped from 80% to 46% of completed supertalls, with residential and hybrid programs taking its place. And steel, once the dominant structural material, has given way to concrete; its share of the 200m+ market has fallen from over 50% to just 9%.

The Shard: Cost-Efficient at 310 Meters

For a more useful modern benchmark than the world’s tallest towers, look to The Shard in London: 310 meters, 95 floors, completed in 2013. Steve Watts cites it directly as proof that high-rise construction doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive: it was Europe’s tallest building at completion, yet “not even close to the most expensive”.

The Shard’s construction solutions echo the Empire State Building’s logistics ingenuity. The team used top-down construction, building the first 23 floors of the concrete core before the basement was fully excavated, saving critical time on the schedule. And the 60-meter steel-and-glass spire was fully pre-assembled at a Yorkshire steelworks before being transported and erected 300 meters in the air.

That last detail is a direct parallel to the ESB’s pre-marked steel beams: both teams solved complexity through meticulous pre-coordination rather than improvisation on-site.

Construction costs have nonetheless risen sharply in recent decades. Watts estimates the cost of high-rise construction has increased nearly 40%, from around €3,800 to roughly €6,000 per square meter. Supply chain volatility, skilled labor shortages, and energy costs are all contributing factors.

Systematization and simplification

Despite a century of innovation, the fundamental failure modes in high-rise construction haven’t changed as much as the technology has. Watts is direct about it: “Projects don’t fail, they start wrong. Difficult projects can be simplified.”

The Empire State Building succeeded because it was planned obsessively before a single rivet was driven. The Shard succeeded because its designers standardized its 11,000 glass panels into a limited number of types, made a deliberate choice for structural simplicity, and pre-tested the most complex elements off-site.

Recent innovations in China point to a future in which high-rise construction is even more industrialized and systematized than in many Western countries.

Chinese innovations

Last year, I interviewed three experts from the China Construction Third Engineering Bureau. They presented “The Building Machine,” which saved 100 days in the construction of an over 500-meter-high building. Another innovation was the DPTA (Design, Prefabricate, Transport, and Assemble) MEP modules. The Bureau has implemented DPTA in more than 200 projects across China

Ten years ago, we learned about an even more radical case study: a 57-floor building, Mini Sky City (J57), that was assembled in 19 days in Changsha, China. That record speed was possible because 95% of the building was produced in a factory before arriving on-site.

The company behind the record-breaking project, Broad Group, has since evolved its modular technology into a product line called “Holon Buildings,” which they are now deploying for residential and commercial projects across China and even internationally. In 2024, the company completed a 26-story residential tower in just 5 days.

Broad Group’s 19-day skyscraper wasn’t a stunt, it was proof that 95% off-site fabrication works. With timelines creeping from 4.3 to 5.8 years, the industry faces a choice: double down on 1930s-style integration with modern robotics, or watch modular pioneers like Holon Buildings redefine the field entirely.