DESIGN INTELLIGENCEJuly 23, 2026·Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence

The World's Tallest Towers Are Mostly Empty at the Top

The world's tallest towers are, increasingly, mostly empty at the top. A large share of a supertall's height is what the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat calls vanity height — the distance between a building's pinnacle and its highest usable floor. It is the spire, the tapering crown, the uninhabitable steel that exists for one reason: to win a ranking, not to be lived in.

The scale is startling once you look. In the CTBUH's own analysis, spires average close to 30% of a supertall's height, and roughly 60% of the world's supertalls would lose that status entirely without the empty pinnacles bolted on top. The Burj Khalifa is 828 metres tall, but its highest occupied floor sits 244 metres below the tip — 29% vanity. The vainest of all, Moscow's Ukraina Hotel, is 42% useless height — a building that is, by area, more spire than tower. As the next generation of kilometre-scale towers like Jeddah Tower rises, the hats are only getting taller.

Here is the contrarian point: this is not incompetence. It is form following a status competition, and the competition's rulebook invites it. Because the sport's governing body ranks towers by height to the architectural top — spire included — rather than to the highest floor a human can stand on, the metric openly rewards adding uninhabitable steel. The measurement created the deformity. A developer who wants the "world's tallest" headline is not being irrational by growing a 200-metre needle nobody will ever occupy; they are optimising exactly the number the scoreboard reads.

Which makes vanity height the built environment's purest illustration of Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. The real goal was a landmark plus a stack of premium, rentable floors. The proxy was height-to-tip. Chase the proxy hard enough and you get a tower that grows a hat — floors of nothing rising into the wind so that a single figure in a database reads larger. The building is brutally honest about what it optimised for; you can see the priority from a mile away, in the dark, empty crown that never lights up at night.

And the lesson travels far beyond towers, because every design has a vanity height. It is the part that exists to score on a metric rather than to serve the person using the thing: the tenths shaved off a nought-to-sixty time no owner will ever use, the fraction of a millimetre of thinness that makes a phone worse to hold, the spec-sheet number, the award-bait detail, the benchmark chased past the point of any real benefit. The concept-phase discipline is separating the ambitions that are genuinely for the user — the landmark, the view, the premium space — from the ones that only exist to win a ranking nobody lives in. Because vanity height is never free. In a tower it is structure, wind load, cost and material spent on a figure; in a product it is complexity, weight, price and compromise spent on a bragging right.

To be fair to the spire, some of it is real. A landmark is partly its silhouette, and a beautiful crown can earn its keep as identity even while standing empty — the Chrysler Building's needle is beloved, and it was itself a ranking stunt. So the line is not "no spire." It is whether the top is doing design work — identity, proportion, a considered termination — or merely accumulating unusable height to game a list. The first is architecture. The second is a scoreboard wearing a building.

None of this is decided in the steel. It is decided at the concept phase, in the quiet gap between the goal and the metric someone chose to chase on the way to it. Pick the wrong measure and the whole design leans toward it, floors nobody will ever stand on climbing into the sky so a table somewhere can hold a bigger number. The most expensive vanity is the kind you cannot see is vanity — because you were optimising a proxy, and forgot that it was only ever a proxy. The tower at least wears its mistake in plain sight; most products hide theirs inside a spec sheet nobody reads twice.

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