See a New Horizon Built Trivia Quiz

Frankfurt's skyline is dominated by a relatively small but dense cluster of office skyscrapers, containing 18 of Germany's 20 tallest modern buildings and all of the top ten. Commerzbank tower, the highest one, is still a relatively modest 259 meters of architectural height (300 meters with antenna); however.

It has a quite interesting triangular layout surrounding an open-sky atrium. Unlike many other tall skyscrapers, it does not include a restaurant or viewing platform on the top floors.

Brazil is not known for an abundance of high buildings and especially not office towers - its highest skyscrapers are all residential buildings in the beach city of Balneário Camboriú. Rio de Janeiro's skyline tops out at a mere 164 meters with the combined office / shopping building called the Rio Sul Center.

As such, the horizon on this skyline is far less dominated by steel, concrete and glass than any of the others!

Most likely, if you hear "skyline", you first think of New York City and especially Manhattan with its abundance of supertall buildings: 101 skyscrapers in New York City exceed 200 meters (657 feet), 35 thereof exceed 250 meters (821 ft), and 16 stand more than 1000 feet (305 meters) tall.

The Freedom Tower (One World Trade Center) is the tallest at 1776 feet (541 meters). Most of these towers are office buildings, but notably, Central Park Tower, the second highest, is a residential building and features a three-story 17,000 sqft (1600 m²) penthouse at the top, with an original asking price of a quarter billion dollars.

The highest building in Paris is still the Eiffel Tower, but it stands alone, so it does not make for much of a skyline. The majority of Paris' modern high buildings are concentrated in La Défense, which is actually just outside the administrative city limits. It is purely a business district and meant to keep office towers outside the actual city, preserving its look.

While far from being the highest of buildings in that district, the most remarkable one is la Grande Arche, a 110 meters a side cube with a hollowed out middle. It is located at the end of a major axis road in Paris and rotated so that looking along that axis will make the building appear as a frame. The upper horizontal floors contain a restaurant, viewing decks and exhibitions while the two side towers contain government offices.

Were you tempted to choose "Paris" here at first before you saw the hint? You can be forgiven because Tokyo Tower's design was directly inspired by its much older French cousin. The two towers even have almost the same height (330 and 332 meters respectively) and both serve as radio transmission towers. The two main differences are that Tokyo Tower does not have a deck at the level of the Eiffel Tower's first deck and that the Japanese building is painted red and white because of local aviation rules.

Tokyo Tower is dwarfed by the 634 meter Tokyo Skytree - also a telecommunications tower. In terms of conventional skyscrapers, Tokyo does not rank among the world's highest-built cities with the tallest buildings reaching around 250 meters in 2022 and typically being mixed use with retail at the lowest levels, followed by offices and then residential and hotel units near the top.

The cost of materials and labor as well as the risk of strong earthquakes make supertall buildings in Japan less common than in most other densely populated areas. Nonetheless, some projects to be completed in the middle to late 2020s are now expected to break the 300 meters barrier.

The most prominent feature of the Kuala Lumpur skyline are the twin Petronas Towers with their unique skybridge connecting the two buildings at the level of the 41st and 42nd floor, 170 meters above the ground. The bridge is actually not firmly anchored in the buildings but can float freely between them to compensate for wind or seismic sway.

These towers were the world's highest buildings from 1998 to 2003, but in 2022, they no longer even were the highest in their city - surpassed twice within a time of just a few months, first by the Exchange 106 and then the Merdeka 118. All of these buildings are primarily office buildings, but the 678 meters high Merdeka 118 also features a hotel on the top floors.

London certainly has its share of interesting skyscraper architecture, with buildings having been voted among the best designs (the Gherkin) and among the worst (the infamous "Walkie-Talkie" whose concave glass surfaces acted as a powerful solar collector which caused plastic parts of cars parked in the street to melt and which looks itself a bit like it had partially melted and sagged).

They are all however dominated by the pyramidal building on the left of the image. At 310 meters, The Shard was for a long time the highest building in the European Union (when the UK was still a member). It is a mixed-use building with office floors, a hotel and ten ultra-luxury apartments located on floors 53 to 65 which sold for upwards of 50 million dollars apiece. While the design of the Shard was generally seen as beautiful, its location far from any existing skyscraper clusters caused some discontent because of its prominence in an otherwise relatively low-rise area with historical buildings.

Like Tokyo, San Francisco makes skyscraper construction difficult due its location in a seismically active zone. This has however not stopped developers from erecting a number of tall buildings downtown, dominated by the Salesforce Tower (326 meters) and and the Transamerica Pyramid (323 meters), both pure office towers.

In spite of the cluster of high buildings (none of which boasts a really remarkable architecture), however, the most remarkable feature of San Francisco's skyline is still the Golden Gate Bridge with its twin 227 meter towers supporting the slender suspension construction with the bridge deck 75 meters over the water. The bridge can be seen on the left side of the photo.

Most of the older members here will still remember the name "Sears Tower" as the former world record holder as the world's tallest building from 1973 to 1998, surpassing the original World Trade Center in New York City and then being beaten by another twin-tower project, Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers. However, this name is no longer accurate, as the naming rights were sold in 2009 with the building now known as Willis Tower.

Its architecture is somewhat reminiscent of the Tetris game with nine square sections of varying heights, the highest two extending to 108 floors, three to 90 (at this level the floorplan is a cross), two to 66 (at opposite corners) and the lowest two only to 50.

At night, the most prominent feature of the tower is the broadcast antenna assembly consisting of two large and several smaller towers, usually lit in bright colors and forming a crown on top of the skyline.

Looking just at the skyscrapers, Sydney's skyline is far from remarkable. The highest building is the Crown Sydney, a residential and hotel tower also featuring a large casino and entertainment areas. The somewhat rounded shape causes a rather questionable aesthetic of the building (not in the picture - it would be off to the right), which is sometimes unfavorably compared to a phallic symbol.

Most pictures of the Sydney skyline are of course immediately recognizable for the characteristic "sails" of the Opera House in the foreground - at a mere 65 meters by far the lowest signature building in this quiz, but its construction time of a full 14 years (1959 to 1973), half of that taken up by interior work to optimize capacity, acoustics and organizational aspects, clearly places it among the ranks of truly ambitious. In spite of the building's name, the concert hall, with one of the world's largest organs, is actually almost twice the size of the Joan Sutherland Theatre where the actual opera performances take place.