Earlier this summer, I visited the Saudi Arabian embassy on the one day it is open to the public. The Saudis are solicitous hosts, if a bit obsequious. As soon as I entered the main building in Foggy Bottom, I was greeted by two men, one carrying a brass carafe filled with coffee, the other bearing a plate piled high with dates. I accepted both gifts, and from a massive television screen a giant Mohammed bin Salman beamed down at me, all smiles and hospitality. As if by law, his cheery mood prevailed throughout the compound. The place was crawling with hundreds of people, many of them from families like my own, who had come because we were promised free lunch, a petting zoo, and unlimited balloons. All for the greater glory of the crown prince: Everywhere around us were posted signs, announcements, and many, many tourism leaflets, proclaiming the arrival of a new, modern Saudi Arabia, guided by the mild wisdom of the kingdom’s heir apparent.

It was a bit overwhelming, and I paused for rest in one of the embassy’s many marble-plated corridors. On the wall opposite me hung old promotional posters printed by the Saudi Binladin Group. These advertised the construction company’s more impressive royal commissions, among them Saudi Arabia’s first skyscraper, the Al Faisaliah Tower in Riyadh, and its most famous modern building, the Makkah Royal Clock Tower. The latter is the tallest building in the kingdom and the fourth-tallest in the world. It’s a hotel, a Fairmont actually, the centerpiece of a complex which overlooks the Great Mosque of Mecca and which was designed to entice pilgrims making the haj. Like many other skyscrapers in the Persian Gulf, it is a garish affair, whose commission was reddened with controversy and whose construction was retarded by corruption. 

Were it not for those twin forces, controversy and corruption, the Makkah Royal Clock Tower would only be the second tallest building in Saudi Arabia. The tallest would be Jeddah Tower, another royal project jobbed out to the Binladin Group in 2011, which as of today sits unfinished on the outskirts of that city. It is the most ambitious skyscraper ever begun. If completed, it would stand at one kilometer in height, the first building ever to reach that high into the heavens. But because of the vagaries of Saudi politics—and the prejudices of its crown prince—it is unlikely that the tower, which right now is only a 67-floor skeleton, will ever pierce the Arabian stratosphere. Mohammed bin Salman is a jealous man and, like any autocrat, intolerant of success other than his own. During the royal purge of 2017–2019, he arrested Jeddah Tower’s primary investor, the billionaire prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and ordered him to pay a massive fine for his release. He also swept up its builder, Bakr bin Laden (whose “shortcomings” in the construction of the Mecca hotel complex had long annoyed him), stripped him of control over the family company, and canceled the Binladin Group’s government-backed commissions. Jeddah Tower lay rusting in the desert for five years after that. 

Only this May did the kingdom announce that it had found a new contractor to resume work. If all goes well, the tower will be completed by 2029—just in time for it to be co-opted into the crown prince’s Vision 2030 modernization deadline. But all rarely goes well, and anyway, in the intervening years, the Saudi royal family has dumped its money into other fanciful concepts. The well known ones are the Line, a “smart city” planned to extend from the Red Sea far into the desert, and the Mukaab, a huge, cube-shaped skyscraper to be erected in Riyadh. But there are also many other novel structures in varied states of completion, all under the aegis of Vision 2030. The idea is that by constructing outlandishly tall buildings, Saudi Arabia, following the lead of the United Arab Emirates, can transform itself from a country whose economy is dependent on goods (oil) to one more reliant on services (luxury travel) for its flourishing. 

But why with skyscrapers? This is the question that Jason M. Barr seeks to answer with his new book Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers. In it, he proposes that skyscrapers are the primary engines of the global economy. “We want them and we need them,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “You may not directly ask for them, but we are all part of the larger system of networks and nodes of trade and urbanization that gives rise to tall buildings.” Barr, who is an economist by trade, argues that, whether it is the Empire State Building, Sears Tower, or the Burj Khalifa, the driving motivation for raising the world’s tallest buildings is economic—no matter what anyone claims to the contrary. “I have come to see that too much emphasis is placed on the ‘ego theory,’” he writes, adding that while some developers and architects are blowhards with crazy dreams, the cold fact is that “a city’s population and its GDP are the two most important predictors of how many—and how tall—a city’s skyscrapers will be, making economics their fundamental driver.”

On paper, Barr is of course correct in his analysis. Anyone who participates in the global economy is bound by the rule that all we do, we do for money. In this case, however, he is mistaken to draw such a hard line between ego and economics (he hardly leaves room for any other motivations). Anyone who has climbed to the top of a skyscraper knows that these distinctions become meaningless at such great heights. The desire for wealth is a base thing, and while it may lay the foundation of the tower, on its own it cannot rise much higher than the trading floors and malls which occupy the real estate at street level. When the tower begins to reach toward the sky, it often conveys that desire along with it, stretching and reshaping it as the building tapers upward. In the offices above the malls and trading floors, the lust for money becomes a lust for power. In the luxury apartments above the offices, the need for power gives way to requirements of ostentation; and in the penthouses above those, ostentation disguises itself as magnificence. Finally, higher than even that, at the tip of the spire, all that remains is desire—pure desire—the sort of unfulfillable longing that dare not look back on the world below, knowing full well that what it has left behind is vanity, all vanity. Anyway, those who look down, fall.

Few make it this high. Those who do are strange men. It may sound funny, but to design the world’s tallest buildings, one must have a serious conception of God. The architects at Babel certainly did. They craned up at the sky and saw the Almighty lording himself over them and resolved to get a better look, from a vantage point more favorable to themselves. That was their sin. With the world’s current tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and, if it is ever finished, Jeddah Tower, something similar has happened—though, at least as far as the architect is concerned, the craning and stretching upward is entirely pious. I use the singular because both buildings were designed by the same man, the Chicago-based architect Adrian Smith, who, with each record-breaking project, comes ever closer to heaven, knowing full well that he will not see its ruler, not in this life. But that is no matter; faith does not require sight. 

Smith, who at age 79 is without question the foremost designer of skyscrapers in the world, believes that in all his work, God’s hand has guided his own. His faith is absolute. Whenever he begins a project, he and his wife kneel down and beg the Lord for success: for wisdom, inspiration, and guidance, not only for himself, but for everyone who works with him—Prince Alwaleed, Bakr bin Laden, perhaps even Mohammed bin Salman. “I really do feel that God listens to me and answers my prayers,” Smith remarked once as he surveyed his recent work. “These buildings become the result of that.”

This admission does not have a place in Barr’s economic narrative; it does not fit into any conventional understanding of the Burj Khalifa and its half-finished challenger in Saudi Arabia. What most people know about these towers, if anything, is that they were commissioned by vain tyrants and, in the case of the Burj Khalifa, built in haste, without regard for zoning, environmental impact, or laborer safety. The commonly repeated story about the Burj Khalifa is one of excess: It was the capstone on nearly a decade of economic activity in Dubai during which the city transformed itself from a midlevel port to a global business and tourism destination, an Arabian version of Singapore. Between 2001 and 2008, Dubai’s population doubled. And between 2006 and 2011, its rulers built 278 skyscrapers. The Burj Khalifa, which broke ground in 2004, was the most ambitious of these. It came out of a contest organized by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who, casting his gaze on what was then the tallest building in the world, Taipei 101, demanded that his subjects do better. “Why is it taller?” he asked his city planners when they showed him the initial sketches for the new tower. “Are those people smarter than you?”

This is how Smith became involved in the project. In the early 2000s, he was one of the leading architects at the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and had a reputation for taking on tricky—and very tall—commissions. He was always an odd fit for the glassy cities of the future. Unlike many tech-crazed starchitects, Smith never embraced computer modeling. (He claims that outside of email he doesn’t know how to use a computer.) He prefers to work the old-fashioned way: in his sketchbook or at a table with clay. And when it comes to the designs themselves, Smith is also something of a traditionalist. He favors an in-situ approach, that is, observing natural features in the area where the building is set to be constructed and using them as a guide for his sketches. He developed this method in the mid-1970s when he was working on the Banco de Occidente in Guatemala City. During the day, Smith would wander the streets, taking photos of the stucco house fronts, the public baths, and the carved wooden doorways. They all made it into the building’s design. It has since become his habit to walk around a city and open himself to its ways before he puts pen to paper. 

When thinking about the Burj Khalifa, Smith noticed that in Dubai, as in many other Arabian cities, the mosques and other public buildings so struck him because they take his same approach to design. The onion domes, the pointed arches, even the calligraphic script that adorns so many buildings in the Middle East find their origin in the flora native to the Arabian plant kingdom. It is the same with the Burj Khalifa. It looks like a giant reed shooting up out of the desert because, in a sense, it is. But when Smith presented his initial designs to Sheikh Mohammed, the emirate felt that even at 700 meters the reed did not shoot high enough. “Go a lot taller,” he commanded. And so it was done. When it was completed, the building was a little more than 800 meters in height—or, as is more commonly said, half a mile.  

For anyone else the design and completion of the Burj Khalifa would mark the culmination of a long and productive career. But Smith has always desired more. Like Chicago’s greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, he dreams of the mile-high skyscraper. In fact, he has proposed the construction of such a building, twice, and without success, a fact he often mentions in interviews. “A mile is probably the next benchmark,” he has said with a tinge of longing. “We’ve researched it. We know it can be built.” It is perhaps unsurprising then that, only months after the Burj Khalifa’s completion, Smith found himself clamoring for the commission on Jeddah Tower, a building which, if not a mile high, was at least to be the metric equivalent.

The origin of Jeddah Tower is one of simple envy. As Prince Alwaleed watched the progress made on the Burj Khalifa, he felt that Saudi Arabia should have the exact same thing, only taller. At first he, too, wanted a mile-high building, but the shifting sands underneath Jeddah would not permit it. He organized a design contest; he was imperious in judging its entrants; and in the end, he got what he wanted. Smith’s firm (he had since left SOM) had one month to submit a proposal, hardly enough to come up with anything original—so they repacked the Burj Khalifa as a slightly taller building and sent off a model to Riyadh. When the Saudis constructed it in Prince Alwaleed’s office, it was so tall that they had to take out the panels in the drop ceiling to put the spire on top. And then they weren’t satisfied: The building looked too much like the Burj Khalifa. Besides, the prince wanted a helipad. So they sent it back to Smith demanding revisions. “Before we got the job, they treated us a little like the janitors,” Smith admitted later.

But once the contract was signed, everyone seemed satisfied with each other. The Saudis deferred to Smith’s expertise, and he in turn made no fuss about how the project was advertised. After all, Jeddah Tower was a chance for the architect to improve on the form he had pioneered in the Burj Khalifa. That first tower ascended in stages; this new tower would rise in one willowy whip. To Smith, this was more true to nature. “Its slender, subtly asymmetrical massing evokes the new growth of palm fronds shooting upward from the land,” he wrote in explanation, adding that he hoped it could be “a symbol of new life heralding future growth for the kingdom.”

Prince Alwaleed felt that the building could be a symbol for the kingdom too, but a symbol of a very different sort: “It has political depth to it to tell the world that we Saudis invest in our country despite what is happening around us from events, turmoil, and revolutions even,” he declared in a press conference as the Arab Spring of 2011 rattled the Middle East. Later, he indicated that very soon Jeddah Tower would supplant the Burj Khalifa as the economic focal point of the Gulf States. He ordered that his company adopt a new slogan that, by force of will, would carry his vision into existence: “It’s happening.”

Of course, more than a decade later, it is not happening. Maybe Smith always knew Jeddah Tower would peter out this way. Prince Alwaleed lacked focus; Bakr bin Laden lacked discipline; Mohammed bin Salman was happy to see them fail. “The real purpose of these supertall buildings is sometimes pure ego,” Smith once remarked of such projects. The people who declare with comic-book bravado that they want to build the tallest building in the world are rarely serious enough to succeed. “The ones who say that first are the ones who usually fail,” Smith warned. In the most high profile case of this tendency—at least in Smith’s experience—Donald Trump came to him in 2001 asking him to design the tallest building in the world on the Chicago River. Smith had long yearned for such a commission, and he drew up a proposal for a skyscraper in excess of 2,000 feet. On the day in September that he was to present it to Trump, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. Trump had been so enthusiastic about the plans before the meeting, but after, he worried that, if terrorists would dare attack the Twin Towers, they might have it out for him too. “Let’s reduce the height down to about 1,000 feet,” the chastened businessman told Smith. “I don’t want to be a target.”

So it always seems to go. There’s economics and there’s ego and then there’s Adrian Smith. He has the half-mile-high tower. Will he ever see the kilometer-high tower? The mile-high tower? Most would say no. But Smith is a man of faith. When he drops to his knees, very likely he is unafraid to demand that God allow him to rise higher, always higher into the sky. There’s something mad, reckless, clear about pure desire. “If your faith is smaller than a mustard seed, you can move mountains,” Smith said once to his church congregation, referring to the words of the parable. “There’s nothing you can’t do if you have faith.”