The Petronas Twin Towers

For two decades, the 110-story Sears Tower stood as the tallest building in the world. Topping out at 1,454 feet above ground level-almost as tall as a string of five football fields would be long-the bundle of nine steel tubes standing just outside Chicago's Loop could be said to have cast a shadow over all other skyscrapers since its completion in 1974. New York's World Trade Center, the 1,368- and 1,362-foot-tall twin towers completed only a year earlier, held the record as tallest buildings for only a brief time. Before that, the Empire State Building, at 1,250 feet tall even without its broadcasting towers-which, like those of the Sears Tower, do not count as part of the building proper-held the world height record for over four decades. Completed in 1931, the Empire State then surpassed the one-year-old Chrysler building, which at 1,046 feet tall had been the first to break the magical 1,000-foot mark. Before then, the Woolworth building, a 792-foottall Gothic cathedral of commerce paid for in cash by the profits from its namesake's chain of fiveand ten-cent stores, had stood as the world's tallest building for almost two decades.

Skyscrapers-so named since the 1880s, when Chicago's 100-foot-tall buildings were marvels of contemporary structural engineering-seem to have sprouted up in temporal and spatial clusters, with Chicago and New York proving especially hospitable to the form and its financing. Throughout most of the 20th century, the skyscraper was considered a particularly American genre, growing with the economy and optimism of cities such as Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles and Seattle. In the last decade of the century, however, the frontier of the skyscraper has moved across the Pacific Ocean to the Far East. Today, most of the tallest buildings in the world are being proposed for locations such as Tokyo, Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China. And they are not only being proposed; they are being built, with the tallest building in the world recently being topped out at 1,482 feet in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The Federation of Malaysia is a southeast Asian country of about 20 million people, the vast majority of whom live in West Malaysia, located just above the equator on the Malay Peninsula, between Thailand to the north and Singapore to the...