Building Facts for Kids

The Great Pyramid of Giza, built for Pharaoh Khufu around 2600 BC, stood at an original height of 146.6 meters (481 feet). Imagine that-it held the world record for over 3,800 years!

It was only in 1311 AD that Lincoln Cathedral in England finally surpassed it, taking back the title for human-made structures.

This means that for longer than all of recorded history until now, that giant triangle of stone was the highest thing on Earth!

The current king, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, soars to 828 meters (2,717 feet), making it a megatall structure!

The Empire State Building, which held the record for 40 years, is only 381 meters to its roof.

That means you could stack almost two Empire State Buildings on top of each other and still not reach the top of the Burj Khalifa! What a climb!

Most limestone blocks in the Great Pyramid weighed about 2.5 tons each, which is heavier than a small car!

But the massive granite blocks used for the King's Chamber roof were way heavier-some weighed up to 80 tons!

That's like lifting 13 full-grown African elephants just to place one stone block! How did they do it without cranes?

Modern concrete can wear away, especially in the ocean, but ancient Roman concrete is super durable!

The Romans mixed volcanic ash (called pozzolana) with lime. This mix created strong, self-healing crystals when it touched water.

That's why structures like the Pantheon's dome are still standing nearly 2,000 years later while some modern piers crumble in decades!

When the Chrysler Building was being built, another team was racing to build 40 Wall Street to be the tallest in NYC.

To win the race, the architect secretly had a 185-foot (56-meter) stainless steel spire hidden inside the building!

At the last minute, they lifted the spire into place, making the Chrysler Building 1,046 feet tall and the world's tallest for 11 months!

The Burj Khalifa needs super deep roots to stand tall, so engineers drilled 192 concrete piles deep into the ground.

These piles are each 1.5 meters wide and go down over 50 meters deep-that's deeper than a 15-story building is tall!

This massive foundation is designed to support the building's total weight of about 450,000 tonnes.

The amazing Colosseum in Rome, built with Roman concrete, could squeeze in about 50,000 spectators for gladiator games.

That's a huge crowd-imagine filling up almost 10 full football fields with people!

It was so cleverly designed that crowds could enter and exit through 80 different arches in just a few minutes.

The elevators in the Burj Khalifa are the world's fastest double-decker lifts, capable of hitting 10 meters per second!

That speed is about 36 kilometers per hour (or 22 miles per hour)-fast enough to make your ears pop!

They shoot you up to the 124th floor observation deck in only 60 seconds-you could barely climb one story that fast!

Engineers are currently building the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, and it's planned to be the first building to break the 1-kilometer mark!

That's a full 1,000 meters (3,281 feet) tall-it would be about 180 meters taller than the current record-holder, the Burj Khalifa!

Its design, by the same architect as the Burj Khalifa, uses a three-petal shape to help fight crazy high winds up there.

Building the Burj Khalifa required an unbelievable 330,000 cubic meters of super-strong concrete.

To make that easy to picture, that’s the same amount of concrete used to build a normal skyscraper over 100 stories tall!

Because Dubai is so hot, they poured the concrete at night and mixed in ice to keep it cool and prevent cracking!