The Skyscraper Curse: Why the World's Tallest Building Keeps Predicting the Next Crash

A Strange Pattern Hiding in Plain Sight

In January 1999, a property analyst named Andrew Lawrence, working in Hong Kong for Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, published a research note with a strange claim in it. He'd noticed that for over a century, the opening of the world's tallest building had an uncanny habit of landing right on top of a major economic crisis. Not a boom. A bust. He called it "an unhealthy 100-year correlation," and the finding became known — half-jokingly at first — as the Skyscraper Index.

It sounds like the kind of pattern-matching nonsense the internet loves to manufacture. Except this one has held up, in one form or another, for over 150 years of data, survived multiple academic attempts to debunk it, and keeps getting quietly cited by economists whenever a new supertall tower breaks ground somewhere with a lot of cheap credit sloshing around.

Every bar above marks a record-breaking building's completion. Every crisis label beneath it happened within roughly one to two years.

The Track Record, One Crisis at a Time

Lay it out chronologically and the pattern is hard to shake off as pure coincidence. The New York Tribune Building, one of the world's first true skyscrapers, opened in 1874 — the same year the Panic of 1873 was tightening its grip on the economy. Three decades later, two record-breaking towers, the Singer Building and the Metropolitan Life Tower, were launched in New York right before the Panic of 1907, completed in 1908 and 1909 respectively.

Then came the big one: 40 Wall Street, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building — three record-breaking towers all racing to the sky in 1929 through 1931, funded by the same 1920s credit boom that inflated the stock market bubble. The Empire State Building opened its doors in 1931, deep into the Great Depression, so underoccupied in its early years that New Yorkers nicknamed it the "Empty State Building."

The pattern didn't stop there. The World Trade Center towers and Sears Tower both opened in 1973, right as the oil crisis and a brutal stock market crash hit. The Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur took the title in 1998, in the immediate wake of the Asian Financial Crisis. Taipei 101 opened in 2004, in the long hangover of the dot-com bust. And the current record-holder, the Burj Khalifa, opened its doors in January 2010 — completed at the exact bottom of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, in a Dubai property market that was simultaneously collapsing under its own debt.

It's Not Magic — It's a Construction Timeline

Here's the part that actually matters more than the spooky coincidence: once you understand why this keeps happening, it stops looking like magic and starts looking like simple, explainable economics. The mechanism has nothing to do with buildings cursing their cities. It has everything to do with how long it takes to build something enormous.

Architectural historian Carol Willis, who studied this pattern years before Lawrence formalized it into an index, put it plainly: "height is a barometer of boom." The tallest buildings in a cycle tend to break ground not because the economy is healthy, but because the economy is overconfident — land values are inflated, credit is easy, and both developers and lenders start betting on rents and demand that assume the good times never end. Because a supertall skyscraper takes several years to design, finance, and physically construct, the moment it finally opens its doors is, almost by definition, several years after that overconfident decision was made — which is very often exactly when the overconfidence finally catches up with the wider economy.

The Case Against It — Because It's Not as Clean as It Looks

A fair account of the Skyscraper Index has to include its critics, because they have real points, not just contrarian noise. The most cited exception is the Woolworth Building, which took the height record in 1913 without any accompanying global crash — though economist Mark Thornton has argued that its completion was still followed by one of the worst quarterly GDP declines on record at the time, so even the cleanest counterexample isn't entirely clean.

More seriously, rigorous statistical studies using time-series analysis have found that building height does not reliably predict recessions in a formal econometric sense — instead, they find the reverse relationship holds up better: a country's GDP tends to predict how tall its next record-setting building will be, not the other way around. In plainer terms, skyscrapers are very plausibly a symptom of an overheating economy rather than a mystical cause or omen of the crash that follows — the tower and the crash share a common cause (a credit-fueled boom), rather than one causing the other.

Is It Happening Again Right Now?

The index's own creator has kept applying it. Years after his original paper, Andrew Lawrence pointed to China's supertall construction boom — including a planned tower that would have briefly become the world's tallest — as a warning sign of an overheating, credit-fueled property market. That warning aged uncomfortably well: China's property sector, most visibly through the debt collapse of developer Evergrande in the early 2020s, went on to become one of the defining economic stories of the decade, and several of the country's most ambitious supertall projects were delayed, scaled back, or quietly shelved.

The current record-holder, the Burj Khalifa, may not hold its title forever — Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia has spent years under construction with the explicit goal of surpassing it, its progress repeatedly interrupted by financing and construction pauses. Whether or not it ever tops out, the Skyscraper Index would suggest treating the eventual ribbon-cutting less as a triumphant milestone, and more as a data point worth watching.

What This Actually Means If You're Planning Something Big

You don't need to be building the world's tallest tower for the underlying lesson to apply. The Skyscraper Index is really a story about a much more universal risk in construction: the gap between the economic conditions when a project is approved and the economic conditions when it's finally finished. A project greenlit at the top of a credit cycle — cheap financing, optimistic rent projections, confident lenders — can find itself completing into a market that looks nothing like the one it was designed for.

For any large project, that's a genuine, practical risk worth pricing in from day one: financing costs can rise before completion, material and labour costs can shift with the broader economy, and demand assumptions made during a boom don't always survive to the opening date. None of that requires a mystical curse — it requires realistic contingency planning, done at the estimating stage, before ground is ever broken.