Is there a limit to the height, that a building can be built?

There must be but I have no idea what that limit is,be interesting to see if anyone does.
I would think foundations,wind currents, and other things would come into play.

Yes, there is, and it has changed over the years.

When the only building material was stone, buildings were limited to 9–10 stories or so, because of the weight of the stone and the size of the base of the building that was necessary to hold that weight in stone.

When concrete, and in particular steel, began being used for building construction, the downward gravitational force can be separated and shared among the vertical supports. (Think of the angled supports at the John Hancock building and the Sears Tower, and how the World Trade Center was built). The weight of the building is distributed over many lighterweight supports.

The problem with building buildings too tall are several:

- wind buffeting; movement of the top of the building. (The AT&T building in NYC had a problem relating to wind tolerance in the 1970s or 1980s)

- elevators have limitations. You can’t have elevator cables that are thousands and thousands of feet long. That’s why in many buildings you have to get off and change elevators in a separate lobby to get to the upper floors.

- water -it takes a lot of energy to keep water pumped to the 150th or 180th floor,

I’ve read several books on this; it’s a very interesting subject in materials science and architecture..

^GA. Very informative. I didn’t think about water pressure. So. What do you think is an approximate limit, on height?

I’ve read multiple articles on space elevators. But I’m talking about a building. Or less of just a structure for function.

Obviously, there are regional limitations, due to earthquake activity, or high winds, or soil.

But given ideal conditions, what would be the limitations, I wonder?....

Depends on city, county, state building codes.

Yes. Whatever height the tower of Babylon was, because then it gets destroyed by the Goa’uld.

Building codes don’t just relate to what is structurally possible, because a lot of things “can be” done. The building also has be evacuable in case of fire or other emergency. It has to be able to withstand whatever seismic events are likely in the area. As others have noted, weather plays a part: wind loading on a structure is highly significant, so historical and predicted weather trends are taken into consideration.

And then, it has to work economically, too. There has to be sufficient transit capacity to get people to and from the building, and someone has to pay the rent. As the building increases in height its costs of construction increase out of proportion to the height. In simple terms, it means that the building cost per square foot of each new floor increases the rents throughout the entire building. That keeps “marginal” occupants from even considering it. The thing becomes little more than an expensive white elephant.

Also, speaking again to the emergency evacuation issue – and part of the building code and water pressure issue – even though the building will presumably be built of fireproof and fire-resistant materials, firefighting is always a concern.

Finally, and related to the holistic issue of “this building in this location”, is the need for such a building. Can the ground even support such a structure without a correspondingly large foundation? New York City does pretty well because of the relatively stable (seismically stable, that is) bedrock near the surface. New Orleans is a terrible place to build high, because the bedrock is so deep, so a “mat” foundation is needed to “raft” a building that will place a lot of weight on what is essentially mud.

I love this question…. I just did a quick back of the envelope calculation for a solid column of bricks, ignoring wind load and different material.
sorry for the English units but i know those .(I was too lazy to look up the numbers in all metric.)
I imagined a tower of solid bricks that got taller and taller until the brick (density of 125 lb/ft3) at the bottom reaches its compression strength: 12000 psi.
The solid tower would be ~13800 ft tall. But! a building is not useful if it is solid . It needs floor space. I figured the floor space to be 90% with support 10%. That brings the height to 1380 ft tall. If we assume a floor spacing of 10 ft we get:
138 stories.
This ignores laminates and exotic materials steels, wind loads etc but it does give you (and me) a rough idea. Thanks for asking.

Luckyguy.. Say you built a structure that got high enough that gravity lessened. I’m assuming that once you got far enough out you could just keep going without the base crumbling under the pressure. The base would be a monster but I think if we melted down all the cars for it we could do it. It might be slightly economically impractical.

What about space tethers ? Does the satellite at the end count as a building? They are talking about being able to make them several miles long.

@johnpowell In order to have the column stay in place the distal end must be in geosynchronous orbit (GO) or else it would move around. GO is ~22,000 miles up. Anything below that still adds weight to the base. This is a pretty long distance.
Some analyses predict carbon nanotubes have the strength and low density to make a column that can reach geosynchronous orbit. But that is only theory.
Maybe buildings of the future will be made of carbon nanotubes.

When you got to that kind of height, @johnpowell – and actually long before then – you’d need to be erecting pressure vessels with airlocks and either air supply or CO2 scrubbers. And heat. Consider that the top of Everest (far below the “gravity doesn’t bother us any more” zone) is in the dead zone when it comes to life support.

Well. Once you get so high, that you’re in outer space (like the space elevator mentioned,) wouldn’t the design have the added need of pulling? My understanding of the space elevator concept is that it would work off of centrifugal force. So the end, or top would then be pulling at the structure. How the hell would that work?

And. If you somehow found a way to support an almost infinitely tall structure, you would be limited by the Moon’s orbit. Or the Moon would hit the structure.

Could a large enough structure mess with the rotation of the planet? In other words, if we built such a massive structure, would we have to build a similar one on the other side of the Earth for balance?

@MrGrimm888 From sea level to the Geosynchronous orbit point, ~22000 miles, you need to fight gravity. At GO we are at equilibrium. Past that distance we start to fight “centrifugal force”: That has to be one tall stack of rocks. :-)

That would be one incredible structure. If it could be achieved.

I’m a firm believer that “what man can contemplate, man can achieve.” Don’t remember who said that…...

Imagine looking up at a building that stretches out of view. It would be crazy looking at night, when I assume they’d have to put lights on it for obvious reasons…

So. LG, would we have to balance a space reaching structure, do you think?

The main reason that I read for having a space elevator, is that we wouldn’t have to use rockets anymore to put things into space. A very dangerous, and costly process…

So anyway, I guess that is kind of taking the thread in a different direction.

With a large enough base, and purpose built materials, we’re still looking at an incredibly high structure.

Could a higher structure be built if they used, say 4 different giant buildings, pillars to meet at a top, like the Eifel (probably misspelled that) Tower in Paris?
That could distribute the weight better, or be a disaster…

In such a large structure, people probably wouldn’t have to leave it often. They would all probably work, live, shop, in the massive building. So infrastructure leading to/from it might be mainly for shipping, trucks/rail.

A large structure could be self contained. I’ve mentioned vertical farms on Fluther before. The same technology could be applied to such a structure.

I think such things will become necessary for a growing population, on our planet’s finite land masses. Perhaps underwater, would be another construction opportunity….

@MrGrimm888 If we can imagine it, we can do it – as long as we don’t violate the laws of physics.
I predict by the time we need such a thing we will have developed rockets powered by fusion reactions running on free hydrogen. Ferries will move as much as we want for virtually no cost.
We won’t need an elevator.

As for massive buildings I am confident materials will be developed with properties far exceeding those of brick. Anything is possible. Let’s hope we don’t need it.

Absolutely. Check building codes.