Daniel was walking past the Marom Tower a couple of nights ago. It's the one going up next to the Yitzhak Navon railway station, forty-one stories by his count, and it's already visibly taller than anything around it.
And he did what any reasonable person does when confronted with a very large building. He went home and looked it up.
He looked it up on the Skyscraper Center, found that it's set to beat Tower One at Holyland by about fifty-four metres, and then got curious about the thing underneath the database. Which is the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
The organisation behind the website.
And Daniel's question is really this. He's an admirer of skyscrapers. He's not neutral about them. But he lives in a city that argues about them constantly, heritage, luxury, absentee investors, apartments sitting dark while people can't afford rent. And he's noticed that these criticisms tend to blend the building with the developer, the tower with the policy. So he wants to know whether the international body that studies tall buildings for a living has actually developed serious answers to those criticisms. Or whether the economics of very tall buildings make some of those problems structural.
Which is a much harder question than it looks.
It is. So who actually is this council, and why did it just change its name?
Here's the thing that makes this episode worth doing. The organisation Daniel used to look up a building in Jerusalem is not a passive database. It is the global arbiter of what counts as a tall building, and which one is the tallest in the world. When your building gets a height on the Skyscraper Center, that's not a wiki entry, that's a ruling.
A ruling from whom, though?
From an organisation that in October last year dropped the words "tall buildings" from its own name. It's now the Council on Vertical Urbanism. Fifty-six years as the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, and then the height comes out of the title.
That's a strange thing for the height people to do.
It is. Their stated mandate now is to define and steward responsible density in cities worldwide. That's the language. Responsible density.
So an organisation that spent five decades cataloguing height records has publicly shifted its language away from height. Which either means it worked out that height alone was never the answer, or that somebody in a marketing department needed a new deck.
And the Jerusalem case is exactly the test. The Marom Tower and the wider Gateway quarter are precisely the kind of project the CVU claims to have principles for. Heritage, density, affordability, community. So we can hold the principles against the actual building.
Right. Start with what this organisation actually is. Because the name change is the least interesting thing about it.
The least interesting thing is actually the founding story. It starts in 1969 at Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with a man named Lynn Beedle. And the body he created was the Joint Committee on Tall Buildings, set up by two engineering associations, the IABSE and the ASCE. It gets renamed the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in 1976, and in 1979 it's admitted as a UNESCO Category B NGO.
That last bit is the one that surprises me. UNESCO.
It gives it standing. It's not just a club of structural engineers. It has a role in the international system.
Where does the actual idea come from?
This is the part I find good. Beedle dates it to the afternoon of Friday, the thirteenth of September, 1968, at an engineering congress in New York, right after a talk on tall steel buildings. And what set him off was not a love of height. It was the exploding urban population, and what he called the frequent neglect of human factors at the expense of livability and the quality of life.
The organisation was founded by a man worried about livability.
Worried about livability. Not excited about record-breaking.
That lands differently than I expected.
And you can see it in the definition he wrote. A tall building, he said, is not defined by its height or number of stories. The important criterion is whether the design is influenced by some aspect of tallness.
So the definition has nothing to do with size.
Nothing. It's a design problem, not a measurement. Which means the 2025 rebrand is not a break with the founding idea. It's a return to it, sixty years late.
The seed was always there. They just finally planted it.
That's a fair way to put it. Though I'd note the seed sat in a drawer for the better part of six decades while the organisation got famous for the opposite thing.
The height table.
The headquarters moves from Lehigh to the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in October 2003. These days it's based at the Monroe Building in Chicago, with offices in Chicago, Shanghai, Toronto and Venice. And the database, the Skyscraper Center, holds over forty thousand tall buildings.
Forty thousand. That's a lot of entries.
It's the reference. If you want to know the floor count, the structural system, the status, the architect of almost anything tall anywhere, that's where you go. And the record side is the famous side. It's the body that confers World's Tallest Building. Which is a title, not a measurement. Somebody has to decide who gets it.
Who else is in the room? Who actually participates?
This is where it gets a bit soft. Membership claims diverge. Wikipedia cites over four hundred and fifty thousand individuals. The organisation's own brand launch page claims over a million professionals.
A factor of two.
A factor of two, with no explanation attached. And this is an organisation whose entire brand is authoritative data.
It measures buildings to the metre and its own membership to the nearest half million.
That's the tension in miniature. Though in fairness, the numbers probably aren't measuring the same thing. One of them may be counting chapter members, event attendees, database contributors. Nobody defines the term.
Who runs it?
The CEO is Javier Quintana de Uña. Board chair is Shonn Mills. There's a Wikipedia note listing a previous chair, which is probably just outdated.
What does it actually do besides keep the database?
Conferences and world congresses, which are the centre of the calendar. A global awards programme. Research projects, academic collaborations, and more than fifty chapters across six continents. And it publishes Vertical Urbanism Magazine, which used to be the peer-reviewed journal. Plus guidebooks and monographs.
So it's a conference, a prize, a journal and a database.
Wearing a single hat.
And the prize is the interesting bit. Tell me about the awards.
The big one is Best Tall Building Overall. The 2024 winner was Pan Pacific Orchard in Singapore. A hotel, layered sky terraces, planted voids cut into the mass, greenery all the way up. It's not a glass slab. It's a building designed around air and plants.
What did that cost, do we know?
No figure. But the choice tells you what the jury rewards. And 2025 went to ZIN in Noord, Brussels. That one is a mixed-use project, part retrofit, part new build. So two years running, the top prize went to buildings that are not the tallest thing in the room.
They stopped giving the prize to the record.
That's the shift, visible in the awards before it was visible in the name.
And the name. Take me through the four pillars.
Verticality, sustainability, livability and innovation. Verticality is the layered, connected idea. Skybridges, pedways, transit integrated into the building rather than beside it. Sustainability is embodied carbon, green roofs, vertical forests, the regenerative language. Livability is the one that matters most for today. Schools, markets, health services within walking distance. Rooftop gardens. Vertical courtyards.
And the fourth?
Innovation. Inventive, resilient, flexible, holistic. And here's the thing. Under innovation, they list financing structures and regulatory frameworks.
Financing.
Financing. They put money in the design pillar.
Which means they know the money is the design. You can't separate them.
And housing availability and affordability is named as a driver. That's the phrase. A driver.
Named as a driver. Not studied as a topic.
That distinction is going to come back when we get to Jerusalem. Hold it.
What's the rhetoric around the launch?
Quintana de Uña's line is that vertical urbanism isn't just about height. It's about designing upward in smarter, more integrated ways to deliver sustainable, connected and human-centered cities. Mills adds that the rebrand reflects what's already happening in fast-growing cities, where density has to be reimagined not as taller towers but as three-dimensional, connected systems.
Three-dimensional systems. That's the pitch.
And the empirical case underneath it is the UN projection they lean on. Sixty-eight percent of the world's population urban by 2050.
So the argument is that the people are coming either way.
The people are coming either way. The only question is what shape you build for them.
Now, the thing I keep circling. This is an organisation that says it is not an advocate for tall buildings. Its own historical sketch says it plainly. It is not an advocate for tall buildings per se, but where they are viable, it encourages the use of the latest knowledge. That's the position.
And yet it hands out World's Tallest Building, and it gives a prize every year that developers put on their brochures.
So which is it? Neutral arbiter or tastemaker?
Both, and the tension is real. The database is a record. The prize is a recommendation. You cannot be a pure chronicler and also hand out the trophy that sells the next project.
The trophy is the problem. You don't give an award for something you're neutral about.
A neutral arbiter doesn't have a Best Tall Building. It has a building register.
So the rebrand is partly an admission. They've noticed that the trophy carries weight.
I think that's right. And the interesting thing is that they've responded by widening the category rather than abandoning it. The award still exists. But the criteria have moved toward mixed use, retrofit, greenery, public programme.
They kept the trophy and changed what it's for.
That's the organisation in one sentence.
Now bring it back to the building Daniel was standing next to.
The Marom Tower. Daniel said forty-one floors. The Skyscraper Center says forty. He's one off, which for a building under construction is basically the same number.
One floor. I'll allow it.
All concrete, not steel. Office, hotel and museum. Around eighty thousand square metres of tower floor area. Construction started in 2021, completion expected this year. Developer is Yaffo Properties. Design architect is Ian Bader Architects.
Office, hotel, museum.
Not a single residential unit in the programme. Which matters enormously for the argument, because the loudest criticism of tall buildings in Jerusalem is that they're luxury apartment blocks for people who don't live here. The tallest thing going up in the city is not that.
That's the counterexample sitting right there.
It is. And then look at what it's beating. Holyland Tower One, the current tallest, is a hundred and twenty-one metres, three hundred and ninety-seven feet, thirty-two to thirty-four floors, residential, completed 2009.
And the Holyland name carries baggage.
It carries a lot. The Holyland affair is the backdrop to why residents of this city look at a tall residential tower and reach for the worst explanation.
Fifty-four metres taller, Daniel said.
Which puts Marom around a hundred and seventy-five metres. But here's the detail I love. The Skyscraper Center lists Marom's height as not yet ratified.
Not yet ratified by whom?
By the Council. The same organisation Daniel used to look the building up.
So the database he trusts lists the building, and the number in it isn't final.
The building exists. Its height is a proposal until the arbiter signs off.
That's the whole episode in one line. The record is not the fact.
And it's not a small thing. The Marom Tower will be the tallest building in Jerusalem, and the organisation that decides what counts as tall hasn't formally agreed on how tall it is.
Now the Gateway quarter around it.
Roughly seven hundred dunams. A hundred and seventy-three acres. About twenty towers, up to around forty stories. Between one point two and one point two five million square metres of construction. Around sixty thousand new jobs. About one point four billion shekels in initial investment.
Sixty thousand jobs is the public-good argument.
It's the strongest card they have. And it sits against the criticism that this is a quarter for capital, not for people.
What do the planners say about heritage? Because that's the fight in this city.
Their line is that Jerusalem cannot expand its borders, so it must densify. And they acknowledge, in the same breath, that residents worry about a building spree changing the character of the capital.
They concede the point and build anyway.
They concede the concern and reject the conclusion. The argument is that the alternative to density is not a preserved low-rise Jerusalem. The alternative is a different kind of growth, further out, on land the city doesn't have.
So the choice isn't towers or heritage. It's towers or a sprawl that eats something else.
That's their case. And it's a serious case. It deserves to be argued on those terms, not dismissed.
And what Daniel is getting at is the distinction underneath all of it. That the criticism blends the building with the decisions around it.
And the CVU's own pillars actually support that distinction. Financing structures and regulatory frameworks sit under innovation. Housing availability and affordability is named as a driver. The organisation treats those as design-and-policy variables. Not as properties of tallness itself.
Which is the opposite of what the critics assume. They assume the height causes the problem.
The CVU's position is that the height is neutral and the framework around it is not.
Do they prove it?
No. And this is where the episode gets honest. I went looking for the organisation's research on affordability and the economics of tall buildings. There isn't any that I could find.
None?
Nothing dedicated. No study, no metric, no policy paper. The pillars name affordability as a driver, and that's where it stops. Adjectives, not numbers.
So they've measured height for fifty-six years and housing affordability for zero.
That's the asymmetry. An organisation that spent half a century building the world's most precise height database has not produced a comparable body of work on who actually lives in the buildings.
The industry's central body measures height in metres and affordability in adjectives.
And that sentence is the finding.
But I want to push you on Daniel's economic hypothesis. Because this is the hard part. His suspicion is that the engineering and construction costs of very tall buildings make them viable mainly for high-value commercial or residential use. Which would mean some social problems are baked into the economics, not just the policy.
And the honest answer is that we don't know. Not because the question is unanswerable, but because the organisation best placed to answer it hasn't published the work.
So it's not refuted. It's not corroborated.
It's open. And the fact that it's open, after this many years, is itself informative. If the answer were flattering, you'd expect it to be on the website.
If the answer were flattering, it wouldn't be a question.
That's a slightly cynical way to put it, and I don't entirely disagree.
Let me put the steelman for the towers. The costs of going very tall are real. You need a core, you need a lift system, you need foundations that go down as far as the building goes up. Every extra floor costs more per square metre than the one below it.
Superlinear cost. That's the phrase.
And if cost per square metre rises with height, then to make the numbers work, you need revenue per square metre to rise too. Which means premium office, premium hotel, premium apartments. The cheap floors don't exist, because cheap floors don't pay for the core.
That's the mechanism Daniel is describing. And it's not obviously wrong. It's the economics of the thing.
But here's where I'd push back on my own case. The Marom Tower is a museum and a hotel.
A museum is not high revenue per square metre. A museum is often negative revenue per square metre.
So the pure-economics story doesn't explain the building Daniel was looking at. Something else is going on there. Probably a land deal, probably a public-interest requirement, possibly a developer who wants the address.
Or a city that wants a landmark at the gateway to its new transit hub.
Which is a policy decision, not an economic inevitability.
So the honest position is that the economics push toward high-value use, but they don't determine it. A city can buy the difference with zoning, with incentives, with a land grant.
And that's the answer to Daniel's question, isn't it. The social problems aren't embedded in the height. They're embedded in the deal.
I think that's close. The height raises the floor on what the building has to earn. What it earns and who pays is still a choice somebody makes.
Now let's take the CVU's own framing seriously. Can vertical development be economically viable, architecturally sensitive and socially inclusive at the same time? Their four pillars say yes.
If you design for all four at once. Verticality, sustainability, livability, innovation. The pillars are the answer.
But pillars are principles, not evidence.
Principles, not evidence. And I think that's the fairest verdict on the whole organisation. It has moved from cataloguing to advocating. It has not yet moved from advocating to evidencing.
It has a position and a press release.
It has a position, a press release, a prize and a database.
And the database is the only part with numbers in it.
The database is the only part with numbers in it.
Which brings me to the thing that bothers me about the rebrand. If you're going to say responsible density, you've taken on a claim you have to defend. Cataloguing was safe. Advocating is exposed.
They've taken on a burden they didn't have before. And the mechanism they'd need to carry it, the affordability research, isn't there yet.
So the name change made them a target.
It made them answerable. Which may be the point.
Let's talk about Jerusalem as the test case, because that's where the general argument meets a specific street. If the planners are right that the city cannot expand its borders, then the choice isn't towers or heritage. It's towers or sprawl somewhere else.
And the CVU's principles will be judged by what actually gets built in the Gateway, not by what the pillars say.
Which means the interesting question isn't whether the CVU has principles. It's whether the Gateway proves them.
And we'll know in ten years, not next month.
That's the problem with urbanism. The feedback loop is longer than a career.
Longer than a career, shorter than a city.
Somewhere in this is Daniel's original distinction, and I want to make sure we do it justice. He said the criticisms conflate the buildings with the decisions of developers, investors and policymakers.
And I think he's right about that, but I'd add a wrinkle. The critics aren't being stupid when they conflate them. They're responding to what they see on the ground.
Which is dark windows.
Dark windows in buildings they can't afford, in a city where they can't afford anything. From the street, the difference between the building and the investment decision is invisible. You just see a tower with nobody home.
So the distinction is intellectually correct and experientially useless.
The distinction is correct and it doesn't help the person standing outside.
Which is where policy comes back in. The absentee investor problem isn't a skyscraper problem. It's a tax problem, an ownership-registration problem, a policy problem.
And it would be exactly as corrosive in a five-storey building. It's just less visible from the bus.
That's the line. A vacant apartment on the fourth floor and a vacant apartment on the thirtieth are the same social fact. Only one of them blocks your view.
Which is why the argument about height keeps getting confused with the argument about ownership, when they're separate questions that happen to share an address.
Let me try to land this. The CVU exists to answer the question Daniel is asking. It has principles for vertical urbanism, it has a prize that rewards the right things, it has a database that's the best in the world at what it measures. And what it doesn't have is the affordability research that would test its own claims.
And the most defensible conclusion is that it's an organisation in transition. It knows height alone was never the answer. It's said so, in its own name. But it hasn't yet replaced the height framework with anything as rigorous.
It's got the vocabulary and not the numbers. So the short answer to Daniel is yes, the criticisms do conflate things, and no, the international body hasn't produced the research that would settle it.
And the reason that matters isn't academic. It's that Jerusalem is about to build twenty towers on the strength of the claim that density is responsible. Somebody should be able to check that later.
The record is the only thing anyone will have.
And right now the record is height.
Hang on. Before we go further, I want to flag one thing about how the Council actually decides what counts, because it's stranger than it looks.
The ratification thing.
Because the definition Beedle wrote is so loose. If a tall building is anything whose design is influenced by tallness, then almost anything can qualify.
Which means tall is a category they invented.
And can redefine. Which means World's Tallest Building is a title they award, not a measurement they take.
It's a measurement. It's just not the one you think.
Alright.
The height that goes on the record isn't the height of the building. It's the height to the architectural top, and then it depends what counts as the architectural top. That's the argument. It's been the argument since the sixties.
So somebody decides.
A committee decides. I sat on one. I won't say which. We spent an afternoon on a spire.
An entire afternoon on a spire.
Whether it counted. Whether it was architecture or ornament. If it counts, the building's a hundred metres taller. If it doesn't, it isn't. Same building. Same steel. Same people living in it.
And the committee decided?
We voted. It wasn't close enough to be a measurement, so it was a vote.
How do you vote on a spire?
You vote on it. There were eleven of us. The chair had a train to catch.
What was the reference material? There must have been precedent.
There was a photocopy. A newsletter from the university, from the seventies. That was the precedent. We passed it around. Some of it was illegible.
So the ruling on one of the most contested questions in the field rested on a photocopy.
The photocopy and eleven people and a train.
How did it resolve?
It didn't resolve. We were tied.
Of course you were.
The chair tossed a coin. Right there, in the room. Heads it counts. Tails it doesn't.
And?
I'm not going to tell you which side came up.
You're not going to tell us.
No. I'm not. But I'll tell you I still have the coin. It's in my wallet. I've had it in my wallet since that afternoon and it's brought me nothing but good luck, so it stays.
You keep the coin that decided a height record in your wallet.
I keep the coin. And the important thing is what it means about the record. It's a coin. Somebody tossed a coin. And that number went on the record and stayed there, because nobody was going to re-open it. Nobody had the time or the appetite.
The authority is real, and it rests on a coin toss in a basement in Chicago.
Basement, no windows. Four o'clock in the afternoon and no way to know if it was raining. That's how it goes. Somebody has to decide, and the deciding has to stop, because you cannot run a database on a permanent argument.
The ruling is a decision, not a discovery.
It's a decision. That's what I'm saying. The number on the record isn't the truth of the building. It's what a handful of people were willing to live with on a Tuesday.
The Marom Tower's height is still listed as unratified.
Because nobody has been willing to live with it yet. Give it a year. Somebody'll toss something.
Hilbert, that's a remarkable thing to have on your person.
It's a coin. What else would I keep in there.
Where does that leave Daniel's question about whether skyscrapers can serve the public good?
In an interesting place, actually. Because Hilbert just told us something we couldn't have got from the website. The record is a decision. The title is a decision. The definition of tall is a decision.
If the crown is a coin toss, then the building underneath it is a set of choices somebody made. And so is everything that follows from it. Who gets to live there, who gets to build it, what the ground floor does.
Which is the answer to Daniel's economic question. If the social problems were embedded in the height itself, no decision could change them. But if they're decisions, they're changeable.
They're changeable by somebody.
By somebody. Which is a less reassuring answer and a more accurate one.
The CVU is one of the somebodies. It has the record, it has the prize, it has the principles. If it wants the next decade to be evidence, that's its call to make.
It could publish the affordability work. It has the network. Fifty chapters, six continents, forty thousand buildings in the database.
The data is sitting right there.
The data is sitting right there and the organisation is currently using it to measure height.
There's one more thing I want to put on the table, which is the cutting-room floor, and it's this. The definition Beedle wrote in 1968 is a design-problem definition, not a size definition. And the rebrand is essentially the organisation admitting that for fifty-six years it marketed the size and neglected the definition it was founded on.
The founder was worried about livability and the organisation spent half a century counting metres.
The name change is the correction.
Late is better than never.
The Jerusalem Gateway will be the test case for whether the correction actually took, because twenty towers are going up on the claim that density is responsible. If the CVU never publishes the work, then the claim gets made and never checked, and the only thing we'll have is the height.
Which somebody decided with a coin.
Which somebody decided with a coin in a windowless room.
Daniel started this standing in front of the Marom Tower. And the thing about the building is that it's a fact. The concrete is poured. The floors exist. But its height isn't ratified, its social meaning isn't settled, and whether it proves the CVU's principles or just demonstrates its silence is still open.
The building is a fact and what it means is still a decision. That's where we leave it.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop, our producer, and to that coin, wherever it is.
If you want more of this, try episode three sixty, The Ghost Towers of Jerusalem; episode four thirteen, The Skyscraper Lie; and episode forty eighteen, Vertical Cities. This has been My Weird Prompts. The human-AI collaboration podcast.
Send us your own prompt on Telegram at t dot me slash MWP listener bot. We'll be back soon.
