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The Tallest 500 Completed Buildings on Earth

In this project I will be analyzing the top 500 completed buildings on Earth. This data set is from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH): a global organization responsible for collecting and compiling data on tall buildings.

Important notes regarding the data:

  • This data is for completed and still standing buildings, it does not include:

    • destroyed or demolished buildings

    • under construction buildings

    • proposed buildings

    • towers or other structures not defined as buildings

  • This data uses Architectural Height:

    • (Definition From CTBUH): Architectural Height is measured from the level of the lowest, significant, open-air, pedestrian entrance to the architectural top of the building, including spires, but not including antennae, signage, flag poles or other functional-technical equipment.

  • From this point onwards, this document will refer to the Top 500 Tallest Buildings as T500Bs, T500Bs are:
    • The 500 entries in our dataset
    • At least 248.1 metres tall
    • The current (as of Sep 2020) 500 tallest buildings on Earth as per the above criteria
  • A building that at one point in time was in the tallest 500 buildings on Earth but has since been surpassed below #500 will not appear in our dataset. This is important to keep in mind when we analyze historical trends.

Data Preparation and Cleaning

  • Import pandas module and read in the csv file
  • We can see the tallest building is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai at 828m
  • The 500th tallest building is CitySpire in NYC at 248.1m
  • In addition to city and height in metres and feet our data includes the completion year, building materials and building uses
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

tallest_buildings = pd.read_csv('tallest-buildings.csv')
tallest_buildings

Using the .describe() method we can see some interesting stats:

  • the average height of buildings on our list is 299.23m
  • the average building on our list was completed in 2010, with the earliest being in 1930
  • a standard deviation of height in our dataset is 62.56m and of completion date is 12.6 years
tallest_buildings.describe()