Ask a grown-up: where is the smallest skyscraper?

An architecture writer answers six-year-old Edmund's question
Owen Hatherley
Owen Hatherley: 'A skyscraper needs lifts to go from floor to floor.' PR

A building needs three things to count as a skyscraper. It needs to be built with a steel or concrete frame, rather than of brick or stone like most houses. It needs lifts to go from floor to floor. It originally needed to be of at least 10 storeys, though now few people would call anything less than around 30 storeys a "skyscraper".

Oriel Chambers in Liverpool, built in the 1860s, has the steel frame but is only five storeys. So the smallest skyscraper that everyone would agree is a skyscraper is the Wainwright building in St Louis in the US, built in 1891. It has a steel frame, lifts and 10 storeys, and was designed by Louis Sullivan, the first architect to design skyscrapers as modern buildings, rather than as classical or gothic buildings stacked up high. He wrote that a skyscraper should be a "proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation from bottom to top".

Despite being only 10 storeys, the Wainwright building is certainly that.

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