Chicago is also where the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright hoped to build his mile-high skyscraper, The Illinois – proposed in 1956.
Though ultimately unsuccessful, the plan electrified Chicago and kept its dreams of height alive.
And there seems more than a passing resemblance between the 252-storey Kingdom Tower and the 528-storey Illinois – both are slender, angular, straight-edged and taper to a sharp point – although Smith dismisses Wright’s tower as “more sculpture than architecture”.
The Kingdom Tower, he says, is “an evolution of the Burj Khalifa”, tracing its lineage back to Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt 1921 Berlin skyscraper, the first designed with glass curtain walls.