Building

Göbekli Tepe is generally considered the oldest known building in the world. Located in southeastern Turkey, it's a prehistoric temple complex estimated to date back to around 9500 BC. This makes it significantly older than famous structures like the Great Pyramids of Giza or Stonehenge.  It's a remarkable site due to its size, complexity, and the fact that it was built by hunter-gatherers before agriculture was widely adopted.

Göbekli Tepe, Şanlıurfa By Teomancimit

The Cairn of Barnenez  is a Neolithic monument located near Plouezoc'h, on the Kernéléhen peninsula in northern Finistère, Brittany (France). It dates to the early Neolithic, about 4800 BC and is considered one of the oldest buildings in the world.

The oldest large-scale cut stone construction still existing is the central edifice of the 4,600-year-old mastaba (a tomb for kings) built at Sakkara, Egypt. It was created to honor King Djoser, the first ruler of the Third Dynasty. Djoser's Pyramid stood 62m (203 ft) tall and was covered in polished white limestone.

Many believe the biblical Tower of Babel was likely based on a real building, the Etemenanki, the ziggraut of the Marduck temple in Babylon. A Babylonian text describes it as having a base of 295 feet square with seven platforms over 108 feet high. The top platform had a temple where the god met with humanity. access was achieved by ramps or stairways.

Lincoln Cathedral was the tallest building in the world for two and a half centuries. It took the mantle in the early 14th century from the Great Pyramid of Giza. This lasted until 1549, when the central spire collapsed.

The tallest building in the world in 1885 was The Home Insurance Company in Chicago. It was nine stories tall.

The Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., officially opened to the general public on October 9, 1888. At the time, it was the world's tallest building, standing at 555 feet and 5 1/8 inches tall. It remains the tallest stone structure and the tallest obelisk in the world to this day.

The monument was built to honor George Washington, the first president of the United States. Construction began in 1848, but it was delayed several times due to funding shortages and the Civil War. Work finally resumed in 1876, and the monument was completed in 1884.

Washington Monument By Greyfiveys Wikipedia

The Singer Building was an office building and early skyscraper in Manhattan, New York. It was the headquarters of the Singer Manufacturing Company. After a tower was added to it the skyscraper became the tallest building in the world from 1908 to 1909, with a roof height of 612 feet (187 m). The Singer Building was razed 1967-1969  to make way for One Liberty Plaza, making is the tallest building ever to be demolished at the time of its destruction.

Philadelphia City Hall was the tallest occupied building from 1901 to 1909, when New York City’s MetLife building was completed. It was actually designed to be the tallest building in the world, but both the Eiffel Tower and Washington Monument were completed before it and stood taller.

Mailing an entire building has been illegal in the US since 1916 when a man mailed a 40,000-ton brick house across Utah to avoid high freight rates. When Indiana Bell bought Central Union in 1929, it found the existing headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana. inadequate. The architect Kurt Vonnegut Sr. suggested moving it to the adjacent lot at 13 West New York Street. Over a month period, he 11,000-short-ton (10,000 t) building was shifted 52 feet (16 m) south, rotated 90 degrees, and then shifted again 100 feet (30 m) west. The work did not disrupt the building's customer telephone service or telephone business operations, nor its gas, water, and electricity supply.

 
The first building to be completely covered in glass, built for the Owens-Illinois Glass Company, was completed in Toledo, Ohio in 1936.

The Pentagon is the world's largest office building. Located in Arlington, Virginia, The Pentagon is about 6,500,000 sq ft (600,000 m2), of which 3,700,000 sq ft (340,000 m2) are used as offices. The headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, approximately 23,000 military and civilian employees and about 3,000 non-defense support personnel work in the building.

The Pentagon photo by David B. Gleason from Chicago, IL. Wikipedia Commons

The North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York was topped out at 1,368 feet (417 m) on December 23, 1970. This made it the tallest building in the world until it was surpassed by the Sears Tower in Chicago in 1973. The entire World Trade Center site was destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The twin towers of the World Trade Center (New York) at night in July 2001. By Filipe Fortes from New York, 

Construction began on the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea in 1987, but the exterior wasn't completed until 2011. It is 330 metres (1,080 ft) tall and was intended to be world's tallest hotel but these days it is the tallest unoccupied building in the world.

The pinnacle was fitted on the roof of Taipei 101 on October 17, 2003. A 101-floor skyscraper in Taipei, Taiwan, it surpassed the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur by 56 metres (184 ft) and was officially classified as the world's tallest  building in 2004, and remained such until the completion of Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan. By Alton Thompson - 2007, Wikipedia

The construction of the world's first building to integrate wind turbines was completed in Bahrain in 2008.

The Burj Khalifa skyscraper (see below), the world's tallest building officially opened in Dubai, United Arab Emirates on January 4, 2010. It reaches the height of 829.8 metres (2,722 ft) and has 163 floors. The Burj Khalifa takes it shape from the Hymenocallis or Spider Lily, which is a regional desert flower.

The Shard in Southwark, London was inaugurated as the tallest building in the European Union on July 5, 2012, with a height of 1,016 feet (309.6 metres). It opened to the public on February 1, 2013. The Shard is a 95-storey skyscraper with 72 habitable floors, a viewing gallery and open-air observation deck on the 72nd floor, at a height of 802 ft (244.3 metres). It is also the second-tallest free-standing structure in the United Kingdom, after the concrete tower at the Emley Moor transmitting station.

The Shard By © User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, $3

The final component of the spire of New York City's One World Trade Center was installed on May 10, 2013, bringing the building, the tallest in the Western Hemisphere, to a height of 1,776 feet (541 m). The building opened in 2014.

The Great Mosque of Mecca, commonly known as al-Masjid al-Ḥarām in Mecca, Saudi Arabia is the  most expensive building in the world having cost around 100 billion $US to build.

The groundscraper, the opposite of a skyscraper, is a building like the Pentagon or Apple's headquarters with relatively few stories but greatly extends horizontally.

NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building in Florida is the biggest one-story building in the world. his massive structure was built to assemble the Saturn V rockets used for the Apollo missions to the Moon. Its immense size allows for the vertical assembly of these colossal spacecraft. It's so big; rain clouds form below the ceiling.

The Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania is considered the heaviest building in the world. Weighing over 4 million tons, it's a massive structure made of steel, bronze, marble, crystal glass, and wood. Its construction was a controversial project, and it's now the third-largest administrative building in the world. 

London, New York and Paris have fake buildings on residential streets that hide subway vents and other infrastructure. These are essentially facades with no building behind them.

Traditional Japanese buildings do not use nails or glue. Instead, timbers are connected by elaborate dovetail joints.

Some buildings in Malaysia replace the 4th floor with “3A” as the sound of four (sì) is similar to the sound of death in Chinese (sĭ ).