Human beings have been building "high-rise buildings" for thousands of years.
Egypt's Pyramid of Khufu is 146 meters high, which makes it a "high-rise" in terms of height. However, Pyramid of Khufu can not have any technical content, it uses only a kind of primitive "concrete", the strength of today's worst sintered clay bricks are not even as good as, and even with a hand to pick can fall off the slag.
The reason why it can stand for thousands of years, is that the structure of the upper small down big, very solid, coupled with which the tomb space is very small, the vast majority of the volume is a solid giant brick, the whole Huff Pyramid seems huge, but the internal stress is very small, the pyramid's self-weight are huge volume to the ground.
Building components are not afraid of pressure, but afraid of bending. A brick placed in a building, how to pressure can not be broken, but take out the hand to split, the strength of the person can split, reflecting this principle.
Modern buildings are usually buried in the tensile steel bars in the pressure-resistant concrete, the formation of a strong resistance to bending reinforced concrete structural components, take it to do beams, can withstand a lot of vertical pressure; take it to do the columns, you can resist the strong lateral force, that is, the hurricanes, earthquakes, as we know the force.
In super-high-rise buildings, there's more to it than just reinforced concrete.
First of all, compared to the average building, the steel and concrete in super-tall buildings are of a very high grade, and can often be up to twice as strong as ordinary steel and ordinary concrete.
Secondly, high-rise buildings also tend to use prestressed members, which bury pre-tensioned steel strands in the concrete, giving the concrete a large amount of pressure in advance. In this way, the original can only resist pressure of concrete will become both pressure, but also tensile materials, but also tough and tough, resistance to external forces than ordinary components and high three to five percent.