William Van Alen’s building of the Chrysler building and the competition to be the first to complete the world’s tallest building.

I think you're spot on in that there is a story here - it's well known enough to have audience appeal, but it hasn't really been tackled yet. Still - dpg is totally right. This logline has put the premise into a logline, and as such it's kind of hard to understand how its story dynamics are going to work.

You should add who he's racing against to build the worlds tallest building, otherwise the logline doesn't make sense, there have been other worlds tallest buildings, such as the empire state building.

What seperates this from a documentary? As wilsondownunder mentioned, you need a human element in there to make us care about this story.