Hi,
I would like to contribute somehow; from my experience in Architecture in Chile, when you don't know how tall is a building you could counts their floors. In our normative (Chilean construction law) one floor represents approximately 3 meters. So, If you take a picture of a building in Chile with 3 floors and you don't know its height, you could use this formula:

Building's height in Meters= Nº floors x 3

http://www.masarquitectos.cl/contenido/cons_temuco/images/ficha.jpg

e.g. this building in Temuco city (Chile) has approximately 9 meters.

my best wishes

Vicente Sandoval
Chile