Sears Tower

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Information
Sears Tower
Image:Sears Tower ss.jpg Sears Tower was the world's tallest building from 1973 to 2004.*
Preceded by	World Trade Center
Surpassed by	Taipei 101
Location	Chicago, Illinois USA
Status	Complete
Constructed	1970-1973
Height
Antenna/Spire	1730 ft (527.3 m) [1]
Roof	1451 ft (442.3 m)
Top floor	1354 ft (412.7 m)
Technical Details
Floor count	108
Floor area	3.8 million sq. ft. 418,064 sq. m
Elevator count	104
Companies
Architect	Skidmore, Owings and Merrill
* Fully habitable, self-supported, from main entrance to rooftop; see world's tallest structures for other listings.</font>

The Sears Tower is a skyscraper in Chicago, Illinois, and the tallest building in the USA. Commissioned by Sears, Roebuck and Company, it was designed by chief architect Bruce Graham and structural engineer Fazlur Khan of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill.

Construction commenced in August 1970 and the building reached its originally anticipated maximum height on May 3, 1973. When completed, the Sears Tower had overtaken the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City as the world's tallest building. The tower has 108 stories as counted by standard methods, though the building owners count the main roof as 109 and the mechanical penthouse roof as 110. The distance to the roof is 1,450 feet, 7 inches (442 m), measured from the east entrance.

In February 1982, two television antennas were added to the structure, increasing its total height to 1,707 feet (520 m). The western antenna was later extended to 1,729 feet (527 m) on June 5, 2000 to improve reception of local NBC station WMAQ-TV. In the process it surpassed the height of the antenna on 1 World Trade Center.

Two-story high black bands appear on the tower around the 30th–32nd, 64th–65th, 88th–89th, and 106th–107th floors. These are louvers which allow ventilation for service equipment and obscure the structure's belt trusses which Sears Roebuck did not want to be visible as on the John Hancock Center.

The building's official address is 233 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60606.

1 History
- 1.1 Planning and construction
- 1.2 Post-opening
2 The Skydeck
3 GoVerticalChicago stair climb
4 Which is the tallest?
5 Trivia
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

[edit] History

[edit] Planning and construction

In 1969 Sears, Roebuck & Co. was by far the largest retailer in the world, with about 350,000 employees. Sears executives decided to consolidate the thousands of employees in offices scattered throughout Chicagoland into one building on the western edge of Chicago's Loop. With immediate space demands of 3 million square feet (279,000 m²), and with predictions and plans for future growth necessitating even more space than that, architects for Skidmore knew that the building would be one of the largest office buildings in the world.

Sears executives decided early on that the space they would immediately occupy should be efficiently designed to house the small army that was their Merchandise Group. However, floor space for future growth would be rented out to smaller firms and businesses until Sears could retake it. Therefore, the floor sizes would need to be smaller, and to have a higher window-space to floor-space ratio, to be more attractive and marketable to these prospective lessees. Smaller floor sizes necessitated a taller structure. Skidmore architects proposed a tower which would have large 55,000-square-foot (5,000 m²) floors in the lower part of the building, and would gradually taper the area of the floors down in a series of setbacks, which would give the Sears Tower its distinctive, husky-shouldered look.

Image:Searsview.JPG

As Sears continued to offer optimistic projections for future growth, the tower's proposed height soared into the low hundreds of floors and surpassed the height of New York's unfinished World Trade Center to become the world's tallest building. Restricted in height not by physical limitation or imagination but rather by a limit imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration to protect air traffic, the Sears Tower would be financed completely out of Sears' deep pockets, and topped with two antennae to permit local television and radio broadcasts. Sears and the City of Chicago approved the design, and the first steel was put in place in April 1971. The structure was completed in May 1973. Construction costs totaled approximately $175 million USD at the time, which would be equivalent to roughly $950 million USD in 2005. For comparison, Taipei's Taipei 101, built in 2004, cost around the equivalent of US$1.64 billion in 2005 dollars.

[edit] Post-opening

However, Sears' optimistic growth projections never came to pass. Competition from its traditional rivals (like Montgomery Ward) continued, only to be surpassed in strength by other retailing giants like Kmart, Kohl's, and Wal-Mart. Sears, Roebuck deteriorated as market share slipped away, and management grew paranoid and introverted through the 1970s.<ref>For information on this transformation, see Donald R. Katz The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears, New York (Viking), 1987.</ref> The Sears Tower was not the draw Sears hoped it would be to potential lessees, and stood half-vacant for a decade as more office space was built in the 1980s. Finally, Sears was forced to take out a mortgage on their headquarters building. Sears began moving its offices out of the Sears Tower in 1993 and had completely moved out by 1995, moving to a new office campus in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.

There have been several owners of the Sears Tower since then. The owners who purchased the tower in March 2004 were rumored to have plans to rename the building.

Considered one of the finest locations for business in Chicago, the Sears Tower is now a multi-tenant office building with more than 100 different companies doing business there, including major law firms, insurance companies and financial services firms.

Sears Tower as seen from John Hancock Center observation deck

900 North Michigan, Park Tower, the John Hancock Center, and Water Tower Place (L-R) as seen from the Sears Tower observation deck

[edit] The Skydeck

The Sears Tower Skydeck observation deck on the 103rd floor of the tower is 1,353 feet (412 m) above ground and is a famous tourist attraction. Tourists can experience how the building sways on a windy day. They can see far over the plains of Illinois and across Lake Michigan to Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin on a clear day. It only takes about 45 seconds to soar to the top in either of two special elevators. The Sears Tower Skydeck competes with the John Hancock Center's observation floor across town, which is 323 feet (98 m) lower.

A second Skydeck on the 99th floor is used when the 103rd floor is closed.

The tourist entrance can be found on the south side of the building along Jackson Boulevard.

The Skydeck was prominently featured in the 1986 film "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" during the main characters' joyride into Chicago.

Admission to the Skydeck is free for persons 3 years of age and younger, $8.95 for persons aged 4 to 12, $11.95 for those 13 to 64, and $8.95 for anyone 65 or older. As with all heavily touristed areas, the exit is flanked by three gift shops featuring Chicagoland memorabilia.

[edit] GoVerticalChicago stair climb

The worlds highest stair climb race is held annually in early November, covering 1,353 vertical feet (413 meters) in 2,109 stairs. As of 2006, 1700 participants make the climb, with the record standing at 13:26

[edit] Which is the tallest?

At 452 m (1,483 feet) tall, including decorative spires, the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Image:Flag of Malaysia.svg Malaysia, laid claim to replacing the Sears Tower as the tallest building in the world in 1998. Not everyone agreed, and in the ensuing controversy four different categories of "tallest building" were created. Of these, Petronas was the tallest in one category. But with the completion of Taipei 101 in Image:Flag of the Republic of China.svg Taiwan, the Petronas Towers were surpassed in spire height, and for the first time, the Sears was surpassed in roof height by Taipei 101. At its highest point, the Sears Tower's antenna exceeds the Taipei 101's spire in height.

Image:Skyscrapercompare.svg

The Sears Tower is the tallest office building in the United States, and it retains the world record when measuring the height from the sidewalk level of the main entrance to the top of the antenna. When completed, the Freedom Tower in New York City may exceed the Sears Tower through its structural but not occupied peak. Burj Dubai, currently under construction in Dubai, will almost certainly surpass the Sears Tower in all height categories in 2008, estimated to have almost twice as many habitable floors (200) as Sears Tower. Within Chicago the planned Chicago Spire may surpass the Sears Tower—although not Burj Dubai—in all height categories in 2009.

[edit] Trivia

Image:Chicago Grattacieli 1.jpg

The top of the Sears Tower is the highest point in Illinois. The tip of its highest antenna is 1,730 ft (527.3 m) above sea level, its roof is 1,451 ft (442.3 m) above sea level, the Wacker Drive main entrance is 595 ft (181 m) above sea level. (The highest natural point in Illinois is the Charles Mound, at 1,235 ft.)
Without warning, in August 1999 French urban climber Alain "Spiderman" Robert, using only his bare hands and feet and with no safety devices of any kind, scaled the building's exterior glass and steel wall all the way to the top. A thick fog settled in near the end of his climb, making the last 20 floors of the building's glass and steel slippery.
The building leans 4 inches (10 cm) from vertical due to its slightly asymmetrical design, placing unequal loads on its foundation. ^{[citation needed]} This works out to about 2 minutes of arc from vertical.
The design for the Sears Tower incorporates nine steel-unit square tubes in a 3 tube by 3 tube arrangement, with each tube having the footprint of 75 feet by 75 feet. The Sears Tower was the first building for which this design was used. The design allows future growth of extra height to the tower if wanted or needed. ^{[citation needed]}
The Sears Tower makes an appearance in the Namco fighter pilot videogame Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War in 'Mission 27+ The Unsung War'.