Sears Tower

The Sears Tower is a skyscraper in Chicago, Illinois, and the tallest office building in the United States. 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 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 (the building owners claim 110, but this includes the main roof and the roof of the elevator penthouse). The distance to the upper 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, bringing 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 CBS station WBBM-TV. In the process it surpassed the height of the antenna on 1 World Trade Center.

The Sears Tower also has the most total floor space of any commercial building in the United States, and second-most overall to The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. One-story high black bands appear on the tower around the 30th–32nd, 64th–65th, 88th–89th, and 106th–107th floors. These allow ventilation for service equipment and obscure the tower's diagonal "X" bracing, which Sears Roebuck did not want to be visible.

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

History

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.

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, Toronto's CN Tower, built in 1976, cost around the equivalent of US$260 million in 2005 dollars.

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. 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.

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 great plains of Illinois and across Lake Michigan 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.

Which is the tallest?

At 452 m (1,483 feet) tall, including decorative spires, the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, 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. With the arrival of Taipei 101, the Petronas Towers were surpassed in spire height, and for the first time, the Sears was surpassed in roof height. At its highest point, the Sears Tower's antenna exceeds the Taipei 101's spire in height.

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 Fordham Spire may surpass the Sears Tower—although not Burj Dubai—in all height categories in 2009.

Terrorist target

Aftermath of September 11th

After the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the observation deck at the Sears Tower was closed for several weeks. It was then re-opened to the public with Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley and former president George H.W. Bush in attendance. In 2006, the Department of Homeland Security designated Chicago as a "high threat urban area" eligible to receive federal funding^*. Since then, the building has often been the target of terror hoaxes and at least one alleged planned attack.

Miami bomb plot

On June 22, 2006, seven men ages 22 to 32, were arrested in Miami on charges of plotting to bomb both the Sears Tower in Chicago and the FBI building in Miami. The group was composed of five U.S. citizens and two immigrants from Haiti, one legal and one illegal.^*

Originally they were reported to be Muslims and later to be Black nationalists, they are now being described as adherants to an unusual set of beliefs derived from a number of faiths including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, based on the teachings of the Moorish Science Temple of America, an early 20th century cult founded by the Noble Drew Ali.^*

Trivia

The Sears Tower is the highest point in Illinois. The tip of its highest antenna is 2,325 ft (709 m) above sea level, its roof is 2046 ft (623 m) above sea level, the Wacker Drive main entrance is 595 ft (181 m) above sea level.
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.
Sufjan Stevens gives a musical nod to the Sears Tower in his song "The Seer's Tower" on his album Illinois.
The building leans four inches from vertical due to its slightly asymmetrical design, placing unequal loads on its foundation.
The design for the Sears Tower incorporates nine steel-unit tubes. The Sears Tower was the first building for which this design was used.
The Sears Tower's ZIP Code, 60606, was a catalyst of various apocalypse-related rumors surrounding the date June 6, 2006 (also 06/06/06) - a play on 666, the Number of the Beast.
Comedian Ron White, referring to a lawsuit he brought against Sears, mentioned as part of a stand-up comedy routine that he hoped that "next year they have to change the name of Sears Tower in Chicago to 'Ron White's Big Ol' F****** Building.'"

External links

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Sears Tower