Quote:
Originally Posted by NYC4Life
In certain towers like the Empire State Building and Sears Tower, their antennas were not originally included during construction and have also been lengthened over the years. Thus, adding more height to their towers.
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I gotta say that's a lousy argument. It boils down to "since it can change, it doesn't count." In reality, when you add to something, you make it bigger. 1+1=2, not 1+1=1. Taken to its logical extension, the vertical expansion of the Blue Cross Blue Shield building in Chicago should not count because they added floors.
Buildings are the only man-made object where people split hairs over of asinine details like spire versus antenna. Aircraft are measured from the pitot tube (a small tube roughly half an inch wide and at most a foot long) to the tail antennas. Why? because if you
pretend it's not there, you might build an airport that gets one of those little sticks of metal snapped off in a hard turn. By the same token, aviation authorities catalog buildings by pinnacle, again because there's practical considerations that don't play well with pretending something isn't there when it will slice off a wing as good as any other piece of metal. Going philosophical, it cheapens the engineering that goes into antennas, and the effort it takes to put them up (which because they have to be replaced every so often means in the long run it takes MORE effort). However, mainly, it's schizophrenic. You're saying something that clearly exists doesn't.