CHICAGO | Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) | 1,451 FT / 442 M | 108 FLOORS | 1974

[-Filipe-]

Originally Posted by J_M_Tungsten

A roof height of over 1400' can be difficult to beat. What's really amazing is that no other building in America has been built taller than the sears since it went up.

i said that before, have to agree, no disrespect to the building but just the fact that in 30 years nothing taller has been built, hopefully something taller will pop up somewhere, hopefully chicago can get a new tallest

[Chicago103]

Originally Posted by george

10-1

View from my far away East Village deck.

So how tall is this new antenna? I haven't been downtown since then and I can't find an article confirming anything.

[Chase Unperson]

Originally Posted by -Filipe-

i said that before, have to agree, no disrespect to the building but just the fact that in 30 years nothing taller has been built, hopefully something taller will pop up somewhere, hopefully chicago can get a new tallest

YOu mean 40 years and nothing else in the US. That is amazing. At least we have the Freedom Tower.

I guess it is not that different how nothing bigger was built between the ESB and WTC and that was almost exactly 40 years too.

In fact that makes the ESB even more of a statistical anomaly than the Willis Tower.

[-Filipe-]

Originally Posted by Chase Unperson

YOu mean 40 years and nothing else in the US. That is amazing. At least we have the Freedom Tower.

I guess it is not that different how nothing bigger was built between the ESB and WTC and that was almost exactly 40 years too.

In fact that makes the ESB even more of a statistical anomaly than the Willis Tower.

true i guess it just depends on the building booms, like 70s, 80s was the latest boom, now 2008-2010's is the latest boom

[george]

[NYguy]

http://www.suntimes.com/news/sneed/1...lis-tower.html

High praise, indeed: Mitt Romney banner hung on Willis Tower





By MICHAEL SNEED
October 15, 2012

Mitt Romney got the city’s highest endorsement recently on President Barack Obama’s home turf. It was a 110-stories-high sanction atop the Willis (Sears) Tower, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.

John Rukavina, 74, a Local 1 ironworker — who claims to have put up “every antenna and tower in Chicago since Marina Towers in 1974” — affixed a Romney banner as well as an American flag on the ABC antenna on Willis Tower minutes after it was completed Sept. 30. “The flag is a symbol — an old ironworker’s custom — which is hung if the job went well,” said Rukavina, who said he worked on the Sears Tower antenna in 1978. He’s also worked on the John Hancock Center and New York’s World Trade Center.

[george]

Thanks, NYguy. ^ Pretty impressive claim for John Rukavina.

[george]

1-4

[DrNest]

So is the replacement antenna the same height as the one it replaced?

[Chicago103]

Here is a rare picture of the original Wacker Drive entrance prior to the 1985 atrium entrance we have today. For those of you that don't know the tower itself hits street level on Wacker Drive a few feet higher than on Franklin Street and that point on Wacker is somewhere between the Concourse and Mezzanine levels of the building, about 4-5 feet above the former level. These outdoor steps in the picture apparently went up to the Mezzanine level on the Wacker Drive side whereas today the atrium entrance has indoor steps that go down to the Concourse level. The Franklin Street entrance on the other hand always went directly into the Concourse level.

This actually reminded me of a diagram a SSP forumner e-mailed me in about 2005 that had precise floor height measurements of every single floor from the Chicago Buildings Department. If I recall correctly the 1,353 foot high measurement for the 103rd floor Skydeck was measured from the Mezzanine level (original Wacker Drive main entrance) whereas the roof was measured from the Concourse level, in fact all floors were measured from the Concourse and if you subtracted 13 feet and some odd inches from the measurement (exact same as the difference between the concourse and mezzanine levels) for the 103rd floor it came out exactly to the 1,353 foot measurement you read everywhere in regards to the Skydeck.

Unfortunately I can't prove this to everyone here because the computer where I saved the diagram died on me years ago, the e-mail account from my college days where I received it is gone as well as is the PM database on SSP from those days so I don't even recall the name of the forumner who sent me this. My bad for not backing up this awesome rare find properly but my computer happened to die suddenly after the other sources were purged. I am curious if anyone on here has any sources that confirm or deny what I recall from memory from years ago. Skyscraper geeks who are obsessed with exact measurements want to know .

[Yankee fan for life]

As a New Yoker i am proud to say that i love the willis/sears tower !

[BrandonJXN]

If you've never seen it in person, it's very hard to grasp how absolutely towering this building is. It is enormous. Plus the way it looms over everything else is really interesting to see.

[photoLith]

The Sears Tower isnt looking as black as it was when I remember seeing at a kid living in Chicago. Maybe they need to clean it although I dont know how you clean steel since a lot of that is just weather over the years and maybe a little bit of rusting.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by photoLith

The Sears Tower isnt looking as black as it was when I remember seeing at a kid living in Chicago. Maybe they need to clean it although I dont know how you clean steel since a lot of that is just weather over the years and maybe a little bit of rusting.

the sears tower is clad with black anodized aluminum. it's not rusting.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by photoLith

The Sears Tower isnt looking as black as it was when I remember seeing at a kid living in Chicago. Maybe they need to clean it although I dont know how you clean steel since a lot of that is just weather over the years and maybe a little bit of rusting.

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

the sears tower is clad with black anodized aluminum. it's not rusting.

Indeed. It very well might hold up longer/better than a stone facade would if both were left completely unmaintained for some period of years.

Coincidentally, I was just thinking about survivability of the Sears Tower on the way to work today. I've been watching (probably too many) apocalyptic movies/shows (such as the Walking Dead) lately and it occurred to me that post-9/11 if society did completely fail that some of the trouble-making factions among the survivors might want to try to wreak some destruction on a grand scale and would easily find a good way to fell a building with a steel support infrastructure.

Barrels of petroleum, cords of wood or reams of paper, perhaps as much accelerant or chemical sources of oxygen as could be scrounged up placed in the 2/3 of a building on the side you wanted it to fall toward, all put on 2-3 floors above the foundation, light it up and in a day or so you very well might end up with a horizontal skyscraper. Obviously wouldn't work as well for concrete cores, but for completely steel ones it seems like a relatively simple task to pull off if society disappeared. This doesn't happen now mainly due to fire suppression (either active systems or active fire departments) and a lack of sufficient fuel to keep the fire hot enough, long enough to soften the steel sufficiently. But if there was no police or fire department, loading in enough fuel would just be a matter of time.

[Yankee fan for life]

Tomorrow the Willis Tower will lose it's pinnacle title to One World Trade Center and will eventually lose it's roof title to Nordstrom tower,but lets give the Willis a hand for 39 years as king of the United States.

[Chicago103]

Originally Posted by Yankee fan for life

Tomorrow the Willis Tower will lose it's pinnacle title to One World Trade Center and will eventually lose it's roof title to Nordstrom tower,but lets give the Willis a hand for 39 years as king of the United States.

40 years actually, tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the topping out of the Sears Tower. It also seems the mast topping out of 1 WTC is still a few days away. Also the Sears Tower has only held the tallest pinnacle title in the US since 2000 because the north tower of the twins had a higher antenna until Sears Tower added an extension to it's western antenna on June 5, 2000 which gave it the pinnacle height of 1,729 feet it has today. The Nordstrom Tower in NYC sounds interesting, I just found out about it recently, as far as I am concerned that will likely be the first American skyscraper to top Sears/Willis Tower.

[Yankee fan for life]

Originally Posted by Chicago103

40 years actually, tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the topping out of the Sears Tower. It also seems the mast topping out of 1 WTC is still a few days away. Also the Sears Tower has only held the tallest pinnacle title in the US since 2000 because the north tower of the twins had a higher antenna until Sears Tower added an extension to it's western antenna on June 5, 2000 which gave it the pinnacle height of 1,729 feet it has today. The Nordstrom Tower in NYC sounds interesting, I just found out about it recently, as far as I am concerned that will likely be the first American skyscraper to top Sears/Willis Tower.

It will be interesting to see if one world trade mast will be counted, since Willis/Sears is just three more years away of beating the Empire state building record as Americas tallest.sticky situation when it comes to 1 wtc vs willis/sears willis/sears = 83 foot taller roof 1 wtc = 47 feet taller by pinnacle ,as a New Yorker i have to say that the willis/sears is still taller.

[george]

4-30

[george]