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Sears Tower
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The Sears Tower, a signature supertall skyscraper in Chicago, Illinois, has been the tallest building in the Americas since 1973 when it surpassed the World Trade Center. The Sears Tower is the second-tallest free-standing structure in the Americas, surpassed only by the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, and the fourth-tallest in the World. The Sears Tower is also one of only five freestanding structures in the world to exceed 500 metres (1,640 ft) in height.
The Chicago Spire was expected to exceed the height of the Sears Tower in 2012 but its construction has currently been halted due to financial difficulties and it is unclear when it will resume.
Commissioned by Sears, Roebuck and Company, it was designed by chief architect Bruce Graham and structural engineer Fazlur Khan of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.
Construction commenced in August 1970 and the building reached its originally anticipated maximum height on May 3, 1973.
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The Sears Tower, a signature supertall skyscraper in Chicago, Illinois, has been the tallest building in the Americas since 1973 when it surpassed the World Trade Center. The Sears Tower is the second-tallest free-standing structure in the Americas, surpassed only by the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, and the fourth-tallest in the World. The Sears Tower is also one of only five freestanding structures in the world to exceed 500 metres (1,640 ft) in height.
The Chicago Spire was expected to exceed the height of the Sears Tower in 2012 but its construction has currently been halted due to financial difficulties and it is unclear when it will resume.
Commissioned by Sears, Roebuck and Company, it was designed by chief architect Bruce Graham and structural engineer Fazlur Khan of Skidmore, Owings and 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 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's owners count the main roof as 109 and the mechanical penthouse roof as 110. The distance to the roof is , measured from the east entrance.
In February 1982, two television antennas were added to the structure, increasing its total height to . The western antenna was later extended to on June 5, 2000 to improve reception of local NBC station WMAQ-TV.
Black bands appear on the tower around the 29th–32nd, 64th–65th, 88th–89th, and 104th–109th 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.
History
Planning and construction
In 1969, Sears, Roebuck & Co. was the largest retailer in the world, with about 350,000 employees. Sears executives decided to consolidate the thousands of employees in offices distributed throughout the Chicago area 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, 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. But 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 high window-space to floor-space ratio, to be 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 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 antennas 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 $150 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.
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. The fortunes of Sears & Roebuck declined in the 1970s as the company lost market share and its management grew ever more cautious. The Sears Tower itself was not the draw Sears hoped it would be. The tower stood half-vacant for a decade as more office space was erected in Chicago in the 1980s. The company was eventually obliged to take out a mortgage on its signature building. Sears began moving its offices out of the Sears Tower in 1992 and had completely vacated the building by 1995, moving to a new office campus in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.
The Sears Tower has gone through several owners in the years since but Sears has retained the naming rights for the building. It is now a multi-tenant office building with more than 100 different companies in residence, including major law firms, insurance companies and financial services firms.
In 1994 Sears sold the building to Boston-based AEW Capital Management with financing from MetLife. At the time it was one third vacant. In 1997 Toronto-based TrizecHahn Corp (the owner at the time of the CN Tower) purchased the building for $110 million, and assumption of $4 million in liabilities, and a $734 million mortgage. In 2003 Trizec surrendered the building to lender MetLife. In 2004 Metlife sold it to a group of investors that includes New York investors Joseph Chetrit, Joseph Moinian, Lloyd Goldman, Joseph Cayre and Jeffrey Feil and Skokie-based American Landmark Properties. The quoted price was $840 million with $825 million held in a mortgage.
Future plans
In February 2009 the owners announced they are considering a plan to paint the structure silver. The paint would "rebrand" the building and highlight its advances in energy efficiency. The estimated cost is $50 million.
Since 2007 the building owners have been considering building a hotel adjacent to the building on the north side of Jackson between Wacker and Franklin on the site of a plaza that is the entrance to tower's observation deck. The tower's parking garage is beneath the plaza. Building owners say the second building was considered in the original design. City zoning does not permit construction of such a tall tower there.
The Skydeck
The Sears Tower Skydeck observation deck opened on June 22, 1974 and is located on the 103rd floor of the tower. It is 1,353 feet (412 m) above ground and is one of the most famous tourist attractions in Chicago. 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 takes about 60 seconds to soar to the top in either of two special, Schindler Group elevators. The Sears Tower Skydeck competes with the John Hancock Center's observation floor a mile and a half away, which is 323 feet (98 m) lower. 1.3 million tourists visit the Skydeck annually.
In January 2009, the Skydeck began a major renovation which includes the installation of window space which will extend approximately four feet out over Wacker Drive. The new installations will be boxes made entirely of glass, allowing visitors to look through the glass floor to the street below. The idea is based on similar glass bottom attractions at the Grand Canyon and in Australia. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill are overseeing the design and engineering. The renovation is expected to be complete in April 2009.
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.
Without warning, in August 1999 French urban climber Alain "Spiderman" Robert, using only his bare hands and feet 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.
Gallery
Height
The Sears Tower remains the tallest building in the Americas, and retains the world record when measuring from sidewalk level of the main entrance to the top of the antenna. With a pinnacle height of 527 m (1,730 ft), it is the second tallest freestanding structure in the Americas, as it is 26 metres (86 ft) shorter than Toronto's CN Tower, and is the only other freestanding structure in the Americas to exceed 500 metres (1,640 ft) in height. As of January 2009, the Sears Tower is the fourth tallest freestanding structure in the world (by pinnacle height), after the Burj Dubai, the CN Tower and the Ostankino Tower.
At 1,482.6 feet (451.9 m) 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 (height to top of architectural elements, meaning spires but not antennas).
Taipei 101 in Taiwan claimed the record in three of the four categories in 2004 to become generally recognized as the tallest building in the world. Taipei 101 surpassed the Petronas Twin Towers in spire height and the Sears Tower in roof height; it also claimed the record for highest occupied floor. The Sears Tower retained one record: its antenna exceeded the Taipei 101's spire in height. In 2008, the Shanghai World Financial Center claimed the records of tallest building by roof and highest occupied floor.
On August 12, 2007, the Burj Dubai in Dubai, United Arab Emirates was reported by its developers to have surpassed the Sears Tower in all height categories.
When completed, the Freedom Tower in New York City is expected to surpass the Sears Tower through its structural and pinnacle heights, but not by roof or highest occupied floor. Burj Dubai, currently under construction in Dubai, is expected to claim (by a significant margin) all height records, surpassing the Sears Tower, the CN Tower, Freedom Tower, Taipei 101 and Shanghai World Financial Center in every category, when it opens in 2009. The Chicago Spire, which has a planned height of 610 m (2,000 ft) is expected to lay claim to all categories of height records in the Americas upon completion, but its construction is currently on hold due to financial difficulties.
Until 2000, the Sears Tower did not hold the record for the tallest building by pinnacle height. From 1969-1978, this record was held by the John Hancock Center, whose antenna reached a height of 1,500 ft (457.2 m), or 49 ft (14.8 m) taller than the Sears Tower's original height of 1,451 ft (442 m). In 1978, One World Trade Center became taller by pinnacle height due to the addition of a 359 ft (109.3 m) antenna, which brought its total height to 1,727 ft (526.8 m). In 1982, two antennas were installed on top of the Sears Tower which brought its total height to 1,707 ft (520.3 m), making it taller than the John Hancock Center but not One World Trade Center. However, the extension of the Sears Tower's western antenna in June 2000 to 1,730 feet (527 m) allowed it to claim the title of tallest building by pinnacle height.
Cultural depictions
Film and television
The Sears Tower appears in numerous films and television shows set in Chicago such as Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where Ferris and company watch the streets of Chicago from the observation deck. The television show Late Night with Conan O'Brien introduced a character called The Sears Tower Dressed In Sears Clothing when the show visited Chicago in 2006. The building is also featured in History Channel's Life After People, in which the Sears Tower and other human-made land marks suffer from neglect without humans around and collapses two hundred years after people are gone. In an episode of the television series, Monk, Adrian Monk tries to conquer his fear of heights by imagining that he is on top of the Sears Tower. Also, in an episode of Kenan and Kel, Kenan Rockmore and Kel Kimble decide to climb to the top of the Sears Tower, so that Kenan can declare his love for a girl.
On May 25, 1981, Dan Goodwin, wearing a homemade Spider-Man suit while using suction cups, camming devices, and sky hooks, and despite several attempts by the Chicago Fire Department to stop him, made the first successful outside ascent of the Sears Tower. Goodwin was arrested at the top after the seven hour climb and charged with trespassing. Goodwin stated the reason he made the climb was to call attention to shortcomings in high-rise rescue and firefighting techniques. After a lengthy interrogation by Chicago's District Attorney and Fire Commissioner, Goodwin was released.
The tower is seen in the PC game Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 and the Rampage series of video games. The tower is also featured in SimCity PC games, as well as Namco's Ace Combat 5 The Unsung War, and has most recently been featured in The Dark Knight, most notably in a scene where Batman stands on top of the building while listening to various citizens of Gotham City.
In the film "I Robot," in the year 2035, the Sears Tower is surpassed in height by the Robot headquarters in Chicago, but in real life, the Chicago Spire will surpass it. In the film, the Sears Tower is shown with new red updated antennas.
Position in Chicago's skyline
Figures and statistics
- The top of the Sears Tower is the highest point in Illinois. The tip of its highest antenna is 1,730 feet (527.3 m) or 2,325 feet (708 m) above sea level, its roof is and 7 inches (442.0 m) above street level or 2,046 feet (623 m) above sea level, the 103rd floor observation deck (The Sky deck) is 412 m (1,353 ft) above street level or 1,948 feet (593 m) above sea level, the Wacker Drive main entrance is 595 feet (181 m) above sea level. (The highest natural point in Illinois is the Charles Mound, at 1,235 feet (376 m) above sea level.)
- The building leans about 4 inches (10 cm) from vertical due to its slightly asymmetrical design, placing unequal loads on its foundation.
- The antennas atop the Sears Tower are struck by lightning an average of 650-675 times per year.
- 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 x 75 feet (22 x 22 m). 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.
- The restrooms on the 103rd floor sky deck 1,353 feet (412 m) above street level are the highest in the world.
See also
External links
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