“If it looks like an antenna, acts like an antenna, then guess what? It is an antenna,” he said.Įmanuel has a point: Unless you clamber up 40 stories of steel into the sky, you will be farther from the ground on the roof of the Willis Tower, or on its observation deck, than at its Manhattan counterpart. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was displeased. In the end, the fracas proved unimportant: the council voted unanimously to crown 1WTC America’s tallest building, convinced that the mast remains a critical element of the building’s design. If this is an antenna, it won’t be part of the height measurement.” Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the architects of 1WTC, had long referred to the needle as a mast or a spire, but following the design changes, principal architect David Childs derided the new top as “an exposed antenna.” “Our criteria are very specific,” said Kevin Brass, the council’s public affairs manager. Without spire, 1WTC is only the third-tallest building in the United States.Īt the time, the Council on Tall Buildings sounded the alarm. The claims to 1,776 feet were thrown into doubt. The sheathed mast, or radome, was evidently part of the building’s structure, whereas a spire of unadorned steel could be considered a structural accessory whose height would not count toward the architectural total. Last year, in an effort to reduce future maintenance expenses, the developer of 1WTC decided to amend the blueprints, halfway through construction, and strip the building’s spire of its fiberglass cladding. Is it an antenna or something more?įor the answer, the world turned to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, an obscure organization with one contentious responsibility: measuring skyscrapers.
All hinged on the classification of One World Trade’s needlelike roof projection, whose 408 feet account for 23 percent of the building’s height. And yet there had been some fear in New York, and some hope in Chicago, that 1WTC might fall short on a technicality. Skyline-watchers in both cities have expected this transfer for years One World Trade was loudly designed to top out at a symbolic 1,776 feet, dozens of stories above the summit of the Willis Tower.
On Tuesday, the Willis Tower ceded that crown to New York City’s long-awaited One World Trade Center. For a quarter-century, ending in 1998, Chicago’s Willis Tower (née Sears) was the tallest building in the world for 40 years, ending this week, it was the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. Among American cities with populations over 500,000, Chicago counts by far the most tall buildings per capita - one 30-story building for every 8,000 residents. It was in Chicago that the Home Insurance Building, commonly considered the world’s first skyscraper, was built in 1884. Businesses and other banks from across North America and Europe landed in Winnipeg to take advantage of the boom.Chicago is a vertical city. Its development came as the city emerged as a major railway, manufacturing, grain trade and wholesale distribution centre.īy 1911, Winnipeg was the third-largest city in Canada. It's always there, always part of the landscape." "It really is one of Winnipeg's iconic buildings," Peterson said. "So many of the pictures from pre-World War I and even after, you can always find the Union Tower. Set at a bend along Main, the building was an instant landmark, seen at a distance from either direction of the north-south running street. It also boasted the largest and fastest elevator in Western Canada. There are two forks to it, one that runs up into the Exchange District along William Avenue and a shorter one that runs along what is now McDermot Avenue. Brown's Creek is shown on a map from 1883 at the top left edge of the bend in the Red River.
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