Courtesy of Zachery Fein. This could happen in Chicago, but Crisman says central financial districts like the Loop tend to make minor migrations over long periods of time.
But a big downtown like Chicago's almost never just vanishes unless something really traumatic happens. To accommodate the demand and make money , developers have filled all the available space with megatall buildings.
The land the Willis Tower sits on is now so valuable that developers tear down the building to make space for a new, megatall building. Author and illustrator David Macaulay writes books that explain architecture, cities and technology. Why not? If it sounds incredible, that may be because in the Willis Tower has been the tallest structure in Chicago for 42 years.
Two generations have grown up knowing it to be the tallest building in the city. For its first 20 years, it was even the tallest building in the world. This is familiar territory for a Chicago architecture. Take the Board of Trade Building , for example. In the s, it was a symbol of towering verticality at feet. You can look down on the Board of Trade Building from the Willis Tower today, and despite its respectable feet of height, and gleaming statue of Ceres , it looks dinky.
Think this scenario of a puny Willis Tower being demolished sounds far-fetched? Architects agree there is no theoretical limit to the height of a skyscraper, and if we can build a 3, foot building today, think about what we might be able to accomplish in Several year ago, Macaulay wrote a book called Unbuilding , which imagines a future in which the Empire State Building is purchased by a wealthy developer, carefully deconstructed, and packed up, with plans of reconstructing it in the Middle East.
He recalls watching a documentary that featured the architects of the then Sears Tower hypothesizing about deconstructing it someday. In Lewis Mumford: Toward Human Architecture, Mumford interviews other critics, architects, and historians on the impact of technology and progress on civilization. But rather than simply hauling the demolished Willis Tower off to a landfill, Macaulay hypothesizes that by , the steel in the Willis Tower may be valuable and reusable.
You have all these square buildings. Think of all the schools you could put into by foot squares made from floors of the individual tubes … if the structural steel was still good. The majority of tall buildings constructed around the world now are built with a reinforced concrete skeleton, making it nearly impossible to disassemble into pieces and reuse the structure.
In ancient Rome, this happened all the time. The Coliseum stone, for example, was reused to build other buildings in the city. Our experts agree: Economics and demand matter.
If it pays to continuously use and adapt the Willis Tower, that will probably be what happens. If it pays to demolish it and build something bigger, that would happen. It was striking to us that all of our experts agreed on something else: The most likely scenario is one where the Willis Tower will be maintained and adapted. The sorts of transformations we would have to see that would lead to demolition or abandonment seem pretty far-fetched: Mega-tall buildings or an abandoned downtown. Facade color.
Architectural style. Roof system. Usages Main Usage. Side Usage. Until Taipei was topped out in , the Sears Tower held title to the world's highest roof and highest occupied floor. This has been the tallest building in Chicago since For a timeline of Chicago's tallest building through history, start with Holy Name Cathedral.
The structure is formed from nine bundled square tubes, each 75 feet wide with no columns between the core and perimeter. Two of the tubes are 50 floors high, two are 66 floors, three are 90, and two are The design was actually inspired by a pack of cigarettes. Architect Bruce Graham used a pack of cigarettes to visualize his idea of using a series of bundled cylinders at different heights to create the tower. Sears executives chose to build a single tall headquarters building over an alternative proposal for twin towers at half the existing tower's height.
The two antennae on the roof give the tower one of the highest "tip heights" of any skyscraper in the world. In , four high-definition television antennas were lifted to the roof by helicopter. In the company moved to a low-rise complex in the northwest Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates. The lobby floor is decorated with metal tiles in a stylized design based on the bundled tube structure. The height was listed in many sources for years as 1, feet. This is the result of misprinted data which was copied by several sources until it was corrected by the engineers in the middle s.
The lobby contains the moving sculpture "The Universe" by Alexander Calder. The observatory elevators are among the world's fastest at feet per minute. Twenty-eight acres of black anodized aluminum panels and approximately 16, bronze-tinted windows form the tower's facade. The tower has a pressure lock like an airlock at the freight entrance to combat the 'stack effect' generated by the differential in air pressure caused by cold air meeting warm air in the building.
The Skydeck occupies the rd floor, the highest non-mechanical floor in the building. It has its own entrance on Jackson Boulevard, and attracts approximately 1. Gallery 5 Items. Address S. Wacker Dr. Completion Date Neighborhood Loop.
Use Type Commercial Office. Style Mid-Century Modernism. See This Building on a Tour. The building formerly, and sometimes still, known as Sears Tower In , Sears Roebuck and Company was the world's largest retailer, employing approximately , people across Chicago. Privacy Policy. Search Tickets. River Cruise. All Tours. All Exhibits.
0コメント