Elko, but for the rest of the country, including Chicago and the Sears Tower.”Īnother letter was from Mrs. It will upset the whole country…Please count the Sears Tower antennae and give the title back to Sears Tower…not just for me, my class, Mrs. He said, in part, “…you just can’t take the title of ‘world’s tallest building’ away from the Sears Tower and give it to the Petronas Twin Towers. It was written by Brett Wolff, a third grader in Eastville School. One was written to Blair Kamin which he forwarded to me. Shortly after those first calls started coming in at the time of the “Sears/Petronas saga”, I received letters from elementary school students in the Chicago area. When I was pointing out these features at the Executive meeting, Les Robertson suggested, “Why not establish three additional height categories in addition to structural or architectural top? These could be highest occupied floor, highest roof, and tip of any broadcast antenna.” This was agreed to and is now the Council’s standard. ![]() It has the highest roof top: 442m (1450 ft) It has the highest occupied floor: 436m (1431 ft)Ĥ. It is world’s largest building: 418,00 sq m (4 ½ million sq ft) of office spaceģ. ![]() And there were several Sears statistics that might be of help in that direction:Ģ. And if they had been, Sears would not have held the record for 23 years because the antenna of New York’s World Trade Center is higher (527m, 1728ft) than those of Sears (520m, 1707ft).”Īctually, on the plane en route to Chicago I’d been wondering what I could say that might be a palliative. “But why don’t the TV antennas count?” “Because flag poles, radio masts, and TV antennas have never been counted. It was an “active” session, to say the least, with a number of reporters as emotionally involved as were the citizens of Chicago -with some strong reactions when they learned that the Council had simply re-affirmed a 60-year-old standard for measuring the height of tall building (from sidewalk at the main entrance to the structural top). Radio, news magazine, press, and news-service reporters came in to standing room only. Somehow the word had spread, and there was nothing for us to do but hold an impromptu press conference. Blair Kamin, architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, had been in touch with me earlier and I had mentioned to him that our meeting would finish about 4:00pm and that he could stop by if he wished.įour o’clock came, we opened the door and there was Blair-together with a host of others. We held our Executive meeting-as scheduled and without the press in attendance. Jay Leno joked on the Tonight Show with a line that all the Council did was once every ten years to look up in the sky and say, “Yep, that’s the tallest!” Even “Spiderman” -the skyscraper climbing daredevil-wanted a list of the 100 tallest buildings so he could climb them all, having already put Sears, World Trade Center, and Empire State under his belt. In the days leading up to the Executive Committee meeting, Council headquarters received at least 75 phone calls from television, radio, newspaper, and magazine journalists requesting information and interviews. It was the culmination of weeks of “media awareness” of the competition between Sears and Petronas. ![]() “ Yes, it’s been an item on our agenda for a year.” CNN and NBC’s “Today Show” arranged to interview me atop the Sears Tower in the days before the Executive meeting. As soon as that word got out, the call came even more frequently. ![]() Newspapers, magazines, television, radio, producers of programs-all called.ĭuring the previous year we had planned that our April Executive Committee meeting would be held in Chicago since it would coincide with a Congress of one of our Sponsoring Societies. It was the successful challenge by Petronas Towers (Malaysia) for “the world’s tallest building” title that opened a floodgate of media approaches to the Council in 1996.
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