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Old Posted Jun 28, 2007, 11:52 AM
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Nunavuter Nunavuter is offline
Coping with the Cosmos
 
Join Date: May 2007
Location: Toronto
Posts: 143
They Might Be Giants

They Might be Giants

The "Coming of the Boxes" and the preceding "Skyscraper Cities" posts were to provide context for the 1960s skyscraper boom that resulted in the biggest boxes of all in the 1970s.

Other than the John Hancock Center, none of the dozens of large office towers built in the 1960s cracked the top five, and indeed only a few would have joined the top twenty due to the sheer number of tall buildings in New York City dating from the 1930s boom. (Yes, "1930s boom" sounds odd, but 1930-1933 indeed was a boomtime for tall buildings.)

A comparison of the "Big Five" diagram of 1931 and its counterpart in 1967 shows the addition of the Ostankino Tele Tower in Moscow that opened that year and the Tokyo Tower of 1958, neither of which are truly "buildings" in the sense of having many occupied floors running up their height.

In 1968, the tallest office buildings in the world were still the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, 40 Wall Street, the American International Building and the GE Building, all of which were in New York City and all of which were built in the 1930s.



^The "Big Five" in 1972: The Tokyo Tower is nudged out after 14 years, and take a long last look at the Eiffel Tower...

The John Hancock Center announced the comeback, not only of Chicago as a skyscraper capital, but also of the large skyscraper, period. Meanwhile, the Twin Towers were slowly rising above the banks of the Hudson River back in New York.

The John Hancock Center is not only taller, but considerably more massive than the Chrysler Building or 40 Wall Street, and this placed it alongside the Empire State Building itself in what the office-building industry calls the "super jumbo" catagory. A "jumbo" is any building with a million square feet of floor space in it. A "super jumbo" has twice that amount, such as the 1933 GE Building, and in 1969 there were exactly four of them in the world.

The massive World Trade Center towers each had more than six million square feet of floor space in them, making each of them larger than the Empire State and John Hancock Center combined. Further, there were other such structures under construction in the early 1970s.

Welcome to the Era of the Giants.



Aon Center

Location: Chicago, IL

Year Completed: 1972

Height: 1,136 feet (83 storeys)

Claim to Fame: The Aon Center beat the height of the John Hancock Building by nine feet, making it the tallest in Chicago, and the tallest building outside of New York City when it opened. Because it is strictly an office building with no residential component, it has the 13-foot-and-change ceilings typical of such buildings and thus a lower total floor count than its immediate rival in Chicago. The Aon Center is a superjumbo, and also a "tube building" like the John Hancock Center and other massive office buildings of its era.

Status: When the Aon Centre was originally built, it was the world's tallest marble-clad building. However, the Chicago climate played havoc with the marble cladding, which began to crack and fall from the building in later years. Between 1990 and 1992, the entire building was refaced in granite at roughly half the cost of the entire structure in the early 1970s.



Sears Tower

Location: Chicago, IL

Year Completed: 1973

Height: 1,451 feet (108 storeys)

Claim to Fame: Way to kick New York City when it is down.

Tower 1 of the World Trade Center was barely more than a year old, and uneaten h'ourderves from the ribbon-cutting ceremony ditched by everybody in New York when Tower 2 was completed was probably still sitting in an underpaid cleaning lady's fridge when the Sears Tower opened one month later, in May 1973.

Yes. It was 40 Wall Street all over again.

In 1969 Sears was by far the largest retailer in the world and the company decided to consolidate the tens of thousands of employees scattered in offices around Chicagoland into one building on the west side of The Loop.

Sears alone would need some three million square feet of office space to do this, and predicted that future growth would require even more space than that. Whatever they built would have to be the largest office building ever constructed excepting the World Trade Center itself. That much was a given.

In designing their new headquarters, the additional floor space needed for future growth of the company was intended to be rented out to lesser corporate powers until Sears & Roebuck could claim it for itself. These smaller companies would require smaller floor spaces.

While Sears could shove its own employees anywhere it wanted to, office space intended for tenants would need nearby windows and be reasonably attractive if it was going to be rented out.

Smaller floor sizes with access to windows required a taller rather than wider structure, and the architects thus designed huge 55,000-square-foot floors in the lower part of the building for the Sears employees, and stacked a series of smaller "cubes" intended to be rented out above them. The result of this arrangement is the distinct appearance of the Sears Tower, which resembles a collection of smaller office buildings stacked on top each other at funny angles to create as many "corner" offices as possible.

The final height of 108 storeys might have gone even higher had the Federal Aviation Administration not stepped in to protect the approach to Chicago's O'Hare Airport and cap the height below 1,500 feet, but even so the Sears Tower took the top spot among the world's tallest office buildings by a healthy margin.

Status: The boom-boom growth of the late 1960s and early 1970s came to a crashing halt with the OPEC embargo of 1973 and the subsequent Energy Crisis.

Note to self: Whenever the World's Tallest building opens, a huge recession is about to happen.

Sears' optimistic growth projections never came to pass, of course. In fact, gloomy economic times and competition from rivals like Kmart and later, Wal-Mart, sent Sears into a decline from its former heights as a retailer from which it has never recovered. And like the Empire State Building before it, the Sears Tower stood half-empty for ten years. Although it had been built entirely with the company's money like the Woolworth Building before it (history repeating again!) in the end, Sears was forced to take out a mortgage on their headquarters due to cash-flow problems in the early 1990s.

Sears began moving offices out of the Sears Tower in 1993 to a new office campus in suburban Hoffman Estates, Illinois. Today the building is occupied by more than 100 different companies, but not a single Sears employee works in the building bearing the company's name.



First Canadian Place

Location: Toronto, ON

Year Completed: 1975

Height: 978 feet (72 storeys)

Claim to Fame: From the day it opened, First Canadian Place has been Toronto's, and Canada's, tallest skyscraper and at the time was the tallest office building in the world outside of the United States.

Indeed, the 784-foot Commerce Court West that opened in 1972 and 731-foot Toronto Dominion Tower from 1967 each once held this distinction, and in 1975 these latter two still held the second and third non-US spots, respectively. All three of them are a block from each other on King Street in Toronto.

But this isn't just an honourable mention for a home-town building. First Canadian Place is a superjumbo with more than two million square feet of office space. In 1975 this class included just ten buildings worldwide, and six of them dated from 1969 onward (see diagram below).

Just a few years before, First Canadian Place would have ranked as the most significant new office building since the Empire State. But in 1975 it was the runt of the superjumbo litter.

Status: The logo of the Bank of Montreal (the building's main tenant) adorning the top of First Canadian Place was the highest corporate logo in the world for more than twenty years. The facade was altered for the first time in 2004, when the former blue bank logo was replaced with blue BMO lettering and a new white-and-red logo that remains one of the highest written advertisements in the world.



^The "Superjumbos" that opened between 1969 and 1975 testify that the early 1970s were indeed a repeat of the sudden surge in mega-construction of the early 1930s, and on an even larger scale.
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