From Arizona

- By Rashmi Menon

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• Labor Day
• The Community College
• Hiking the Grand Canyon - II
• Hiking the Grand Canyon - I
• The Niagara Falls
• Desert Dogs
• The Sears Tower
• The Navajo Code Talkers
• Driving Through McDonalds
• The Mighty Desert Warrior
• The Big Roundup
• Serving the Americans
• Martin Luther King Day
• Harvard University and Other Ivy League Schools
• Winter Wonders
• Las Vegas
• Let's Give Thanks!
• Fall Colours
• Halloween
• The Collared Peccary
• Hurricane Isabel
• Wonders of Yellowstone
• A Trip Under the Sea
• The Legend of the Kokopelli
• The Great Lakes of North America

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The Sears Tower

A Modern Architectural Wonder

Hello, and welcome again to yet another adventure with me, your pal from Arizona. This fortnight, how would you like to accompany me on a breathtaking elevator ride inside an imposing skyscraper? Our ride will take us up 110 stories above ground level. From our lofty perches we can see some breathtaking views of four of the United States’ most beautiful states – Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. I am talking about the Sears Tower.
The Sears Tower is a man-made wonder located in Chicago, Illinois. It covers two city blocks and rises to an imposing height of 1,454 feet above the ground. This skyscraper is the tallest building in North America. For over 20 years, from 1973 till 1996, it was also the tallest building in the world. Originally designed by architects from a firm called Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, a Chicago-based corporation called Sears Roebuck and Company, this modern edifice is a very fine example of “bundled-tube” architecture.
To Americans, Chicago is the “windy city.” With wind velocity often exceeding 16 miles per hour, tall buildings in Chicago have to be designed to withstand the high wind pressures. When designing and building the Sears Tower, engineer Fazlur Khan and architect Bruce Graham developed an ingenious way to deal with this issue. The tower is a bundle of nine tubes, each of which is a separate skyscraper in itself, piled on top of one another. The building has a broad base and all nine tubes reach up to forty-nine stories. At floor 49, three tubes end. The design mimics this pattern and only two tubes reach the full height of 443 meters. Thus, towards the upper levels, the columns begin to reduce in number, thereby reducing the width. The result is that the tower resembles a Christmas tree. This reduces the wind forces on the building. It took the architects a little over two years to complete this project.
Although the tower has now lost out it’s number one spot to Malaysia’s Petronas Twin Towers, employees and tourists alike can experience the thrill of literally “facing the wind” from atop it’s glorious heights. When strong winds blow, the building squeaks and often sways to the rhythm of the gusts. Daily tours are available for the millions of tourists who flock this modern marvel. Commercially speaking, the original owners, Sears Roebuck and Company, have moved to alternative locations. The tower, however, continues to house several other business giants. A few years ago, Chicago honored Fazlur Khan, the chief engineer of the Sears Tower project, by renaming the street adjacent to the building after him.

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