The Sears Tower was the first building to use this innovative design. The remaining west and center tubes reach 108 floors. The northeast and southwest tubes reach the 66th floor the north, east, and south tubes end at the 90th. Their team of Colombian-Peruvian architect Bruce Graham and Bangladeshi-American structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan designed the building as nine square "tubes" (each essentially a separate building), clustered in a 3×3 matrix forming a square base with 225-foot (69 m) sides.All nine tubes would rise up to the 50th floor of the building, where the northwest and southeast tubes terminate. Sears, which needed 3 million square feet (280,000 m2) of office space for its planned consolidation and predicted growth, commissioned architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). Attorneys from the Arnstein firm, headed by Andrew Adsit, began buying the properties parcel by parcel.Sears purchased 15 old buildings from 100 owners and paid $2.7 million to the City of Chicago for the portion of Quincy Street the project absorbed. The firm consulted with local and federal authorities and the applicable law, then offered Sears two options: the Goose Island area northwest of downtown, and a two-block area bounded by Franklin Street on the east, Jackson Boulevard on the south, Wacker Drive on the west and Adams Street on the north, with Quincy Street running through the middle from east to west.Īfter selection of the latter site, permits to vacate Quincy Street were obtained. Sears asked its outside counsel, Arnstein, Gluck, Weitzenfeld & Minow (now known as Arnstein & Lehr, LLP) to suggest a location. Sears executives decided to consolidate the thousands of employees in offices distributed throughout the Chicago area into one building on the western edge of Chicago's Loop. was the largest retailer in the world, with about 350,000 employees. However, local area residents still refer to the building by its old name. It was named the Sears Tower until 2009, serving as the headquarters of retail company Searsfrom its opening in 1974 to 1994. Morgan Stanley plans to move to the building in 2019 and become its fourth-largest tenant by 2020. Other major tenants include the building's namesake Willis Towers Watson and law firms Schiff Hardin and Seyfarth Shaw. The structure was renamed in 2009 by the Willis Group as a term of its lease.Īs of April 2018, the building's largest tenant is United Airlines, which moved its corporate headquarters from 77 West Wacker Drive (then the United Building) in 2012, occupying around 20 floors. Each year, more than one million people visit its observation deck, the highest in the United States, making it one of Chicago's most popular tourist destinations. It is currently the third-tallest building in the United States and the Western hemisphere – and the 23rd-tallest in the world. Willis Tower is considered a seminal achievement for engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan. At completion in 1974, it surpassed the World Trade Center in New York City to become the tallest building in the world, a title that it held for nearly 25 years it was also the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere for 41 years, until the new One World Trade Center surpassed it in 2013. The tower has 108 stories as counted by standard methods, though the building's owners count the main roof as 109 and the mechanical penthouse roof as 110. The Willis Tower (formerly known as and commonly referred to as the Sears Tower) is a 108-story, 1,450-foot (442.1 m) skyscraper in Chicago.
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