Chicago Calls Tall-Building Ruling the Height of Folly

This town of chest-thumpers had every right to be on top of the world this week as its beloved Bulls set a record for the most wins in a single basketball season. There was, however, one small problem. The top of the world has shifted somewhere else.

In a decision that many here consider the height of ignorance, the Sears Tower--for 22 years the undisputed tallest building in the world--has been stripped of its title by twin skyscrapers in Malaysia.

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a panel of engineers who set international building height standards, ruled in Chicago late last week that ornamental spires atop the newly constructed Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur now surpass the roof of the Sears Tower’s 110th floor by 33 feet.

The Sears Tower’s owners, tenants and the endless stream of visitors here have taken the engineers’ verdict as a slap at the city itself. Knocking Chicago, in this city of big shoulders and fragile egos, is an inexcusable offense.

“What are these people, nutso?” asked Donnie Moran, 41, a South Side Chicago construction foreman whose eyes bulged slightly as he contemplated the ignominy of it all from the observation deck with his two sons. “We’re supposed to give it up because of a bunch of guys with slide rules? Come ahhhnn!”

The tower’s owners are disputing the Malaysian building’s dimensions and, like any tough-talking Chicagoans, defying the powers that be. Sears Tower officials insist that they will go on calling their building the tallest in the world. In the insular domain of structural engineers, this is the equivalent of head-butting a referee--a quality sports fans here hold dear in tattooed, head-dyed Bulls forward Dennis Rodman.

“We’re not ready to concede,” fumed Philip J. Domenico, one of two men who serve as building managers inside the Sears Tower, due to its 4-million-square-foot immensity. His colleague, Charles W. Wagener, propped up a schematic of the Sears Tower side by side with the despised Malaysian towers as evidence of his building’s eternal superiority: “Are people going to believe this picture or are they going to accept the word of a group of unknown engineers?”

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The unknown engineers, who sat all this week in Chicago attending a national convention and watched overhead projectors flicker in darkened hotel meeting rooms, were baffled by their sudden emergence as enemies of the people. Lynn S. Beedle, the director of the tall buildings council, tried to be encouraging to the long faces in the Sears Tower’s administrative office.

“Maybe,” he offered, “they could call it the world’s highest elevator ride.”

This had to happen someday. Ever stirred by vanity and the desire to sell more office space, commercial developers with Colossus of Rhodes fixations have built to higher heights.

For more than 40 years, the Empire State Building in Manhattan held the crown, then lost it in 1972 to Donald (The Donald) Trump’s World Trade Center--which in turn was reduced to a 1,350-foot asterisk by the Sears Tower two years later. Even without opposition from the Sears Tower, the Petronas Towers could themselves soon be rendered grand illusions by even taller skyscrapers planned in Shanghai and in Melbourne, Australia.

But Sears Tower executives and architects say their eclipsing by the Petronas Towers came about because of a questionable assessment of the newer building’s height. Although the Sears Tower’s 110 stories dwarf the Malaysian twin skyscrapers’ 88 floors, the engineers of the tall buildings council also counted the Petronas Towers’ 242-foot-high spires--a measurement from ground floor entrance to highest original structural point that has been considered the traditional criterion for assessing skyscrapers for a quarter of a century.

The problem, Sears Tower officials say, is that the tall buildings panel failed to count their “original” spires--two 64-foot-high hollow steel tubes that were finished when the building was unveiled in 1972 but later became the bases for radio antennas. Sears Tower officials concede that radio towers should not be counted as part of the building’s height, but they insist that the steel bases should be counted, giving their building a 35-foot edge over the Petronas Towers.

That argument might have impressed the engineers of the tall buildings council save for one nagging fact: The Sears Tower’s official height of 1,450 feet was recorded by the building’s chief engineer, Fazlar Rahman Khan, who did not count the building’s antenna base. Khan died before the Petronas building was even a blueprint.

“We are going by Fazlar Khan’s recorded height,” Beedle said. “If he had thought the base was part of the building, he would have said so.”

Sears Tower officials have trotted out engineers from Khan’s Chicago firm to suggest that his failure to include the base was a simple oversight. But they sniff at the Malaysian towers in almost every available comparison--fewer floors, smaller usable office space, even the fact that the Sears Tower is a privately financed building and the Petronas building is a state-financed structure.

“Ask anybody up on the observation deck,” assured Wagener. “You can’t look out from 110 stories over this city and tell me that an 88-story building is taller than we are.”

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In Chicago, that kind of dare would never draw much betting money. Show a Chicagoan the findings of a committee, said Eugene Kennedy, a retired Loyola University psychology professor and longtime Chicago observer, and wait for the inevitable snort of disgust.

“People here don’t care much for assessments from self-appointed experts,” Kennedy said. “Chicagoans are unintimidated by the grandeurs of the East or the West--and not very interested in the pronouncements that come from anyplace but here.”

Even one as well-traveled as John Simpson, a world-weary patent lawyer who manages a firm of 40 attorneys on the Sears Tower’s 87th floor, is sure of his building’s superiority. A man who has watched exhausted birds and snow fall upward in the peculiar updrafts that the Sears Tower sometimes produces in winter is not likely to see his working abode as a common place.

“I’m sorry, but when I can look out the window and stare down at helicopters and small planes, that is not second place to anything, damn it,” Simpson said.

The fact that the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat is based in Bethlehem, Pa., was not lost on some Chicagoans. “Oh yeah, well, what’s the tallest building in Bethlehem?” smirked Dave DeYoung, 22, a paint-ball game worker from suburban South Holland. Twenty-two stories, Beedle said with a slightly pained smile.

They may be razzing the engineers now. But in the days leading up to the tall buildings council decision, Chicago insiders were lobbying and applying a political full-court press on the baffled engineers as if they were dealing with an office full of truculent zoning commissioners.

Hours before the decision was made by the council’s eight voting members, Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.) issued a press release saying she “stands by the Sears Tower.” And the night before the vote, a self-appointed circle of Chicago engineers and architects tried a clubbier sort of lobbying, trying to point out the flaws in the Petronas Towers to tall buildings council members while nibbling hors d’oeurves in the Michigan Room of the exclusive Chicago Athletic Assn.

“It was a nice affair, but it didn’t change anyone’s mind,” Beedles said. “I guess that’s the way they do things here, eh?”

Lobsang Dorjee wouldn’t know. A 59-year-old Geshi monk from Tibet, he was one of two emissaries from the northern India mountain temple of the Dalai Lama who took the ear-popping elevator ride up to the top of the Sears Tower several days after it was stripped of its title.

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Leaning forward in his ankle-length scarlet dache robe as he stared out through the observation deck’s eastern windows, Dorjee could only giggle when asked if he would side with the Sears Tower or the Petronas buildings. He has seen the clouded world from Tibetan peaks, he explained through an interpreter, but Dorjee’s unobstructed view of the hidden mysteries of the Gary, Ind., skyline left him in some awe.

“One day,” he said, both elliptically and diplomatically, “I hope to come back here and look down at the sun and the moon.”

Standing not far away, Dave DeYoung offered his own Chicago perspective, not too far removed in fact from Dorjee’s.

“Hey, man, there’s an easy way to figure this out,” DeYoung said. “Add on!”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Which is Taller?

An engineering panel says the Sears Tower is no longer the world’s tallest building. Executives of the Chicago skyscraper say their building is actually 35 feet taller if the radio bases are counted as part of the height. Petronas Towers’ ornamental spires are considered part of their height while the radio antennas are not.

Petronas Towers

SPIRE HEIGHT: 1,483 feet

Sears Tower

ROOF: 1,450 feet

TOP OF ANTENNA BASE: 1,518 feet

FULL ANTENNA: 1,707 feet