Sears Tower Photos

For $2.7 million Sears bought from the City of Chicago a portion of Quincy St which ran through the site of the future tower posing a problem.

From the very beginning, the tower had to have at least an estimated 3 million square feet to accommodate Sears’ little army of employees.

Height of the tower: 1,457 ft / 443 m.

It takes 2232 steps to get to the top.

In the US it comes only behind The Pentagon as the building with the most total floor space.

It was designed by chief architect Bruce Graham and structural engineers Srinivasa “Hal” Iyengar and Fazlur Khan of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

One of the things that affected the design of the building was the projections for future growth made by the executives of Sears, Roebuck & Co. As a result, the tower was supposed to house the employees of the company at that time. However, it was supposed to be larger than the immediate needs to be able to offer the space needed for future additional employees. Until those needs would appear, the available space was going to be rented to other companies and taken back according to the company’s growth. Thus, the floor sizes would have to be smaller with a high window space to floor space ratio to be attractive and easy to market to prospective lessees. To meet such demands, the architects proposed a tower that would have large floors (55,000 sf – 5,000 sm) on the lower levels (for the Sears employees at that time) reducing the size of the floors in a series of setbacks.

Sears, Roebuck and Co. is no longer the owner of the building as of 1992 when the company sold the tower and moved its headquarters to Hoffman Estates, Il.

Sears Tower has the highest occupied floor in the world.

The height of the tower was influenced by the Federal Aviation Administration which imposed certain limits for protecting the air traffic.

The length of the tower is close to five football fields.

The total surface of the tower is 4,400,000 square feet / 406,630 square meters.

The tower is the result of the 1969 decision of Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s executives to consolidate the thousands of employees from offices throughout the Chicago area into one building.