Much to Chicagoans' chagrin, the Petronas Towers in Malaysia snatched the title of world's tallest building back in 1996 after Sears' 22-year reign. But that was only after the Petronas twins thrust their spires 30 feet beyond the Sears' roof. Sears' owners were so stung that they appealed to something called the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat at Lehigh University. In 1997, the Council issued a decree that tall buildings would henceforth be measured in four ways: tallest top, highest floor, tallest roof, and tallest antenna. The Petronas Towers and their spires claimed the title in the first category, Sears had the next two and then gobbled up the fourth when it extended one of its attennas one foot higher than the attenna on the north tower of New York City's World Trade Center. (Toronto's CN Tower is taller than all of the above, but is considered a freestanding structure, not a building [see this]. And did you know that while these skyscrapers are the pride of their mega-metropolises, a 2000-foot television tower in the middle of North Dakota has them all beat?) In short, the Sears is the highest place in the world you can stand, and what more could you ask for in a skyscraper? (See a good breakdown of the race to be tallest from the Chicago Reader.)

Sears was spawned in an era of clunky gigantism--a phase America was going through in the early 1970's--and has maintained an aloofness ever since, as Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin points out (see below). Big-boned and impersonal, it is admired but not loved by Chicagoans and tourists. Sears is like the overachieving oldest child parents boast of at parties but silently wish they were closer to; the Hancock Tower is slightly less audacious and more embraceable. Kamin writes that Sears executives blame the building--with its seemingly interminable expanses of offices and separate elevator systems--for creating a stagnant corporate culture that contributed to Sears' surrender to Wal-Mart as the country's leading retailer. Sears has since moved out of its namesake tower and fled for the suburbs.

I retain a greater fondness for the Sears Tower's architecture than does Kamin, whom I greatly respect as a writer and a person. As Kamin concedes, "From certain vantage points, the tower posesses a stepped-back silhouette that dominates the skyline rather than simply marking it like an overgrown tombstone." The Sears Tower does indeed command the cityscape and grabs glances from all angles; its arresting architecture ably climaxes a complex skyline. I visited New York City for the first time in the summer of 2001, and the World Trade Center just didn't seize the eyes and imagination; the Empire State Building kept yanking you back. Sears may not embrace its own street corner or embody the city's personality the way the Hancock Tower does, as Kamin writes, but I like its various "big shoulders" and its stark, unembellished profile in a city known for both its stocky build and Midwestern understatement. The Sears is not just an imposing presence, but a defining icon. -NB