One World Trade Center declared the tallest building in the US, who cares?

Irvrobinson

Irvrobinson

Audioholic Spartan
Of all of the dumb things to worry about, some council on tall buildings has declared One World Trade Center to be taller than the Willis Tower in Chicago, after much controversy, even though the Willis has higher occupied floors. Compared to the Burj Khalifa it seems like an argument about who is the tallest short person. It also reminds me of one of our subwoofer discussions, where we worry about the difference between 123db and 126db of output at 30Hz.
 
j_garcia

j_garcia

Audioholic Jedi
If you want the tallest building, then you build the tallest building, not the tallest building with a long needle on the top. Still, I am glad they opted to just let it be the tallest simply because of the 1776 ft height they intentionally built it to.
 
3db

3db

Audioholic Slumlord
What is teh point of building the tallest phalic symbol reaching up to the clouds
 
itschris

itschris

Moderator
The thing is, putting tall antennas and spires seem like cheating to me. Sorta like a chick padding her bra. The building is the building... the sh*t poking from the top shouldn't be considered. If you want the tallest building, do it legit, and just build a few more floors. What does it matter at that point?
 
Irvrobinson

Irvrobinson

Audioholic Spartan
The thing is, putting tall antennas and spires seem like cheating to me. Sorta like a chick padding her bra. The building is the building... the sh*t poking from the top shouldn't be considered. If you want the tallest building, do it legit, and just build a few more floors. What does it matter at that point?
I'm in your camp philosophically, but I've read that adding occupied floors can be very expensive, because you get to certain thresholds on the weight-bearing capacities of the lower floors, elevator capability cost transitions, etc, and going higher means everything below gets more expensive too. If you look at the Burj Khalifa you can see that the upper-most floors have very little area, which limits their usefulness. (I think they're on the order of 5000 sqft.) If you want the building to be mostly an office tower you need big floors, which makes the building more expensive to construct (among other factors). Big floors cost more to add a few. There's also a matter of leasing risk, since more floors mean more square feet that you have to lease to make a profit. I see why developers try to stretch their perceived height, but I'm with you that it's cheating. That's what makes the Willis Tower so hard to beat; Sears paid a fortune to make it commercially usable to 108 floors. Now that they're really Kmart in disguise I bet they'd have a different plan. :)
 

Latest posts

newsletter

  • RBHsound.com
  • BlueJeansCable.com
  • SVS Sound Subwoofers
  • Experience the Martin Logan Montis
Top