An Idea Forms
The whole idea of constructing a tower that would eventually become the world’s tallest building started when the largest retailer in the world, Sears Roebuck and Company needed a new headquarters to hold its growing mass of employees. The company had two large decisions to make before construction began. Who was it going to hire to design and construct such a building, and where was it going to be built? In the end it decided to keep the tower in downtown Chicago because many its employees depended on Chicago’s public transportation to get to and from work. If Sears moved out of the city it would lose employees. In the end, Sears purchased a section of Quincy Street for $2.7 million. This gave the company the three acre site it needed to begin construction.
Sears Roebuck and Company had an idea and it had the land; what it needed next was an architect. After a lot of interviews with at least nine different firms, it eventually settled on Bruce Graham, an architect who worked for the firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM). In addition to designing the Sears Tower, Graham also designed the 100-story John Hancock Center. “‘With those two skyscrapers he singlehandedly put Chicago back on the map,’ said Joseph Rosa, the chairman of the department of architecture and design at the Art Institute of Chicago. ‘Without them, Chicago architecture would have been frozen in time. They expressed the optimism in Chicago and pointed toward what the future could be.’” (The New York Times).
It also hired the man who would be Graham’s partner in designing the building. Fazlur Khan was a structural engineer from Bangladesh. He is credited with inventing a new method of building very tall buildings. His design was called the “bundled tube design.” It consisted of nine 75 square foot tubes arranged in a three by three square.
The whole idea of constructing a tower that would eventually become the world’s tallest building started when the largest retailer in the world, Sears Roebuck and Company needed a new headquarters to hold its growing mass of employees. The company had two large decisions to make before construction began. Who was it going to hire to design and construct such a building, and where was it going to be built? In the end it decided to keep the tower in downtown Chicago because many its employees depended on Chicago’s public transportation to get to and from work. If Sears moved out of the city it would lose employees. In the end, Sears purchased a section of Quincy Street for $2.7 million. This gave the company the three acre site it needed to begin construction.
Sears Roebuck and Company had an idea and it had the land; what it needed next was an architect. After a lot of interviews with at least nine different firms, it eventually settled on Bruce Graham, an architect who worked for the firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM). In addition to designing the Sears Tower, Graham also designed the 100-story John Hancock Center. “‘With those two skyscrapers he singlehandedly put Chicago back on the map,’ said Joseph Rosa, the chairman of the department of architecture and design at the Art Institute of Chicago. ‘Without them, Chicago architecture would have been frozen in time. They expressed the optimism in Chicago and pointed toward what the future could be.’” (The New York Times).
It also hired the man who would be Graham’s partner in designing the building. Fazlur Khan was a structural engineer from Bangladesh. He is credited with inventing a new method of building very tall buildings. His design was called the “bundled tube design.” It consisted of nine 75 square foot tubes arranged in a three by three square.
When
designing a tall skyscraper, a structural engineer has to take into
consideration the elements of wind and gravity.
Extremely tall buildings could not be constructed using traditional
methods. They would not be able to
withstand the forces of wind and gravity.
Khan’s new system of tubes that are tied together in a structurally safe
way not only made buildings stronger, they were less expensive too. Without this new bundled tube system, the Sears
Tower could not have been built. The
plans for the Sears Tower were presented to the public on July 27, 1970, and
groundbreaking ceremonies took place later that August.