![]() The outside of the Tower would be sheathed with tinted-glass windows and anodized aluminum. Two of these ended at the 50th floor, two more stopped at the 66th floor, and three more at the 99th, leaving the final two tubes to extend to the full height of 110 stories. Fifteen hollow tubes were intended to be built, but when plans for a hotel to occupy a large portion of the structure were dropped, the design was cut back to just nine tubes, each measuring about 75 feet square. When Sears decided to add extra office space that could be rented out, the project expanded to 110 stories, which would make it the tallest building in the world. The original design for the "Sears Tower" called for 70 floors. This design presented several advantages: it used the minimum amount of construction material for any given volume, it allowed more interior space with fewer internal columns and walls, and it gave great lateral strength-important for withstanding Chicago's famously strong winds. Now, the firm was ready to try out a "bundled tube" style of construction, in which several of these trussed tubes would be contained together inside an outer skin-like crayons in a box. This building used a new method of construction called a "trussed tube", in which the primary support for the structure came from the outer walls rather than from an internal frame. SOM had recently finished its work on the 100-story John Hancock Center. Local architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill was given the job of designing a new building. Some 13,000 of these were administrative, spread out in seven regional centers around the country, and the company decided that it wanted to consolidate them all into one office building to be located in Chicago (both because of the city's central location and because Chicago was Sears' home town). From its beginnings as a tiny mail-order business, Sears and Roebuck had grown into the largest retail chain store in the world, with almost $9 billion in annual sales and over 350,000 employees. In 1969, the Sears Company needed a new building. It remains today as an instantly-recognizable landmark on the city skyline. For a quarter of a century, the Sears Tower in Chicago was the tallest building in the world.
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