It’s been eight years now, and Chicagoans still haven’t forgotten–or forgiven, says David Maola, laughing. “It’s an issue that constantly comes up.” He’s talking about how the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, where he currently serves as director, snatched the title of world’s tallest building away from Sears Tower in 1996 and awarded it to the twin Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
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The Council on Tall Buildings itself harbors no ill will toward Chicago–in fact, it just moved to the Illinois Institute of Technology from its longtime home at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, where it was founded in 1969. “We thought that going to IIT in Chicago, which is known for its international school of high-rise design, just made sense,” says Maola. “IIT wanted us there, and they really thought it was a good synergy for us to be there–good for their students, good for us, good to get us in the Chicago community.” The council’s the second major urban-design organization to move to Chicago recently–the Congress for the New Urbanism, headed by former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist, arrived here from San Francisco in January. But though the Council on Tall Buildings maintains its Web server at IIT, as an organization it’s largely a virtual presence: Maola still lives in suburban Philadelphia, chairman Ron Klemencic in Seattle, and many of the group’s deliberations are conducted by e-mail.
The council is not without competition in ranking tall buildings. The commercial Web site Emporis (formerly Skyscrapers.com) maintains its own global database of information on over 85,000 buildings and projects 12 stories and higher. Take a look at what’s been happening over the last decade and you could come to see the diminished status of the American skyscraper as yet another casualty of global outsourcing.
A few egoists remain, but even they aren’t immune to downsizing. At 1,125 feet, the Trump International Hotel & Tower, scheduled for completion in 2007, would rank among the world’s 20 tallest by the current reckoning. But the would-be owner of the tagline “you’re fired” originally had even bigger plans for the Sun-Times building site. “This isn’t folklore,” says Maola. “This is true. On the morning of September 11, Donald Trump was actually in the office of SOM [Skidmore, Owings & Merrill] in Chicago, and he had up on the wall the tallest building in the world, and that has been scaled back since September 11.” The downscaled project, designed by Adrian Smith of SOM, now faces new problems given the shake-up at Hollinger International, a 50-50 partner with Trump in the $700 million development.
To the rational mind this kind of payoff should be a lot more satisfying than the one you get from having bragging rights to the world’s tallest building. We’re grown-ups now–we’ve put away childish things. Yet we can’t quite forget that it was crass, raw ambition that built Chicago: hog butcher to the world, world’s busiest airport, world’s tallest building. As the titles fall away, does some of our vitality wither with them?
