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Gary Price
We visited friends in Chicago over the weekend. On Friday, we took Chicago Architecture Center's expertly guided boat tour on the Chicago River. I took this photo of 311 South Wacker Drive, which competes for attention with its much taller neighbor to the left—the former Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower).
311 South Wacker Drive is a 65-story postmodern skyscraper in Chicago, Illinois, 961 feet tall. Its "Queen of the City" crown is formed by a 105-feet-tall translucent central cylinder surrounded by four smaller cylinders, illuminated from within by approximately 1,900 color-changing, tubular fluorescent lamps.
When completed in 1990, it was the tallest reinforced concrete building in the world. Its height was achieved partly by innovations in concrete but also by its bundling of a ring of hexagonal towers, which, like an ancient Etruscan fasces made of bundled wooden rods, gained collective stiffness to withstand the Windy City's winds.
Our Chicago friends were unfamiliar with that ancient, pre-Roman bundling of individual rods. I composed an explanation, which I will include in my next post.
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