Once there, take a few steps over to the west wall, where the facade has been cut away. Then take one more step, over the edge.
You’ll find yourself on a floor of glass, suspended over the sidewalk a quarter-mile below. If you can’t bear looking straight down past your feet, shift your gaze out or up — the walls are glass, too, as is the ceiling. You’ve stepped into a transparent box, one of four that jut four and a half feet from the tower, hanging from cantilevered steel beams above your head. The glass walls are connected to the beams, and to the glass floor, with stainless-steel bolts. But what’s really saving you from oblivion is the glass itself.
“Ultimately what we’re all striving for is an all-glass structure,” said James O’Callaghan of Eckersley O’Callaghan Structural Design, who has designed what are perhaps the world’s best-known glass projects, the staircases that are a prominent feature of every Apple Store.
Through it all, they’ve realized one thing. “Glass is just another material,” said John Kooymans of the engineering firm Halcrow Yolles, which designed the Sears Tower boxes.
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Talk about a room with a view! While it seems like a neat concept, it doesn't appear to be terribly practical. Plus, I bet keeping it clean is a pain.
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- groups:
- Upstream, Art, Architecture
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- tags:
- Art, Upstream, Architecture, Glass + add
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- Acedia
- added this
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MMmmmm cantilevers.
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- Buddha2112
- 5 months ago
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Current.com is falling behind.
It used to be that Current.com had the breakingest news on it's homepage.
Now the homepage is static with the same old stories every hour.
I heard about this on NPR a week ago.
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Can always lay down some carpet.
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You know what they say about living in a glass house.
It's beautiful and frightening, but not for the acrophobic.
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- lolitanimatronic
- 5 months ago
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I don't see any thing bad happening to this.
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An entire building, including the bathrooms?
FANTASTIC.-
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- hell0everything
- 5 months ago
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Won't the glass eventually break because of the heavy weight of the many people that may be there?
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- shadowlord325
- 5 months ago
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This is old news, but a new take. Its more about the architectural firm and the idea of glass structures than about the Sears tower itself.
It is insteresting. But I think that transparent aluminum and materials like P.E.T. will be working better.
