1.
Chicago
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Chicago, officially the City of Chicago, is the third-most populous city in the United States. With over 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the state of Illinois, and it is the county seat of Cook County. In 2012, Chicago was listed as a global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Chicago has the third-largest gross metropolitan product in the United States—about $640 billion according to 2015 estimates, the city has one of the worlds largest and most diversified economies with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce. In 2016, Chicago hosted over 54 million domestic and international visitors, landmarks in the city include Millennium Park, Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Campus, the Willis Tower, Museum of Science and Industry, and Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicagos culture includes the arts, novels, film, theater, especially improvisational comedy. Chicago also has sports teams in each of the major professional leagues. The city has many nicknames, the best-known being the Windy City, the name Chicago is derived from a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum, from the Miami-Illinois language. The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as Checagou was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir, henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the wild garlic, called chicagoua, grew abundantly in the area. In the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe known as the Potawatomi, the first known non-indigenous permanent settler in Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable was of African and French descent and arrived in the 1780s and he is commonly known as the Founder of Chicago. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed in 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn, the Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi tribes had ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. The Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, on August 12,1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200. Within seven years it grew to more than 4,000 people, on June 15,1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as U. S. The City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4,1837, as the site of the Chicago Portage, the city became an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States. Chicagos first railway, Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, and the Illinois, the canal allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River. A flourishing economy brought residents from rural communities and immigrants from abroad, manufacturing and retail and finance sectors became dominant, influencing the American economy. The Chicago Board of Trade listed the first ever standardized exchange traded forward contracts and these issues also helped propel another Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, to the national stage
2.
Skyscraper
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A skyscraper is a tall, continuously habitable building having multiple floors. When the term was used in the 1880s it described a building of 10 to 20 floors. Mostly designed for office, commercial and residential uses, a skyscraper can also be called a high-rise, for buildings above a height of 300 m, the term supertall can be used, while skyscrapers reaching beyond 600 m are classified as megatall. One common feature of skyscrapers is having a steel framework that supports curtain walls and these curtain walls either bear on the framework below or are suspended from the framework above, rather than resting on load-bearing walls of conventional construction. Some early skyscrapers have a frame that enables the construction of load-bearing walls taller than of those made of reinforced concrete. Modern skyscrapers walls are not load-bearing, and most skyscrapers are characterized by surface areas of windows made possible by steel frames. However, skyscrapers can have curtain walls that mimic conventional walls with a surface area of windows. Modern skyscrapers often have a structure, and are designed to act like a hollow cylinder to resist wind, seismic. To appear more slender, allow less wind exposure, and transmit more daylight to the ground, many skyscrapers have a design with setbacks, a relatively big building may be considered a skyscraper if it protrudes well above its built environment and changes the overall skyline. The maximum height of structures has progressed historically with building methods and technologies, the Burj Khalifa is currently the tallest building in the world. High-rise buildings are considered shorter than skyscrapers, the first steel-frame skyscraper was the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, Illinois in 1885. Even the scholars making the argument find it to be purely academic and this definition was based on the steel skeleton—as opposed to constructions of load-bearing masonry, which passed their practical limit in 1891 with Chicagos Monadnock Building. What is the characteristic of the tall office building. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and it must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line. Some structural engineers define a highrise as any vertical construction for which wind is a significant load factor than earthquake or weight. Note that this criterion fits not only high-rises but some other tall structures, the word skyscraper often carries a connotation of pride and achievement. A loose convention of some in the United States and Europe draws the limit of a skyscraper at 150 m or 490 ft. The tallest building in ancient times was the 146 m Great Pyramid of Giza in ancient Egypt and it was not surpassed in height for thousands of years, the 14th century AD Lincoln Cathedral being conjectured by many to have exceeded it
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Cornerstone Research
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Cornerstone Research is a litigation consulting firm based in the United States and the United Kingdom. It provides economic and financial analysis and expert testimony to attorneys, corporations and government agencies involved in complex litigation, cornerstone utilizes both internal and external expert witnesses to provide testimony, utilizing faculty and industry experts. The firm collaborates on the Securities Class Action Clearinghouse in conjunction with the Stanford University Law School, according to a University website, the clearinghouse provides summary information regarding federal class action securities litigation in the United States
4.
Eliel Saarinen's Tribune Tower design
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The winning entry, the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower, was built in 1925. Saarinens entry came in place yet became influential in the design of a number of future buildings. In 1921–22, the prominent Tribune Tower competition was held to design a new headquarters for the Chicago Tribune, first place was awarded to a design by New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, a neo-Gothic building completed in 1925. Saarinen was awarded $20,000 for second place, his design was never constructed, many observers felt that Saarinens simplified yet soaring setback tower was the most appropriate entry, and his novel modernist design influenced many subsequent architectural projects. Saarinen was an architect but had never before designed a skyscraper. To arrive at his design, he took as a starting place the upward sweep of Gothic architecture. He said that through logical construction each portion of the design was made to reflect the goal of verticality. He was 49 years old when he submitted the design, the year he moved from Finland to the Chicago area. In the U. S. he contributed to a design for the Chicago lakefront, and he lectured at the University of Michigan. Instead, others found success by incorporating his vision, pflueger, George W. Kelham, Hubbell and Benes, Holabird & Roche, Alfred C. Finn, and James Edwin Ruthven Carpenter, Jr. as well as later architect César Pelli, respected Chicago architect Louis Sullivan offered high praise to Saarinens design, and said that his building indicated the future direction for the old Chicago School. Sullivan named Saarinen his stylistic successor, Chicago architects Thomas Tallmadge and Irving Kane Pond were also very vocal in their praise for Saarinen. Pond said Saarinens design was by far the best contest entry, that it was devoid of the superficial adornments featured on the winning entry, Tallmadge projected that Saarinens design would be transformative for American skyscrapers. He said that under Saarinens hand, the spirit of the skyscraper, rid of its inhibitions, leaps in joyous freedom to the sky. Skyscraper Museum director Carol Willis, and art consultant Franck Mercurio, curator at the Field Museum in Chicago, Mercurio argues that Goodhues design is a better example of modernism because it has less ornamentation. Goodhues entry gained him honorable mention but no cash award, the following buildings have been observed to be influenced by Saarinens 1922 design. The Chicago Tribune Competition, Skyscraper Museum
5.
World's tallest structures
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The worlds tallest artificial structure is the 829.8 m tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The building gained the title of Tallest Building in the World. The second tallest self-supporting structure and the tallest tower is the Tokyo Skytree, the tallest guyed structure is the KVLY-TV mast. Structures that do not meet this criterion, such as the CN Tower, are defined as towers, there are dozens of radio and television broadcasting towers which measure over 600 metres in height, and only the tallest are recorded in publicly available information sources. The assessment of the height of structures has been controversial. Various standards have used by different organizations which has meant that the title of worlds tallest structure or building has changed depending on which standards have been accepted. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has changed its definitions over time, whether a structure, building or tower that is guyed is assessed in the same category as self-supporting structures. The tallest artificial structure is Burj Khalifa, a skyscraper in Dubai that reached 828.1 m in height on January 17,2009, by April 7,2008 it had been built higher than the KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota, USA. That September it officially surpassed Polands 646.38 m Warsaw radio mast, guyed lattice towers such as these masts had held the world height record since 1954. The Petronius Platform stands 610 m off the sea floor leading some, including Guinness World Records 2007, however, it is debated whether underwater height should be counted, in the same manner as height below ground is ignored on buildings. The Troll A platform is 472 m, without any part of height being supported by wires. The tension-leg type of oil platform has even greater heights with several examples more than 1,000 m deep. However, these platforms are not considered constant structures as the vast majority of their height is made up of the length of the tendons attaching the floating platforms to the sea floor. Despite this, Guinness World Records 2009 listed the Ursa tension leg platform as the tallest structure in the world with a height of 1,306 m. The Magnolia Tension-leg Platform in the Gulf of Mexico is even taller with a height of 1,432 m.2 m as measured to its architectural height. Burj Khalifa broke the record in all four categories for completed buildings. Due to the disagreements over how to measure height and classify structures, engineers have created various definitions for categories of buildings, One measure includes the absolute height of a building, another includes only spires and other permanent architectural features, but not antennas. The tradition of including the spire on top of a building, a modern-day example is that the antenna on top of Willis Tower is not considered part of its architectural height, while the spires on top of the Petronas Twin Towers are counted
6.
Aon Center (Chicago)
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With 83 floors and a height of 1,136 feet, it is the third tallest building in Chicago, surpassed in height by the Willis Tower and the Trump International Hotel and Tower. The building is managed by Jones Lang LaSalle, which is headquartered in the building. Aon Center formerly had the headquarters of Aon and Amoco, Aons US operations are headquartered here. The Standard Oil Building was constructed as the new headquarters of the Standard Oil Company of Indiana, when it was completed in 1974 it was the tallest building in Chicago and the fourth-tallest in the world, earning it the nickname Big Stan. The building employs a tubular steel-framed structural system with V-shaped perimeter columns to resist earthquakes, reduce sway, minimize column bending and this construction method was also used for the former World Trade Center towers in New York City. When completed, it was the worlds tallest marble-clad building, being sheathed entirely with 43,000 slabs of Italian Carrara marble, the marble used was thinner than previously attempted in cladding a building, this quickly proved to be a mistake. On December 25,1973, during construction a 350-pound marble slab detached from the façade, in 1985, inspection found numerous cracks and bowing in the marble cladding of the building. To alleviate the problem, stainless steel straps were added to hold the marble in place, later, from 1990 to 1992, the entire building was refaced with Mount Airy white granite at an estimated cost of over $80 million. The buildings facade now somewhat resembles that of the former World Trade Center due to the flow of the columns. The Standard Oil Building was renamed the Amoco Building when the company changed names in 1985, in 1998, Amoco sold the building to The Blackstone Group for an undisclosed amount, estimated to be between $430 and $440 million. It was renamed as the Aon Center on December 30,1999, in May 2003, Wells Real Estate Investment Trust, Inc. acquired the building for between $465 and $475 million. In recent years, the top floors of the building have been lit at night with colors to reflect a particular season or holiday, orange is used for Thanksgiving, green or red for Christmas, and pink during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The lighting commonly matches the nighttime lighting on the antenna of Willis Tower, the John Hancock Center, in the plaza, there is a sounding sculpture by Harry Bertoia
