Whatchutalkinbout Willis Tower?

Chicago Tribune readers are vowing to ignore the new name on the Sears Tower. And it's almost unanimous.

An insurance brokerage company, Willis Group Holdings, announced March 12 that in addition to moving its Chicago offices into several floors of the Sears Tower, they had also negotiated to rename the building in their own honor. But Chicagoans and people across the country just can't imagine referring to the tallest building in North America as the Willis Tower.

Sears, Roebuck and Company was the largest retailer in the world when the tower was built for them, but a lot has changed since then. Even though Sears relocated to the suburbs seventeen years ago, the structure has continued to bear their name.

Its imposing black silhouette is as recognizable and memorable as one could imagine as an icon of Chicago. At 110 stories and 1,454 feet, the Sears Tower opened in 1973 as the tallest building in the world, surpassing New York's World Trade Center which had held the title only briefly. Construction on the Sears Tower had already begun when the Twin Towers were completed in 1972.

In 1998, sixteen years after the Sear Tower opened, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, took the World's Tallest title away, though not without controversy. The Sears Tower's antenna masts were still taller than the highest point of the Petronas Towers, however, most people who care about stuff like this agree that antennae or other such supplemental additions are not technically part of the building. Regardless, the Sears Tower remains the tallest structure in the Western Hemisphere.

Like an asymmetrical stack of smaller office towers, the building's unique design was a local project from Chicago architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Some of SOM's other notable projects include the John Hancock Center in Chicago, Manhattan's Time Warner Center, and the mammoth Burj Dubai tower in the United Arab Emirates, which, though not yet completed, is now the tallest building in the world. At 2,684 feet tall, the Burj Dubai positively dwarfs the Sears Tower. It would take an antenna taller than New York's Chrysler Building on top of the Sears Tower to compete.

Surprisingly, Willis Group Holdings does not own the building they are renaming. In fact, they will occupy less than 4% of the tower's 3.8 million total square feet of space. They procured the right to rename it from a real estate investment group, US Equities Realty, which manages and leases the building.

A March 13th online poll at ChicagoTribune.com asked readers, "Will you still refer to it as the Sears Tower?" Not surprisingly, after a few days of voting and about 15,000 responses, more than 95% of readers intend to continue calling it the Sears Tower.

The new name is scheduled to take effect in July 2009. Read more at ChicagoTribune.com and the building's official site SearsTower.com.