

One World Trade Center named tallest US building - bdehaaff
http://news.yahoo.com/one-world-trade-center-named-tallest-us-building-230809612.html

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sjwright
TLDR: It's only the tallest US building if you include the antenna atop 1WTC
in the measurement, and disqualify antennas atop many other tall buildings. No
technical rationale exists for the unequal treatment.

The World Trade Center tragedy isn't respected by cheating in a penis-
measuring contest, and the organization that made this decision should be
forever embarrassed and discredited.

~~~
PLenz
Poetry should trump technical reasons:

BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul. Prairie and
valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its
twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
valleys. It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day
that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories. (Dumped in
the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care for the building or speak its
name or ask a policeman the way to it?)

Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and parcels and iron
pipes carry gas and water in and sewage out. Wires climb with secrets, carry
light and carry words, and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men
grappling plans of business and questions of women in plots of love.

Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the earth and hold the
building to a turning planet. Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach
out and hold together the stone walls and floors.

Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar clinch the
pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted. Hour by hour the sun and the
rain, the air and the rust, and the press of time running into centuries, play
on the building inside and out and use it.

Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the
wind whistles a wild song without words And so are men who strung the wires
and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor. Souls
of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging at back doors hundreds of
miles away and the brick- layer who went to state's prison for shooting
another man while drunk. (One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the
end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has gone into the stones of the
building.)

On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names and each name
standing for a face written across with a dead child, a passionate lover, a
driving ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's ease of life.

Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls tell nothing from room
to room. Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation
officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters go bundled from
the building to all ends of the earth. Smiles and tears of each office girl go
into the soul of the building just the same as the master-men who rule the
building.

Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties its men and women
who go away and eat and come back to work. Toward the end of the afternoon all
work slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on them.
One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed elevator men are gone.
Pails clang. . . Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water
and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit, and machine grime of the
day. Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles of houses
and people where to buy a thing for money. The sign speaks till midnight.

Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence holds. . . Watchmen walk slow
from floor to floor and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets.
. . Steel safes stand in corners. Money is stacked in them. A young watchman
leans at a window and sees the lights of barges butting their way across a
harbor, nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span of
glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the
sleeping city. By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and
has a soul.

-Carl Sandburg (ironically writing about Chicago)

~~~
sjwright
Poetry should trump technical reasons if we're judging a poetry contest. This
is not a poetry contest, it is a technical contest.

If you want 1WTC to win a poetry contest, start a _Most Poetic Skyscraper In
The United States_ competition, and let's see.

~~~
bdehaaff
How about a series of Haikus? Building size is not poetry.

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prawn
Hair is often an artistic expression. Can we start including that in our
height measurements? Might help Iman Shumpert:

[http://sinbapointforward.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/iman-
sh...](http://sinbapointforward.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/iman-shumpert-
knicks-1.jpg?w=600&h=400)

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rayiner
Cheating! Its shorter than the Sears Tower without the antenna.

~~~
tedunangst
Yeah, but that was the entire point of the councils decision. The tower on top
counts as a core part of the building.

