The Durst Organization will find out early next month whether their mammoth One World Trade Center project is in fact, technically, the country’s tallest tower. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a nonprofit that is the industry’s go-to source for determining skyscraper height, will determine the height of the building that its developers (Durst and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) say soars to 1,776 feet.
But it is still up in the air whether the council will rule that One World Trade’s 408-foot steel mast can be considered a “spire,” and thus a part of the building’s architecture that counts toward its height, the Wall Street Journal reported. If it isn’t considered a spire, One World Trade will have an official height of only 1,368 feet, still a ways away from the current top dog, the 1,451-foot Willis Tower, in Chicago, according to the newspaper.
“We are caught between a hard rock and a stone,” Antony Wood, the council’s executive director, wrote to Douglas Durst last month, according to the Journal.
A Durst organization spokesperson told the newspaper that there isn’t room for debate about the tower’s height. “Logic and their guidelines dictate clearly that the building is 1,776 feet tall,” spokesperson Jordan Barowitz said. [WSJ] – Hiten Samtani