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Which is taller now? Chase Tower or Wells Fargo Plaza?


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The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, which decides the official heights of skyscrapers, has changed the way it measures buildings.

It used to be that the height was measured from the main entrance. Now it's measured from any significant pedestrian entrance. Here's a link to the explanation: http://www.ctbuh.org/NewsMedia/PR_091117_ChangeHeightCriteria/tabid/1273/language/en-US/Default.aspx

It doesn't matter much for the top ten tallest buildings. All it does is push Chicago's Trump Tower ahead of Shanghai's Jin Mao Building. But it should make for quite a shuffle further down the line.

Here's the diagram of the current tallest buildings, measured three ways. The first diagram is the one most people go by -- the height to the "architectural top":

CTB_ArchitecturalTop.jpg

This shows rankings if measured by the highest occupied floor:

CTB_HighestFloor.jpg

This shows the rankings if measured to the tip of the structure:

CTB_ToTip.jpg

So, now that the Wells Fargo Plaza's sunken garden counts in that building's height, is it enough to push Fargo ahead of the JPMorgan Chase Tower in height? Fargo was 992 feet before. JPMC is 1,002. If I remember correctly, that sunken area is more than ten feet deep.

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(Since we didn't call the thread done once Attica weighed in with the right answer) -

Its unquestionably way more than 10 feet deep, so that would make Wells Fargo taller, but I question including it in the building height. Seems kind of silly.

Conversely, if a surface stretched our tape measure a distance then it would be pedantic to insist that the distance couldn't count for real.

Up until today I had the feel that pedants were exactly the sort of person drawn to be involved in CTBUH.

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I think for two buildings that close to each other, there shouldn't be any of that nonsense about sunken levels. Get on top and see which one is...TALLER. That's it. The one with more altitude is taller.

Assuming relatively flat terrain, that is...which is the case here.

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Chase would still be taller if you count space where there's a significant pedestrian entrance since you would then count the tunnel entrance to Chase because it qualifies as a significant pedestrian entrance.

Sounds fair to me. The depth of the tunnel level on each is roughly the same, so Chase has the advantage again.

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It has to be "open-air," which technically that area was for a few hours when Ike blew out the windows...

So theoretically what if there were a building that could only be entered from a tunnel level with no entrances on the street level? Would it have an altitude of 0?

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