I. IntroductionThe Willis Tower (originally known as the Sears Tower) was for years the tallest building in the world. The original planning and design did not envisage this record as an objective to be achieved or as a parameter to guide the design. Fazlur Khan's project for Sears Roebuck not only achieved the client's goal of consolidating Chicago-area employees into one central location while enabling the company's anticipated growth, but did so with a structural tubes in an innovative and economical bundle. This building was arguably not only the culmination, but the fulfillment of Chicago's role in advancing the towering skyscraper as the centerpiece of modern architecture. Its distinctive design exemplifies the adage “form follows function” in both the advantages and disadvantages of this way of conceptualizing buildings. Its aesthetics amplify the aesthetic characteristics and disadvantages of the huge modern skyscraper.II. BodyThe Willis Tower is 110 stories tall and 1,454 feet tall. Visitors can see five states from its observation deck on a clear day. The building has the tallest elevator in the world. Its base covers two entire city blocks. An often mentioned way to imagine its clustered tube design is to think of a cigarette pack with nine cigarettes rising above the others. Two are drawn to a medium level with two others slightly higher. Then three are pulled even higher and the final two are pulled out to complete the design. Each of these cigarettes measures seventy-five square feet. The exterior design is that of a steel frame and glass awning, as first introduced in Bruce Graham's Inland Steel building. The outer frame is covered in twenty-eight acres of black aluminum. Other stats barely make the Willi's superhuman scale... middle of paper... cheap. Yet its aesthetic and human shortcomings reveal that form follows function is only successful to the extent that we do not let narrow or parochial ideas about a building's function limit what it becomes in the lives of the people who have to live and work there. There's a sense that the Sears executives who commissioned it got exactly what they wanted and paid for. Few people feel affection for the Hancock Center as a civic symbol, nor would many take it as a source of inspiration. The Willis Tower will serve as a monument to the engineering imagination of Fazlur Khan and an indictment of the aesthetic and social imagination of those who could not conceive of a workplace where people did more than record and perform tasks and pre-established functions. Remember that the Sears people originally conceived the building as a 40-story cube.