Trump's tower (in Chicago) now 6th tallest building

From the Chicago Tribune:

"The Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the global arbiter of height standards, has changed its criteria for measuring skyscrapers.

The old standard was that a skyscraper's height was determined by calculating the distance from the sidewalk outside the main entrance to the building's spire or structural top.

The new standard is that height is measured from "the lowest, significant, open-air, pedestrian entrance" to the top.

For the Trump tower, this means an extra 27 feet in height. Its bottom is now considered to be the entrance to the still-unoccupied shops along the along the Chicago riverwalk, not the main entrance on Wabash Ave."

Click here for the full article.

Falling Smoke Stack

This is a slow-motion video of the demolition of a smoke stack (probably from a power plant) on the campus of Drexel University. At the 0:35 second mark, once the stack impacts the ground, you can see a shock wave travel through the glass cladding on the building in the center of the video.



(It helps to view the video in a full screen mode)

Ryugyong Hotel

Infamously ugly and unfinished, the shell of the Ryugyong Hotel dominates North Korea's capital, Pyongyang. But work on the skyscraper began again last summer after a 16-year hiatus and, as the company behind it tells the BBC's Matthew Davis, an end may finally be in sight.

Read more at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8306697.stm