103rd floor glass balconies (5 yrs old kid on glass balconies)

kinda scary but i still wanna to do it just for my experience! :D
 
That's interesting. Although I would be a bit queasy if some 500 pound dude walked on the glass.
 
I just pissed in my pants just by looking at it.... even though I skydived twice.

:Oops:
 
I was curious about that glass ledge so here it is....

Sears Tower: New glass 'ledges' lead to high anxiety

47821735.jpg


Three layers of half-inch-thick glass were all that separated me from what looked like Matchbox cars and tiny people about 100 stories below.

My stomach was queasy, and my heart pounded. But the view from this glass box -- about the size of an elevator -- was breathtaking and terrifying, especially for someone who fears heights.

I'm standing on The Ledge, the four new enclosed glass boxes that jut about four feet from the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower. The latest addition to the 110-story high-rise opens Thursday. From the glass boxes, visitors get a nearly panoramic view, from Wacker Drive below and up to 50 miles in three directions on a clear day. The boxes can hold at least 5 tons each, about the weight of an elephant, and they can retract into the building when the windows get washed.

The idea to suspend glass boxes 1,353 feet in the air spawned from all the forehead marks on the glass walls of the 103rd floor, known as Skydeck Chicago, general manager Randy Stancik said. Visitors just love looking down, so the Sears Tower decided to give them an unobstructed view.

On Wednesday, I joined a few lucky wide-eyed children and adults to catch an early glimpse of The Ledge. My editor gave me the assignment not despite my fear of heights, but because of it.

After seesawing for a few minutes between the carpeted entryway and the Ledge's glass floor, I finally edged one foot onto the glass. It was petrifying. But after a few more minutes, I shuffled my way to the corner of the box.

Ah, the spectacular view. The entire panorama of Chicago lay out before me. But the fear still lingered. Death was surely below. The children surrounding me thought my fear was quite funny.

Adam Kane, 10, and his sprightly young companions were oblivious to any potential for plunging to the streets below. They wormed their way around the glass box, streaking the glass with tiny fingerprints, and sat comfortably cross-legged on the floor. "When I look down, it's still pretty freaky," said Adam, who ventured to Chicago from Alton, Ill., with his family. "My legs, they feel like all wobbly. It feels like they're going to squish to the ground."

Darron Cooper, 30, of Atlanta, crept gingerly inside the glass box.

"I've got a fear of heights, and I'm looking straight down," Cooper said. "It's an experience you can't pass up."

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP designed The Ledge, a year-and-a-half project. Determining how to suspend boxes from the top of the tower was a challenge, project manager Lou Cerny said. Then there were Chicago's harsh winds, which wouldn't allow workers at times to assemble the boxes now suspended by 30-pound steel beams from inside the tower. Cerny had advice for the fearful: Just take the first step in. And, of course, come back for more.

"You do it for the 10th time and you don't even think about it anymore," Cerny said.
Click to expand...
 
Walking On Air in Chicago

CHICAGO, July 1 -- Don't look down. Or do, since that's the idea. But brace for vertigo. In the city of big shoulders, this is like standing on an eyelash.

It's a glass ledge, 1 1/2 inches thick and poking out about four feet from the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower. There is no frame under the floor, only air -- 1,353 feet of it, straight down to the miniature taxis on Wacker Drive.

Picture Wile E. Coyote racing off the cliff. Think of the moment when he suddenly looks down. Only you don't actually fall.

The reason is an intriguing feat of engineering, a team of designers and builders said Wednesday, swearing on a stack of liability policies as they unveiled the project. The ledge -- actually four identical glass boxes suspended near the top of the nation's tallest building -- opens to the intrepid Thursday.

The natural instinct is to inch out onto the glass very, very slowly, said sheet metal worker Leo Thier, who took a break from another job to venture into the box. Still in his hard hat and construction boots, he delivered his verdict: "It's fantastic. It's insane."

"I've never seen a helicopter from that view: eye level," he said as a news chopper drifted in for a close-up. "See, now all the big wheels in this whole place are going to want [a ledge] in their office."

The ledges, created off the tower's enclosed Skydeck, are hardly likely to be duplicated elsewhere in the 36-year-old building. Knocking out chunks of steel and glass to install the four structures, with the wind whipping and the clock ticking, was cost and hassle enough.

If the wind is blowing at 20 mph on the ground, it is blowing two or three times harder 1,353 feet up, said construction chief Lou Cerny of MTH Industries. The building itself moves with the wind on a normal day, creating conundrums for installers seeking precision within a 16th of an inch.

"It's probably swaying seven to eight inches while we're standing here," Cerny said. "So the opening changes. You measure and you get a different dimension and you scratch your head."

The glass boxes look like square portholes on the west side of the tower -- or, from a great distance, dimpled chads on a ballot. From the Skydeck, which draws 1.3 million visitors a year, one steps onto the glass through openings 10 feet wide and 10 feet high.

Thick panels of glass are bolted to a steel frame at the top of each box. The 1,500-pound floor, which connects to the vertical pieces on three sides, is made of three sheets of glass layered with a special invisible resin called polyvinyl butyral, or PVB, the same stuff used in car windshields.

"Think of it like bulletproof glass. Even if the glass were to break, which it's unlikely to do, it stays inside the frame. It would never fall out," said Ross Wimer, the project's lead architect.

To make sure, workers used a center punch to shatter first the top layer of the glass, then all three layers, Cerny said. The floor held. As installed, each floor is designed to hold several times more weight than would ever be placed on it.

"There's no problem with putting 5,000 or 10,000 pounds without anything happening," Cerny said. "It's been tested."

Then there is the mechanical part. Engineers had to figure how to clean the glass for paying customers and, just as important, allow a clear path for the building's window-washing platforms, which drop from cables anchored on the roof, seven floors above.

So, using equipment designed to move theater sets, they made the ledges retractable. The boxes can be hauled into the openings in the 103rd floor to allow the window washers to do their work, then are rolled back out.

Wimer, who typically designs airports and skyscrapers, was intrigued by the project. Working with colleagues at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the first instinct was a mesh floor and sides so visitors could "step out there and feel the wind."

That proved impractical -- and potentially painful in a city with merciless winters. Mesh would also impede the views. Wimer was seeking the sensation of "floating in space," as well as something that was not, as Prince Charles once said of a proposed London gallery extension, "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend."

"How do we do this in a way that's consistent with the logic of the building?" Wimer said designers asked. "We didn't want this to be an amusement park ride, but simple, elegant and natural, so it felt it belonged in the Sears Tower."

One reason for designing glass ledges just four feet deep was to prevent more people from crowding onto them. Not for safety reasons, Wimer said, but to preserve an open feeling easier to establish if "they're not standing two-deep."

As the designers pulled back a curtain on a cloudy Wednesday morning and reporters moved gingerly toward the ledges, a television reporter said to his cameraman: "I'm not going to get out there. I'll get close."

"Close," it turned out, was a foot away. He extended his microphone to interview 11-year-old Isaac Moldofsky, who stood without fear on the glass and pronounced the experience "pretty cool."

Later, a visitor named Viesha Arbes was having none of it. In dressy clothes and heels, she lowered herself indelicately to hands and knees and crawled toward the opening. When she caught her first glimpse of the street 103 floors below, she gasped and lunged away.

"I don't think I have that much confidence," said Arbes, visiting from Raleigh, N.C. "It feels too real."

Reality worked for her 12-year-old daughter, Sarah.

"It's scary like no other. It's like you're floating," she said, long after Wimer had departed. After 20 minutes of coaxing, Sarah led her mother backward onto the ledge to pose for a photo. Her mother never looked down.
Click to expand...
 
My friend who lives around in Seattle....he told me that he visited Chicago for RAD conference and he did check it out and said it's amazing to see glass balcony and see everything below and he told us how thick the glass is and amazly strong.
 
Jiro said:
I just pissed in my pants just by looking at it.... even though I skydived twice.

:Oops:
Click to expand...

rofl, no shit? i thought ur brave enough to not piss yourself by just look at it since you done skydrived twice (lucky ya, i wanna do skydrive so baddd lol)
 
dark said:
rofl, no shit? i thought ur brave enough to not piss yourself by just look at it since you done skydrived twice (lucky ya, i wanna do skydrive so baddd lol)
Click to expand...

I know. it's just different type of fear. At least in skydiving, you've got chute (and back-up chute) on your back but what about this one? if you fall, you're f**ked!!

btw - why not go skydiving? unless.... it's money issue. It's usually $200-250
 
i wonder how many extra janitors they had to hire to clean up after all the people that crap after going out there... :hmm:
 
That is pretty amazing. I have this urge to walk on it and jump up and down to see if I can break it. But then, I am pretty evil and stupid.
 
(sigh) I went to Sears tower for 5 times already now 103rd floor glass balconies is new to me. Probably we will go there again by next year.
 
I don't mind to try! I am very brave person! I love the height! I am not chicken out! LoL

My friend took a picture of it last week. She did that with her fiance. They aren't afraid of it. They said whoa!!!!

It remind me of Toronto's tower with glass floor.
 
I may say I'm crazy enough to give this a try and step on the ledge but what the heck, I'll go for it and step on it.

It'll be an experience that I would want to have! :)
 
Back
Top