Trump's Number...Six?

A change in criteria used to measure a building's height has moved the new downtown Trump Tower from seventh place to sixth place on the list of the world's tallest towers (but still behind the fifth place Sears Willis Tower). So what changed? The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat - based here in Chicago - changed exactly where you begin when measuring height. The Trib's Blair Kamin explains:

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.

Those extra inches mean the Trump Tower clears the Jin Mao Building in Shanghai by just eight feet. Of course, all these buildings will be dwarfed when the Burj Dubai, which is ridonkulously tall, opens in January.