Willis Tower Willis Tower The Willis Tower, built as and still commonly referred to as the Sears Tower, is a 110-story, skyscraper in Chicago, Illinois. At completion in 1973, it surpassed the World Trade Center towers in New York to become the tallest building in the world, a title it held for nearly 25 years; it remained the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere until the completion of a new building at the rebuilt World Trade Center site in 2014. The building is considered a seminal achievement for its designer Fazlur Rahman Khan. The Willis Tower is the second-tallest building in the
Sears history of the old company, celebrating the original 1892 incorporation, rather than the 1906 revision, as the start of the company. Sears' successful 1906 initial public offering (IPO) marks the first major retail IPO in American financial history and represented a coming of age, financially, of the consumer sector. The company traded under the ticker symbol S, and was a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1924 to 1999. In 1906, Sears opened its catalog plant and the Sears Merchandise Building Tower in Chicago's West Side. The building was the anchor of what would become the massive Sears,