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MetLife Will Sell Sears Tower by Dean Starkman From The Wall Street Journal Online March 12, 2004 Two investors who are part of Larry Silverstein's group that owns the World Trade Center lease are among the buyers of the Sears Tower, which MetLife Inc. agreed to sell Thursday for more than $800 million, according to people familiar with the situation. Lloyd Goldman and Joseph Cayre, New York investors who are among Mr. Silverstein's backers in the Trade Center, are part of a group that agreed to buy the Chicago landmark, these people said. Another New York investor, Jeffrey Feil, was also a participant in the Sears Tower deal, the people said. Names of the other investors couldn't be learned.
Might Sears Tower, the brooding black mountain of the Chicago skyline, turn a shiny silver? Don't count on it, even if such an outlandish move might cut energy costs at the nation's tallest building.
Following this morning's Chicago Sun-Times story that the skyscrapers' owners are looking at re-covering the tower in silver, a Sears Tower spokesman confirms that the owners want to improve the energy performance of the 110-story office building, but adds that "any details at this point would be speculative." It's been known for months that the owners have asked Chicago architects Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill to devise ways to drop the tower's energy consumption.
Among the ideas floated: Putting wind turbines and solar panels on the roof. Now comes the Sun-Times with a fanciful illustration (above) that imagines the tower with a new skin of silvery mirror glass instead of its current cladding of black anodyzed aluminum and bronze-tinted windows. Experts in energy-saving architecture say such a plan could cut two ways. "Changing the facade color of the Sears Tower from black to a lighter color that absorbed less heat would reduce its air-conditioning costs," said Doug Farr, a Chicago architect who has made green design a hallmark of his practice.
Chicago’s iconic Willis Tower (formally the Sears Tower) is set to become a massive solar electric plant with the installation of a pilot solar electric glass project. The high-profile project on the south side of the 56th floor will replace the windows with a new type of photovoltaic glass developed by Pythagoras Solar which preserves daylighting and views while reducing heat gain and producing the same energy as a conventional solar panel. The project could grow to 2 MW in size — which is comparable to a 10 acre field of solar panels — turning North America’s tallest building into a huge urban vertical solar farm.
The image produced by the hologram can either appear to be in front of the holographic plate or film, or behind the film. In the former case it is called a real image (projection) and the latter a virtual image. If you imagine your position as viewer to be constant then you can easily determine whether an image is real or vitual. If the image appears between you and the hologram it is a real image, if the hologram is between you and the apparent object then it is called a virtual image.
In general it is easier to view a virtual image because you can see through the hologram as if it were a window. I would like to mention here that as with other windows if you change the size of the windows the object or objects you are viewing do not change their size. For example, let's say you are lucky enough to have a window in your house that looks out on a beautiful tree. If for some terrible reason you have to make your window smaller, your tree luckily does not shrink, you merely have a more confined view or less possible angles of view of the tree.
To view a virtual image you must look through the hologram to perceive the object floating in the space behind it. In order to see a real image you look at the hologram and see the object in free space in front of the hologram. It is a little more difficult to view a real image because you have to find the image or focus your eyes in front of the hologram and in this case the hologram is less capable to act as a guide for your eyes. You may move a screen or sheet of paper back and forth in front of the hologram in order to find where the object is focused and then, keeping your eye on that place in space, remove the sheet and look straight into the hologram.
The real image is very exciting but there are a number of drawbacks. The object holographed should be quite a bit samller than the size of the film you are using, if not, you will not be able to see the complete real image of the object all at once. It will necessitate craning your neck and stretching in all which ways to see parts of the whole object or objects.
Also, unless you take special precautions in the construction of the hologram, the real image will be pseudoscopic. This means simply that everything that was closer to the film when the hologram was made will now be further away and vice versa. This includes both individual objects in a shot or the different planes of space of an individual object. The pseudoscopic image is made by reversing the direction of the reference beam, or by turning the completed hologram around until seeing the image in front of the plate.