I only have one image right now but I think everyone will like it. Unfortunately this isn't a viewable angle in ECC anymore because another tower was built in front of the Sears Tower from this angle, and ECC's default render distance was cut down since I took the image.

The tower is to scale, at 1/4 the size of the real building. It's built with black clay and glass, black wool forms the dark bands. The floodlight system turns on and off with sunrise and sunset. The structure is in the city of Bertigstadt (Bertig City in German), which will have a portal in Rising very soon. It will allow all of ECC to visit in person! There will be a custom designed souvenir for sale on the observation deck if I can get it to work.

Enjoy, feedback much appreciated!

-jbertig

 

Yeah, I designed it in a singleplayer creative world and used MCEdit to find out how much stuff I needed to build it, then spent $35k buying the material to build it. @DaisyWarrior helped put the building together.

I have some pics of it as we were building it I'll post in a little bit.

 

Here's a timeline of the building as the skeleton went up.

I built the tower's basement with a proper foundation MC style. I dug out all of the dirt down to stone, flattened the stone layer and built columns up to the road level. I also lined the walls of the hole with stone, my MC equivalent to concrete.



Here Daisy and I reached the first floor with a dark band. The floors are 4 blocks high except for those with the bands. These floors are 5 blocks high. I brought the columns in the center of the tower up with the façade of the building.



Here we reached the top of the tower's 2nd set of setbacks, which are around the 67th floor in the real tower. The jagged edge in the setback is where the building's floodlights were placed.


Here we reached the top of the building's 3rd set of setbacks. From here only the top floors remained. The redstone lamps are in place on the setback I mentioned before.



The tower's body topped out and the antennas are up. The building towers 109 blocks into the Rising sky and the west antenna reaches to 131 blocks. I thought I took more pictures of the tower when the beams and columns were up but not the floors they support, oh well haha.



The building sits with its façade and basic structure completed, it awaits it's interior. The lights aren't on in this shot. I didn't set the redstone circuits to light up until the building's grand opening.



The building's lights come on for the very first time for it's grand opening. @SparklyPotat02 is flying and taking screenshots when I am haha. The cloud layer gives you a better idea of the building's height.

 

I found an interesting way to get ECC to keep stuff at a distance loaded into memory on my PC for a second. If you move away from what you want to see w/o looking back and then turn around, what you wanted to see will very briefly stay there until the render distance updates. I snagged some distance pictures of the current skyline of Bertigstadt with the Sears Tower.




If anyone is interested, the floors in the building are for sale for use as offices. Bertigstadt has a portal in Rising on the bottom floor in the blue ring. I wrote a book that tells the story of building the Tower and it has an itemized list of the materials I used. These are for sale for $150 each on the top floor. Pm me or mail me if you'd like to buy a book, or get office space in the building!

 

@314 I built this building as my town's "centerpiece" so it'd be unique lol. I'd prefer to not have an identical building elsewhere on the server. You could build the building at a different scale if you wanted, or you could find another famous Chicago tower to build! Try building the John Hancock Center! I don't think there's a replica on the server yet. I've considered giving it a shot, but my downtown isn't large enough for two goliath buildings like that.

@outerlocal, Yes, the floors are quite the demotivator haha, either that or the windows. Probably the windows, it took a double chest and half a chest of glass blocks to build the façade. The fattest floors of the tower were 17x17s and they dropped off to 50 block floors at the top, DaisyWarrior and I built the frame floor by floor so we basically had to reach the top to make it look right lol. I almost built the building to 1/3 scale but those floors would've been 28x28s! The tower would've been 145m to just the roofline and like 10 blocks from the height limit for the antennas! I almost wish I went for that bigger one, but it would've been excessive- in the pics above, the roof line of the tower would've been 15 blocks higher than the antennas, basically very ECC unfriendly lol. 1/4 scale was economical and looks good :D

 

Downtown Bertigstadt has grown quite a bit! One of my town's residents tore down the tall light gray tower that was catty-corner to the Sears Tower. That plot's a big hole in the ground atm until I decide what I want to build on it. I added a cathedral, and an early 20th Century themed skyscraper a couple blocks south of the Sears Tower. All the new buildings have similar day/night lighting effects that the Sears Tower has. It can't be seen, but I also built a parking garage for horses :D I recently reached President and claimed my second town, which is Strauchstadt. The town borders Bertigstadt, and this view is from an overpass on a highway bypass I just started building. Other things that were added include an elevated tramway, which loops the central portion of downtown. Visitors or prospective residents are welcome! Bertigstadt has a portal in the Rising Towns portal on Floor 5 in the Lapis blue ring. Viviville is one of the neighboring portals.