Daniel Safarik, the council’s publications editor, says his group doesn’t track guyed broadcast towers. The Burj, the Tokyo Sky Tree, and the Shanghai Tower, which topped out in 2013, are the only other structures in the world that reach over 2,000 feet, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the official arbiter of the tallest buildings and structures. KVLY was again the tallest structure in the world until 2008, when the 2,722-foot Burj Khalifa skyscraper was built in Dubai. But that tower fell down in 1991, and was never rebuilt to the same height. The KVLY tower lost its title of the tallest structure in the world first in 1974 after the completion of the Warsaw Radio Mast, which reached 2,121 feet. Freestanding towers are generally shorter than guyed towers (which are also called guyed masts). Towers can either be “guyed,” which means they rely on guy wires tethered to the ground to stay up, or “freestanding,” which means they need no wires. Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibit building above that limit, and only three currently standing towers have exceptions to the rule. Image Courtesy of Īccording to Federal Communications Commission records, 16 towers in the country reach 2,000 feet and above, with dozens more only a few feet from the 2,000 mark.
#EMPIRE SECOND LIFE FLICKR TV#
Save this picture! The locations of all 16 2000-foot-plus TV towers in the USA. Neither tower is exactly picturesque - just narrow lattices of red and white metal, about 10 feet on each face, anchored to the ground by thick wires. That tower, KXJB, which broadcast a competing station, has fallen down and been rebuilt twice - first in 1968 when a helicopter got caught in the guy wires, killing four, and again in 1997 after what Jenson called a “freak ice storm.” That’s right - five miles away from the KVLY tower, there’s a second TV tower that reaches 2,060 feet. “Especially when you have another 2,000-foot tower you can look at.” “You can see quite a ways out on the prairie, and although it gets kind of misty on the horizon, it’s pretty awesome,” Jenson says. Blanchard, North Dakota is “just a little blip on the road,” he said.Īn elevator goes up most of the way to the top. “Our population isn’t exactly very dense out here, so you need to cover a large area to get to enough people,” says Doug Jenson, the chief engineer at the NBC affiliate that broadcasts from the tower. Built in 1963, it was the tallest structure in the world for many years. It’s so narrow that it’s just a vertical line on the horizon until you get close up. The KVLY tower rises out of the flat countryside like a needle. Save this picture! The KVLY-TV Tower in North Dakota.
Sustainability and Performance in Architecture The Future of Architectural Visualization