Dive Brief:

• Word will come from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat next month on whether One World Trade in Lower Manhattan is a 1,776-foot-tall building erected as a commercial monument to American resilience or a big office building with a whopping antenna on its roof.
• The essential question is whether the last 408 feet of the building that sits next to the nation's 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero is a spire.
• If the council rules that it's a spire, it's part of the structure, and One World Trade takes center stage as the tallest building in the U.S. If it's an antenna on top of the building proper, the score is Chicago 2, New York 1.

Dive Insight:

This is one of those cases in which there is no legal question or ruling, just an opinion that everyone in the world of big buildings agrees to accept. The council members understand what's riding on their decision, having said in an email to one of the owners that it can displease people who think that sticking a metal pole on top of a building to get a record is just too much to bear or it can tick off about 300 million people in the U.S. (minus the population of Chicago, of course).