the sears tower will be renamed the "willis tower". as a former chicagoan, it just doesn't sound right too me. i've never really liked having buildings named after their corporate owners. i remember when the stone container building turned into the smurfit-stone building. neither was a good name. they should have just stuck with "the diamond building." here in the philly area, i watched the "core states center" turn into the "first union center" (or, as my brother called it, "the FUC"), and then into the "wachovia center" in just a few short years of corporate takeovers. now that wachovia has been eaten by wells fargo, i'm not really sure what to call it. in texas, the collapse of enron made enron field a joke.
if we've got to name buildings, why can't we just give them names? "the empire state building" has worked well for decades. i work in a building that just barely pre-dates the naming-after-corporations fad. it's just called "liberty one." corporations and their holdings are an ephemeral thing, posing as something permanent. if they're going to insist on naming a building after it's corporate sponsor, there should be a rule that that's the name no matter who buys it later. the world is littered with monuments to dead kings. we don't rename them, they are part of history. our buildings should serve as monuments to our modern corporate overlords.
