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This is an easy — or at least straightforward — question: the tallest building is Van Hise Hall, which is 243 feet high (or 74 meters, if you want to get all scientific and metric). In Madison, only the state capitol is taller, at 284 feet. But the capitol has only six floors, whereas Van Hise has 19. The UW built Van Hise during a high-rise boom in the late 1960s: it opened in 1967, just a year after Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (15 stories, 180 feet) and a year before Engineering Research (14 stories, 184 feet). Keep in mind that the tallest building on campus isn’t the same as the largest. That’s the Clinical Sciences Center, which has 1,897,439 square feet of floor space. The capitol has just over half a million square feet — not even close. 

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