In
another city, the John Hancock tower wouldn't be anything
special -- just another reflective glass box in the
crowd. But because of the way Boston and the rest
of New England has grown up architecturally, this
"70's modern" building stands out from the rest. Instead
of being colonial, it breaks new ground. Instead of
being quaint, it soars and imposes itself on the skyline.
And Instead of being white like so many buildings
in the region, this one defies the local conventional
wisdom and goes for black. For these reasons and more
the people of Boston have fallen in love with the
790-foot monster looming as the tallest building in
New England at the time of its completion. In the
mid-1990's, The Boston Globe polled local architects
who rated it the city's third best architectural structure.
Much like Boston's well-loved baseball team, the building
has had a rough past, but still perseveres, coming
back stronger to win the hearts of its fans. The trouble
began early on. During construction of the foundation
the sides of the pit collapsed, nearly sucking Trinity
Church into the hole. Then in late January, 1973 construction
was still underway when a winter storm rolled into
town and a 500-pound window leapt from the tower and
smashed itself to bits on the ground below. Another
followed. Then another. Within a few weeks, more than
65 of the building's 10,344 panes of glass committed
suicide, their crystalline essence piling up in a
roped-off area surrounding the building. The people
of Bean Town have always been willing to kick a brother
when he's down, and started calling the tower the
Plywood Palace because of the black-painted pieces
of wood covering more than an acre of its façade.
Some people thought the building was swaying too much
in the wind, and causing the windows to pop out. Some
thought the foundation had shifted and it was putting
stress of the structural geometry. It turns out the
culprit was nothing more than the lead solder running
along the window frame. It was too stiff to deal with
the kind of vibrations that happen every day in thousands
of office buildings around the world. So when John
Hancock Tower swayed with the wind, or sighed with
the temperature, the windows didn't and eventually
cracked and plummeted to Earth. It cost $7,000,000.00
to replace all of those panes of glass. The good news
is, you can own a genuine piece of the skyscraper.
According to the Globe, the undamaged sheets
were sold off for use as tabletops, so start combing
those garage sales. For any other skyscraper, the
hardship would end there. But the Hancock building
continued to suffer indignities. The last, and most
ominous, was revealed by Bruno Thurlimann, a Swiss
engineer who determined that the building's natural
sway period was dangerously close to the period of
its torsion. The result was that instead of swaying
back-and-forth like a in the wind like a metronome,
it bent in the middle, like a cobra. The solution
was putting a pair of 300-ton tuned mass dampeners
on the 58-th floor. The same engineer also determined
that while the $3,000,000.00 mass dampeners would
keep the building from twisting itself apart, the
force of the wind could still knock it over. So 1,500
tons of steel braces were used to stiffen the tower
and the Hancock building's final architectural indignity
was surmounted.
bob - 26 January, 2003: