John Hancock Tower

Architecture

Minimalism was the design principle behind the tower. The largest possible panes of glass were used, there are no spandrel panels, and the mullions are minimal. Cobb added a geometric modernist twist by using a parallelogram shape for the tower floor plan. From the most-common views, this design makes the corners of the tower appear very sharp. The highly-reflective window glass is tinted slightly blue, which results in the tower having only a subtle contrast with the sky on a clear day. As a final modernist touch, the short sides of the parallelogram are each marked with a deep vertical notch, breaking up the tower's mass and emphasizing its verticality. In late evening, the vertical notch to the northwest catches the last light of the sky, while the larger portions of glass reflect the darkening sky.

A major concern of the architects while designing the tower was its proximity to Boston's Trinity Church, a prominent National Historic Landmark. Their concern led them to redesign the tower's plans, as there was a public outcry when it was revealed that the Hancock Tower would cast its shadow on the church.

File:John Hancock Panorama.jpg|Full vertical view of the John Hancock Tower File:John Hancock Tower Sky.JPG|Cloud reflections on the glass sheathing File:Hancockslimside.JPG|The dark vertical notch is prominent in this view.

In 1977, the American Institute of Architects presented the firm with a National Honor Award for the building, and in 2011 conferred on it the Twenty-five Year Award.

Engineering flaws

The building was a much-anticipated landmark designed by a well-respected architect, but was known in the 1970s for its engineering flaws as well as for its architectural achievement. The opening of the building was delayed from 1971 to 1976, and the total cost is rumored to have increased from $75 million to $175 million. It was an embarrassment for the firm, for modernist architects, and for the architecture industry.

During the excavation for the tower's foundation, temporary steel retaining walls were erected to create a space in which to build. The walls warped, giving way to the clay and mud fill of the Back Bay which they were supposed to hold back. The shifting soils damaged utility lines, the sidewalk pavement, and nearby buildings—including the historic Trinity Church across St. James Avenue. Trinity Church won an $11 million lawsuit to pay for repairs.

There were problems with the innovative use of blue reflective glass in a steel tower: entire windowpanes, 4 x and 500 lb, detached from the building and crashed to the sidewalk hundreds of feet below. Police closed off surrounding streets whenever winds reached 45 mph. Under the direction of Frank H. Durgin of MIT's Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel a scale model of the entire Back Bay and an aeroelastic model of the John Hancock Tower were built and tested in the wind tunnel to identify the problem. The research raised questions about the structural integrity of the entire building (due to unanticipated twisting of the structure), but did not account for the loss of the glass panels. An independent laboratory eventually confirmed that the failure of the glass was due to oscillations and repeated thermal stresses caused by the expansion and contraction of the air between the inner and outer glass panels which formed each window; the resilient bonding between the inner glass, reflective material, and outer glass was so stiff that it was transmitting the force to the outer glass (instead of absorbing it), thus causing the glass to fail.

In October 1973, I.M. Pei & Partners announced that all 10,344 window panes would each be replaced by single-paned, heat-treated panels at a total cost between $5 million and $7 million. Approximately 5,000 of the original glass panes were removed intact, and were later offered for re-use by artists. Glass panes were sold to Hingham-based discount retailer Building #19, who sold them for $100 apiece. They advertised "If it does fall out, we promise to sell you the replacement plywood very cheap."

It took many months to diagnose problems and repair the building. Sheets of plywood replaced many of the missing glass windows of the building, earning the tower the nicknames "Plywood Ranch" (the same name as a local lumber yard chain at the time) and "Plywood Palace", much to the consternation of the vice president in charge of construction. According to engineers Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori, the replacement also inspired jokes that the Hancock Tower was the "world's tallest wooden building."

The building's upper-floor occupants suffered from motion sickness when the building swayed in the wind. To reduce the movement, contractors installed a tuned mass damper on the 58th floor. As described by Robert Campbell, architecture critic for The Boston Globe:

According to Campbell, engineers discovered that—despite the mass damper—the building could have fallen over under a certain kind of wind loading. The structure was assessed as more unstable on its narrow sides than on the big flat sides. Some 1,500 tons of diagonal steel bracing, costing $5 million, were added to prevent such an event.

History

In 2006, Broadway Partners acquired Hancock Place for $1.3 billion. By 2009, they had defaulted on the loans they used to buy the building, and it fell into foreclosure. On March 30, 2009, Hancock Place was sold at auction for $660 million ($20 million was new equity and the $640 million of in-place debt was assumed by the buyer) to a consortium of Normandy Real Estate Partners and Five Mile Capital Partners. The companies had been slowly increasing their investment over the previous months. In October 2010, Boston Properties acquired the John Hancock Tower for $930 million. As part of the purchase agreement, the name "Hancock Tower" would expire along with John Hancock's lease in 2015.

The company that built the Hancock Tower and two earlier, similarly-named buildings is known loosely as "John Hancock Insurance", or simply "John Hancock". It was known as "The John Hancock Life Insurance Company" in the 1930s and "The John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company" in the 1940s. As of 2000, the company owning the buildings was "John Hancock Financial Services, Inc." with various subsidiaries such as "The John Hancock Variable Life Insurance Company" and "Signator Investors, Inc." In 2003, Manulife Financial Corporation of Toronto acquired the company, but it still uses the name "John Hancock Financial Services, Inc." and those of various subsidiaries.

The name change from "John Hancock" to "200 Clarendon" took place in mid-2015, when the Hancock's lease expired. It had been stipulated in the leasing contract that the building would retain the name "John Hancock" only so long as John Hancock Financial was an occupant.

Observation deck

An observation deck at the top of the tower was a tourist attraction for several decades. However, it was closed after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. After the closure of the John Hancock Tower's observation deck, the building with the highest observation deck open to the public in Boston became the Prudential Tower. The building's owners cited security as the reason for the closure in the years following. They rented the deck for private functions and expressed intent to replace it with more office space. Boston city officials contended that security concerns were moot, since most similar attractions had long since reopened. In addition, they note that a public observation deck was a requirement for the original building permits to gain public benefit from the high tower. However, officials have not been able to locate the documentation of this requirement.

In 2023, the Prudential Tower’s top floors reopened as View Boston, a multi-level observatory and dining attraction.

In popular culture

About a year after the falling windows problem was resolved, American novelist John Updike wrote in a story,

The TV series Fringe shows the building as the location of FBI Headquarters. At the time, the actual FBI Boston headquarters was located at One Center Plaza.

In September 2015, the French photographer and artist JR created a 150 by tall mural of a man wearing shorts, between the 44th and 50th floors of the building. According to the property manager, the mural was the final piece in a three-part series of temporary public art projects at the building.

References

Notes

Sources

• October 15, 1973. "Those Window Pains", TIME.
• Harl P. Aldrich, James R. Lambrechts (Fall 1986). "Back Bay Boston, Part II: Groundwater Levels", Civil Engineering Practice, Volume 1, Number 2.

References

1. "John Hancock Tower". Hamburger, SkyscraperPage.
2. "John Hancock Tower". Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.
3. Logan, Tim. "So, what should we call the John Hancock Tower now?". [[The Boston Globe]].
4. Farragher, Thomas. (September 24, 2006). "Hancock Tower at 30: 60 stories and countless tales". boston.com.
5. "Twenty Five Year Award Recipients". American Institute of Architects.
6. Wiseman, Carter. (September 1, 1990). "I.M. Pei: A Profile in American Architecture". Harry N. Abrams.
7. (1992). "Why Buildings Fall Down". W.W. Norton and Company.
8. (January 3, 1988). "How Art Springs Forth From Broken Windows". [[The New York Times]].
9. "Classic Ads « Building #19".
10. Grant, Spencer. (June 29, 2014). "Photograph: The Plywood Palace, 1974".
11. (1992). "Why Buildings Fall Down". W.W. Norton and Company.
12. Campbell, Robert. (March 3, 1995). "Builder Faced Bigger Crisis Than Falling Windows". The Pulitzer Prizes.
13. Gross, Daniel. (September 5, 2009). "The Skyscraper That Ate a Billion Dollars: Boston's Hancock Tower and the coming commercial real estate crisis". [[Slate (magazine).
14. (March 31, 2009). "Hancock Tower Sells at About Half Price to Normandy". [[Bloomberg BusinessWeek]].
15. Ross, Casey. (March 31, 2009). "Hancock Tower sells for $660m at auction". boston.com.
16. "Boston Properties buys Boston tower for $930M". Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
17. Colletti, Carolyn. (September 14, 2001). "Hancock Tower observatory is shut permanently". boston.com.
18. Park, Madison. (June 15, 2005). "Searching for an answer on 60th floor". boston.com.
19. (June 15, 2023). "View Boston opens atop the Prudential Tower". CBS News Boston.
20. Gallagher, Tina. (September 14, 2011). "'Fringe' Trivia: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Your Favorite Show". [[Yahoo!]].
21. Annear, Steve. (September 24, 2015). "Mystery solved: mural on ex-Hancock Tower the work of French artist". The Boston Globe.
22. (September 25, 2015). "With Hancock piece, the public gets an imposing and intriguing gift". The Boston Globe.
23. Goodison, Donna. (July 31, 2015). "Hancock signs off as name of tower". The Boston Herald.