John Hancock Tower
200 Clarendon Street Boston
Massachusetts
Concept
The John Hancock Tower is the tallest building in New England, and stands sleekly on its own in Copley Square, away from the high-rise area of Boston's downtown. Despite is enormity in its local area, its presence is made less overpowering by its pure, crystal-like geometry and reflecting glass skin. The dominant view when you are close to the building is of the nearby historical buildings reflected with subtle distortions of color and shape in the Hancock Tower's glass.
The John Hancock Tower, officially named Hancock Place and known colloquially as The Hancock, is a 60-story, 790-foot (241 m) skyscraper in Boston. The structure, the tallest in the city, was designed by I.M. Pei and Henry N. Cobb of the firm now known as Pei, Cobb and Freed and was completed in 1976. In 1977 the American Institute of Architects presented Cobb with a National Honor Award for the John Hancock Tower. The John Hancock Tower has been the tallest building in Boston for over 30 years, and is also the tallest building in New England and the 172nd tallest building in the world.
The company uses both "Hancock Place" and "200 Clarendon Street" as mailing addresses for offices in the building. The John Hancock companies were the main tenants of the tower, but the insurance company announced in 2004 that some offices will relocate to a new building at 601 Congress Street. It sits prominently near Copley Square in Boston's Back Bay.
The glass skin suffered massive technical problems when first built: many of the 10,000 windows habitually fell out, as the building responded to the pressures of wind and changing heat. Giving a special control room early warning of when a window's vibration suggested it might be next to go. Not a story to remember when you're standing next to the floor-to-ceiling windows on the (now closed) 60th floor observation deck.
With its windows now securely in place, the Hancock Tower has regained its purity and elegance, especially on a sunny day when it appears almost transparent against a deep blue sky.
The Design
Tall, skinny glass structures were a goal of modernist architecture ever since Mies Van Der Rohe proposed a glass skyscraper for Berlin. Such buildings as Gordon Bunshaft's Lever House, Mies' Seagram Building, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson Wax Headquarters attempted this goal, but many of these designs retained structural artifacts that prevented a consistent, monolithic look.
In 1972, Pei and Cobb's design of the Hancock Tower took the glass monolith skyscraper concept to new heights. The tower is an achievement in minimalist, modernist skyscraper design. Minimalism was the design principle behind the tower. The largest panes of glass possible were used. There are no spandrels panels, and the mullions are minimal.
Pei and 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 slight contrast with the sky on a clear day. As a final modernist touch, the short sides of the parallelogram are marked with a deep vertical notch, breaking the tower's mass and emphasizing its verticality.
Foundation
Hancock Tower was plagued with problems even before construction started. During the excavation of the tower's foundation, temporary steel retaining walls were erected to create a void on which to build.
The walls warped, giving way to the clay and mud fill they were supposed to hold back. The inward bend of the retaining walls damaged utility lines, the sidewalk pavement, and nearby buildings—even damaging the historic Trinity Church across the street. Hancock ultimately paid for all the repairs.
Falling glass panes
Inventing a way to use the blue mirror glass in a steel tower came at a high price.
Soon after the building was completed, windowpanes began detaching from the building and falling to the street below. These were temporarily replaced with plywood.
The building's most dangerous and conspicuous flaw was its faulty glass windows. Entire 4' x 11', 500 lb (1.2 x 3.4 m, 227 kg) windowpanes detached from the building and crashed to the sidewalk hundreds of feet below. Police were left closing off surrounding streets whenever winds reached 45 mph (72 km/h). According to the Boston Globe, a scale model of the entire Back Bay was built in MIT's Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel to identify the problem. In October 1973, I.M. Pei & Partners announced that all panes would be replaced by a different heat-treated variety—costing between $5 million and $7 million. During the repairs, plywood replaced the building's empty windows, earning it the nickname Plywood Palace and the joke that it was "the world's tallest plywood building".
Hancock Tower Auctioned Off for Half-Price
April 17, 2009, By Ted Smalley Bowen
Since it was planted in the landfill of Boston’s Back Bay district in the 1970s, I.M. Pei and Henry N. Cobb’s John Hancock Tower (1976) has been an emblem of spectacular but problematic commercial architecture. Excavation for the tower cracked the masonry of H.H. Richardson’s neighboring Trinity Church, faulty curtain walls rained glass onto surrounding streets, and the building swayed excessively.
“The real question is why it sold for $1.3 billion when you couldn't see a tenant base to support it,” says MIT economics professor William Wheaton. “It's a sign of the folly that partly got us into the financial crisis." Nationwide, the easy money of recent years allowed investors to overpay, and when their loans came due, many came up short and were forced to sell into an illiquid market, according to Wheaton. The Hancock's radically lower auction price reflects where rents are likely to be over the next five years, he says.
Along with the overall recession, the financial industry’s shrinkage and its dispersal from expensive city centers significantly dents the market for major new towers, says Wheaton. To build the Hancock today, construction alone would probably top $660 million, he notes. “It may be that buildings like that are endangered species, if the tenant base isn't there to pay 100-buck [per square foot] rents,” he says.
At the end of the first quarter, asking prices for prime office space in Boston's financial district and Back Bay were in the $50 to $65 per square foot range, down at least 10 percent from a year ago, according to commercial real estate services company Colliers Meredith & Grew. Across the country, vacancies were up and demand for downtown office space was off significantly in the fourth quarter of 2008.
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