John Hancock Tower Failure

Written by Margaret Craft

Introduction

A building located in Boston, Massachusetts that towers over Trinity Church and Copley
Square had many critics that did not admire the idea of it being built. This building was the John
Hancock Tower. The chief designer of the tower, Henry N. Cobb, served as an architect for 70
years and designed very prominent buildings such as the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles,
World Trade Center Barcelona, and the Belvidere/Dalton Towers in Boston. This building
sparked debate between people condemning the structure and creative architects who saw the
beauty in the John Hancock Tower. The purpose of this essay is to encapsulate how the John
Hancock Tower has left an unforgettable mark and has stirred commotion within the architecture
community to focus better on the durability and hardiness of the structures that they design.

Structure

The John Hancock Tower is the tallest building in the New England area. The idea of the
building first arose in the late 1960s and neared completion in 1972. It is a 790-foot-tall
parallelogram shaped structure made of mirrored glass. The glass reflects the Trinity Church that
is next to it and the surrounding around the John Hancock Tower. The glass panels weighed up
to 500 pounds each. The building also had a basement that was braced with steel.

Reported Incidence

On the night of January 20, 1973, winds up to 75 miles per hour caused over sixty-five of
the heavy glass panels to drop from the 790-foot-tall building onto the areas where pedestrians
walk. On the way down from falling, the panels of glass smashed other windows too. The
windows of the tower continued to drop for months.

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 Within three months of the incidences of the windows falling began, more than an acre of
the building’s exterior was boarded up the exterior so that the glass would not endanger more
people. Journalists at the time nicknamed the John Hancock Tower as “the plywood palace”
because of all the plywood that had to cover the glass.

Incidence Explained

Many myths about why the glass panels on the John Hancock Tower spread around. A
popular belief is that the windows fell off because the wind was swaying the tower too much.
While the building did sway too much, as a study had proved, the movement was not the direct
cause of the windows falling off. Another myth that circulated among the community was that
the wind caused hot spots for the glass to be sucked out of.

People who were involved in the incidence of the building were forced to sign a legal
document to not talk about what caused the incident. While no one who is correlated to the event
has spoken on the subject, experts in the field have shared their thoughts about why so many of
the glass panels fell [1].

Bruno Thurlimann, a Swiss engineer, informed the owners of the John Hancock Tower
prior to the event that the building was at risk of collapsing [1]. The reason for this warning was
because of the building’s basement. The steel that braced the sides of this basement were
insufficient enough to hold up the structure. Some time after the basement being built, the steel
that lined the sides began to cave inwards up to three feet. The movement of the sides shifting
caused the soil around the building to also shift and settle. Soil shifting and settling causes
structures to become disturbed. Buildings nearby started to have cracks appear and utility lines
that were underground ruptured in the process. The shifting soil was so hazardous that the Trinity
Church building was very close to falling too before experts discovered the problem.

Field observations of steel structure systems were made after an earthquake happened in
Kermanshah, Iran in November of 2017 [2]. These observations noted that severe non-structural
and structural damages happened in all types of steel lateral load resisting systems.

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 Figure 1: Configuration of WFP moment connection [2]

A common welding configuration, shown in Figure 1, demonstrates the connection of

flange plates and the beam. This structure is considered a rigid structure but was observed that it
was used in many of the damaged buildings from the earthquake. The welding connection was
proven to have insufficient stiffness, ductility, and strength to withstand the movement of the
earthquake. This steel welding configuration is an example of how the poor choice of materials
and arrangement of materials can cause a building to collapse, as also demonstrated with the
John Hancock Tower.

The Takeaway

Ever since the John Hancock Tower glass panels event, the building has been
reconstructed with a Tuned Mass Damper. The damper worked to help stabilize the tower from
swaying too much. This in turn prevented the windows incident from happening again.

The John Hancock Tower’s design opened the conversation up for debate about creating
aesthetic structures that are safe. Even though the neighboring buildings around the John
Hancock Tower are not amused about the building reflecting the surroundings, many architects
like the minimalist, yet stunning design that earn the gaze of many people in Boston.

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 References

1. Campbell, R. (1995). Builder Faced Bigger Crisis Than Falling Windows. The Boston
Globe. http://4.penceland.com/hancock-windows.pdf
2. Hosseini Hashemi, B., Keykhosro Kiany, B. (2018). Performance of Steel Structures and
Associated Lessons to be Learned from November 12, 2017, Sarpol-e Zahab-Ezgeleh
Earthquake (MW 7.3). Journal of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering, 20(3), 33-46.