Word: hancockers
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...construction began. First, because Back Bay is all reclaimed land from the Charles River Basin, the excavation disturbed the adjacent area. Disrupted sidewalks and streets shifted and buckled, causing damages to sewage and water mains and communication lines. The city of Boston and three utility companies are currently suing Hancock for the damages incurred from this excavation...
Historic Trinity Church also received extensive damages because of the flow of mud beneath its wooden foundations. The Hancock company agreed to pay for the repairs. Various construction accidents, including a broken stained-glass window and a damaged roof, caused one enraged Trinity parishioner to comment to Time, "First they overwhelm us. Now they are trying to destroy...
...winter, when the double-paned glass cracked in 3500 of 10,344 windows, some falling out of the window frames. Although this problem is not a rare occurrence--Pei's office claims that other buildings have had similar problems, without the publicity--the agony was compounded when the Hancock building replaced the broken windows with plywood sheets painted with a black fire retardant requested by the city fire inspectors...
...blame--neither Pei nor Hancock is talking. But someone will have to pay the $7 million it will cost to replace the windows. The reflection glass, and the window company, Libby-Owens-Ford, could be at fault--the use of reflective mirror-like glass might have caused the heat stress that the BSA had originally warned the designers about. But as architectural supervisor for the building, Pei and Partners again can't be totally free from blame. And it is possible that Pei and Partners might have designed a building without the materials existing to make its concept work...
Nevertheless, the blackened plywood does spoil the effect of disguising the building amidst its surroundings. All Hancock can do now is wait until September 1974, when all the new single-paned reflective windows are installed, to see whether the effect will still be the same...