Word: towers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...biggest headache in Boston is undoubtedly the John Hancock Tower, however. It seems that everybody has their own favorite anecdote about this 60-story building with its cascading windows. Yet the matter of the falling glass has tended to obscure the initial argument which Pei encountered when he was commissioned to design a home office headquarters for the New England life insurance firm...
...original dispute concerning the Hancock Tower was the size of the building itself. As soon as Pei announced the project in 1967, community and architectural leaders swooped down upon the plan and condemned it as 1.6 million square feet of blight on the serene and intimate Copley Square...
...spokesman for the BSA said shortly after the zoning law passage that "the overall project does not recognize human values," yet he still allowed that "the Pei planners did the best they could in light of their clients' insistence on the tower and other requirements...
...final blows to Pei's beleaguered tower occurred intermittently during the summer of 1972, and increasingly through the 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...
...occupied, Ahern warns that the functional impact of the building will then surface. "It will be fine aesthetically and economically, bringing workers into the city, but the building will present a transportation problem." Ahern cites increasing traffic, plus an overburdened transit system as possible outgrowths of the Hancock Tower occupancy...