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John hancock tower2/28/2024 ![]() “The danger was that it might collapse on a narrow edge. “He announced that, according to his calculations, under certain rare but entirely possible wind conditions, the Hancock might fall over,” Campbell wrote. Thurlimann came back to Cobb with bad news. Can you come over?’” Thurlimann recalled in a Globe interview in 2006. Thurlimann was the world’s leading authority on high-rise steel-frame buildings. Looking for reassurance that his building was safe, the architect of the tower, Harry Cobb, hired Swiss engineer Bruno Thurlimann to review its structural integrity. He said the dampers are “not something that many buildings use.” Another “very effective” method, he said, is the use of “shear walls” made of reinforced concrete.īut that wasn’t even the worst of the Hancock’s hidden problems. Mehrdad Sasani, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University, said Friday in a telephone interview that the “heavy masses” in the device “bring the building back” to its rightful place when it sways in the wind. ![]() The solution was to stabilize the building by installing a device called a tuned mass damper on the 58th floor of the building, involving two giant 300-ton weights, springs and shock absorbers. The problem was not affecting the building’s structural integrity, but it was “making life very uneasy for people on the upper floors,” he wrote. How bad was it? In high winds, it would sway as much as 3 feet off center, the Globe reported in 2006. It was doing a sort of cobra’s dance, swaying a few inches forward and back and, at the same time, twisting,” Campbell wrote. “The tower, in ordinary wind conditions, was accelerating too fast for comfort. Cracks appeared in nearby buildings, utility lines ruptured, and part of Trinity Church came near collapse, Campbell wrote.Įxperts studying the building also found that it was swaying too much. During the excavation for the building’s basement, the sides of the hole in the ground were braced with steel that was inadequate and the sides caved in, causing earth around the site to shift and settle. There were other problems that weren’t visible to the eye. “What hardly anyone understands - and this is the real story of the Hancock - is that problems with the windows weren’t even the biggest disaster to strike this haunted high-rise mirror, which always seems to be reflecting clouds as if it were brooding on its own grim beginning,” Campbell wrote. The fallen panes were replaced by sheets of plywood painted black, and people began calling it the “Plywood Palace,” the “Woodpecker Palace,” or the “US Plywood Building.”Ī number of culprits were considered for the window problems, but eventually it turned out to be the design of the windows themselves. The 10,344 windows on the 790-foot-tall building had begun to fail almost from the start, Campbell wrote in a column that was part of the body of work that won him a 1996 Pulitzer Prize. ![]() High winds had broken and damaged much of the glass facade over time. Many black-painted plywood boards covered the windows of the John Hancock Tower in Boston on Aug.
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