The John Hancock Tower reflects the sky and the surrounding brick buildings across its sixty-story glass facade. Henry Cobb designed this rhomboid skyscraper to disappear into the clouds, but its construction is remembered for a series of engineering failures. In nineteen seventy-three, high winds caused the glass panels to pop out of their frames and shatter onto the sidewalk below. Workers eventually replaced all ten thousand windows with reinforced glass, but the building remained famously unstable until dampeners were installed at the top.
John Hancock Tower
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