John Hancock Building

The John Hancock Tower rises as a sheer, sixty-story rhomboid of reflective blue glass above Copley Square. Architect Henry Cobb designed the skyscraper to disappear into the sky, but the building became famous for a different reason soon after construction ended in nineteen seventy-six. Its massive glass panels could not withstand the high winds and began detaching, raining shards onto the streets below. Engineers eventually replaced all ten thousand windows with safer, thinner glass, and the tower finally held its place.