the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 152
the Museum of Fine Arts, fi nished in 1876, and the Renais sance Revival
Boston Public Library, completed in 1895.
The tower, by contrast, rose 790 feet from the street, and was cov-
ered from bottom to top by a shimmering 13.5-acre skin of 10,344 win-
dows. Each pane was a double layer of mirrored glass mea suring 4 1⁄2 by
11 1⁄2 feet and weighing five hundred pounds—a size that architect Henry
Nichols Cobb of New York’s I. M. Pei & Partners felt was needed to create
the building’s sleek surface. The new building was an exotic dancer among
gray-haired crones; a diamond among squarish, hand-carved stones. The
very idea of it rankled.
But there it stood in the wind-whipped city that night in 1973,
defiant as it faced its first real structural test. Then, unexpectedly, one of
the building’s 10,344 eyes blinked as one massive window cracked and
failed. That failure was quickly followed by another. Then another. Some
windows shattered and sent showers of glass raining down. Others simply
fell out and crashed onto the pavement. By the time the wind died down,
dozens of the building’s panes were damaged or destroyed. No one was
dismembered that night, or during the many window failures that followed
before the problem was finally solved. That’s considered somewhat
of a miracle today, especially since a single pane about half the size of the
Hancock’s windows fell from the 29th floor of a Chicago skyscraper and
guillotined a young woman as she walked hand in hand with her toddler
in 1999.
As it turns out, the falling-window problem wasn’t even the most
serious defect with the John Hancock Tower, though it’s certainly the one
that made it a laughingstock. It also was spectacular enough to earn it inclusion
in Business Week magazine’s list of eight “top technological blunders”
of the 20th century, along with the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma
Narrows Bridge (see Lesson #5) and the 1986 Soviet nuclear plant explosion
at Chernobyl. And although today the building is widely regarded as
a masterpiece of modern architecture, cherished even by many of its
harshest critics from the 1960s and 1970s, it remains a gleaming sixty-