the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 156
problem, they placed sensors all over the still- unopened John Hancock
Tower to determine if the building’s movement in the wind was the cause.
It wasn’t, because the problem turned out to be a manufacturing fl aw
with the windows themselves. But like most skyscrapers, the building
was moving, and moving far more than it should have been, and in an
unexpected way. The movement—a back-and-forth motion with a twist,
which the Globe’s Robert Campbell described as a “cobra dance”—was
particularly unsettling to anyone on its upper floors. The solution, developed
by Cambridge engineer William LeMessurier, was a “tuned mass
damper” that involved installing two three-hundred- ton weights at opposite
ends of the 58th floor. Those sliding weights acted like an internal
gyroscope, offsetting the building’s motion every time it moved. Cost: $3
million.
While the world watched the tower’s windows and snickered about
motion sickness, though, a far more troubling problem with the building
was being studied in private.
But the Really Bad News Is . . .
Reeling from the problems, Cobb, the architect, decided he needed
to do some public- relations work. What the troubled Hancock needed, he
thought, was the endorsement of the world’s leading authority on highrise
steel-frame buildings. He sought out Swiss engineer Bruno Thurlimann
to evaluate the integrity of the structure and, presumably, testify to
its safety.
In March 1975, about eighteen months before the tower was dedicated,
Thurlimann flew from Zurich to Boston to deliver a verdict that no
one could have predicted. He calculated that under “extreme and rare
wind conditions” that were entirely possible during the building’s lifespan,
the whole thing might just fall over, and in the most bizarre way
imaginable. The Globe’s Campbell, in a 1995 story that was part of his
Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture coverage, used the metaphor of a