The lack of ornamentation, or other breaks along the surface, on Boston’s 200 Clarendon Street (aka Hancock Tower) skyscraper here, the city’s tallest, is said to worsen the local wind-tunnel effect.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
What a nice feeling it is after a windy cold morning to feel the sun on your face after the wind drops off.
Boston is the windiest major city in the United States, partly because it’s on a stretch of ocean frequented by intense storms. The blasts sure hit you in the wind-tunnel effect in the mix of skyscrapers and much older buildings downtown, and in the growing but perhaps eventually imperiled-by-sea-level-rise Seaport District. Very off-putting. The wind-tunnel effect is serious enough that building codes and designs may have to be adjusted in downtown Boston. Architects and city planners are working on the problem. I love many skyscrapers but…
Checkerboard crisis
The Hancock Tower, in Boston’s Back Bay, in 1974, showing the plywood over where many windows had popped out because of an engineering flaw in the window installation. The problem was obviously fixed and the building opened in 1976. The 62-story, 790-foot skyscraper remains the tallest building in New England.
Look out below!
View of 200 Clarendon Street, in Boston’s Back Bay, a skyscraper known as the John Hancock Tower, and colloquially known as The Hancock, after the insurance company. The tower is 62 stories and 790 feet high, making it still the tallest building in New England.
It was designed by Henry N. Cobb of I. M. Pei & Partners and was completed in 1976. In 1977, the American Institute of Architects presented the firm with a National Honor Award for the building, and in 2011 its Twenty-five Year Award. But as it got close to completion it became infamous, for a time, for a materials flaw that led to some windows popping out and crashing to the street. Luckily, no one was killed.
So ugly that we'd miss it
From dartblog.com, run by Joseph Asch:
{Boston's} Prudential Center looks as good as it’s ever going to get in this iPhone 6 shot in angled evening light, but it doesn’t hold up to the John Hancock Tower, Henry N. Cobb’s 1976 creation (he was working at I.M. Pei’s firm). The two buildings offer a sharp contrast, don’t you think? Squat brutalist power facing sleek elegance. To my mind and eye, the Hancock building wins every time.
Addendum: Wikipedia summarizes the reception that the Pru received from architectural critics:
When it was built, the Prudential Tower received mostly positive architectural reviews. The New York Times called it “the showcase of the New Boston [representing] the agony and the ecstasy of a city striving to rise above the sordidness of its recent past”. But Ada Louise Huxtable called it “a flashy 52-story glass and aluminum tower … part of an over-scaled megalomaniac group shockingly unrelated to the city’s size, standards, or style. It is a slick developer’s model dropped into an urban renewal slot in Anycity, U.S.A.—a textbook example of urban character assassination.” Architect Donlyn Lyndon called it “an energetically ugly, square shaft that offends the Boston skyline more than any other structure”. In 1990, Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell commented: “The Prudential Center has been the symbol of bad design in Boston for so long that we’d probably miss it if it disappeared.”
The individual critics have it right. 