![]() Mercifully, however, an entrepreneurial T-shirt artist didn’t lose his opportunity to find a lighter side, with which I was able to outfit all three of my daughters in the otherwise miserable summer of 1973. Many in Boston saw all this as entirely just retribution for the egregious overreaching of the city’s largest corporation. ![]() The most notorious of these problems, publicized worldwide, was the failure of insulating glass units that necessitated removal and replacement of all 10,334 panels in the curtain wall. ![]() To compound the agony, during construction the building endured a series of mishaps that caused us and our client to experience the rare privilege of being, for almost half a decade, simultaneously despised and ridiculed. This brazen exercise of corporate arm-twisting on the part of our client naturally contributed to the widespread opinion, often explicitly conveyed to me in person, that my colleagues and I had prostituted ourselves professionally in accepting and carrying out this commission. Permission was granted not because I had succeeded in converting people to our way of thinking-for with only a few exceptions, I had not-but because had a building permit been denied, the Hancock company might well have carried out its threat to move its headquarters, with its 12,000 employees, to Chicago. But after nine months of acrimonious public debate, the necessary permits were obtained, and in the fall of 1968, construction began. What we saw as the right building in the right place at the right time was seen by almost everyone else, and above all by our fellow architects in Boston, as the wrong building in the wrong place at the wrong time. Indeed, the response in Boston was one of shock and horror. His proposition was to find a new meaning for the square, seizing the opportunity of the Hancock company’s need for office space to propose that “Copley Square should have its own tower.”Īs Cobb’s newest tower-the Four Seasons Hotel & Private Residences, One Dalton Street-nears completion, it’s time to hear in his own words how its bold precursor, the Hancock, came to be more than 40 years ago: In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the idealized image of the square had suffered from the intrusion of commercialism, and had, as Cobb observed, lost its meaning. It can only be understood as a response to the setting, Copley Square, where the tower stands adjacent to H. In this excerpt, Cobb describes the Hancock’s apparent adherence to the rules of typical office buildings yet acknowledges that the form of the “notched rhomboid” deviates from such expected patterns. The story of his best-known building, Boston’s John Hancock Tower (now 200 Clarendon), follows a dramatic arc from the controversies of its public review and construction to its recognition as a beloved icon of the city. After seven decades in practice, Henry Cobb has published his first collection of essays, interviews, lectures, and projects: Henry N.
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