Modernism had its up side.
We cannot live in the past, but the mistake too often made is destroying the old just
because it is old.
This is just as bad as blindly imitating the old. Perhaps it is even worse, because destroying the old cuts us off from the opportunity to understand the forces that shape our present.
Some modernist architects and supportive builders knew what they were doing.
In this post we revisit the ancestral home of the skyscraper.
John Hancock Center
Location: Chicago, IL
Year Completed: 1969
Height: 1,127 feet (100 storeys, plus a rooftop observation deck)
Claim to Fame: Welcome back Chicago!!!!!
Chicago was the city where the steel-frame skyscraper was invented, and 84 years after the Home Insurance Building opened its doors, Chicago re-entered the game hitherto abandoned to New York City.
NYC was practically
masterbating given the paltry competition it faced after the World Building opened in 1890. At one point more than half of all the tallest buildings on Earth were all within a few blocks of each other in Manhattan, and even the tenth tallest building in New York beat out the tallest in any other city. It's amazing what high land values and a relaxed building code allow.
The John Hancock Center was never the tallest building in the world.
But then neither were the Philadelphia City Hall (which has a spire taller than any cathedral), and 40 Wall Street technically has a higher top floor than the famous Chrysler Building. I doubt anybody goes to New York and shouts: "Honey, let's visit 40 Wall Street. It was the tallest building in the world for six weeks in 1930!"
But the John Hancock Center is important.
The John Hancock Center, like the Penobscot Building of Detroit in 1928 and the Terminal Tower of Cleveland in 1930, was the tallest building in the world outside New York City when it was completed in 1969.
At the time this still meant something, but that will be the subject of a later post.
The John Hancock Center missed the floor count of the Empire State Building by just two, and was only the third office building ever built to surpass 1,000 feet in total height . Considering that the other two were nearly 40 years old when this happened is the main reason why I mention this fact.
The John Hancock Center announced the "Come Back Tour" of the skyscraper.
This building was completed in the structural expressionist style. This style strives to achieve individualization of spaces once the technical aspects of the building have been met. It takes the concepts of Mies van der Rohe and says: "let's play a bit."
From the beginning, this structure was a "mixed use" building. The John Hancock Center is home to offices and restaurants, as well as 700 condominium units. Few people on Earth have apartments with the kind of views that tenants here have. This is a skyscraper that is also a home.
People might
visit the Eiffel Tower. People might
work at the Empire State Building.
But people shave, shower and shit and raise families a thousand feet above the sidewalk in the John Hancock Center. The first residential lease for the Hancock building was signed by Benjamin Gingiss, who lived in the building until his death. The most famous tenant was the late comedian Chris Farley.
The John Hancock Center's X-bracing exterior reveals that the structure is a "tube building." A tube building, ironically, reverses the concept of the curtain wall invented in Chicago in 1885 to a degree. In a tube building, the skeleton of the building is not in the centre, but rather is (as the name suggests) arranged as a tube, with the interior of the building filling the central part. The walls of the building don't hold it up, but the skelaton actually forms the outer wall.
This innovation offers greater strength and the ability to completely eliminate columns inside the building, and thus offer the most "open floor plan" and usable floor space possible.
Status: The John Hancock Center remains a landmark in Chicago, and has served as the inspiration for similar tall buildings worldwide. An annual stair climb race to the observation deck called "Hustle up the Hancock" is held on the last Sunday of February to raise money for charity. (The record time as of 2006 is 9 minutes, 39 seconds.)
The tallest structures built between 1968 and 1970 are a mix of office buildings and communications masts, with a hint of innovation starting to show in the designs of a few of them.