Beleaguered Tower

Once, the skyscraper was the symbol of America's soaring ambition. Now it is becoming a new addition to the list of environmental dirty words. The criticisms range from dehumanization of cities to changing of weather patterns. Only Washington, D.C., has won the fight against height; it bans any building more than 90 ft. tall. Almost every other major city continues to build gigantic skyscrapers--New York its twin-tower, 110-story World Trade Center, Chicago its 80-story Standard Oil Building. Perhaps the most interesting of all, and among the most controversial, is the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co.'s nearly completed headquarters in Boston.

A rhomboid-shaped, mirror-walled building, it rises 60 stories from a site on Copley Square and looms over the elegant, residential Back Bay district. As soon as the project was announced in 1967, local architects attacked it as a disfiguration of the whole area. The building's size--1.6 million sq. ft. of office space--seemed sure to destroy the charm and intimate scale of Copley Square, formed mainly by Charles McKim's stately, neo-Renaissance Public Library and H.H. Richardson's Romanesque Trinity Church. Boston officials urged Hancock to reconsider its plans, but the company threatened to move out of the city entirely if construction permits were not granted. One apparent reason for its insistence: a competitor's tower, the 52-story Prudential Building, made Hancock feel like engaging in what one of the city government's chief planners angrily called "corporate assertion."

Once the digging began, new problems and complaints arose. Since Back Bay is all built on land that was reclaimed last century from the Charles River Basin--really a swamp filled with sand and gravel--digging into the unstable soil disrupted nearby areas. Streets and sidewalks rose and fell, sometimes as much as six feet, pinching and twisting telephone, electric and gas lines. Several water mains broke. As a result, the city and local utilities are suing Hancock for some $4,000,000.

Hole Trouble. Even worse, say officials of Trinity Church, Hancock's hole caused the ground to shift so much that the church cracked in at least a dozen places. Hancock disputes the charge. Says Vice President Albert Prouty: "The ground is always settling. They cannot blame 95 years of aging on us." The Trinity congregation has endured other annoyances, however. Wind pressure popped several windows off the Hancock tower. A construction worker's water bucket plummeted through a stained-glass window. A doorframe fell into the chancel's roof. "First they overwhelmed us," said a Trinity parishioner last week. "Now they're trying to destroy us."

One of the ironies of the controversy is that the Hancock Building is great architecture--not only handsome but also respectfully mirroring its neighbors and enlivening Copley Square. Indeed, its architect, Harry Cobb of I.M. Pei & Partners, studied the square's history and decided that it was never a secluded enclave of culture, as commonly thought, but rather the meeting place of city-shaping forces. These include the six-lane Massachusetts Turnpike behind the square and a cluster of tall buildings near its uptown and downtown flanks. The Hancock Building thus had to be a high-rise to fit into, and escape the domination of, the new scale. From a distance, the tower actually helps to order the chaos of the city's bristling skyline.

Because the building recognizes the facts of Boston, most of its original critics now praise it. Yet other critics still complain that it will increase the densities of both people and autos. Since these are problems common to all skyscrapers, they raise the question of whether any more such supertowers should be built anywhere. C. Allin Cornell, associate professor of civil engineering at M.I.T., compares the skyscraper to the supersonic jets, and adds: "I can't think of any advantage."

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