5 more from their extensive 10 Major Architectural Failures list
Aon Center
The Aon Center is the third-tallest building in Chicago. It was completed in 1973 and was originally named the Standard Oil Building. When it was completed, the building was a visual wonder to behold, thanks to the decision to sheath the entire structure in Italian Carrara marble. The building looked great, but its fetching exterior came at a very high price.
Carrara marble is much thinner than building materials normally used to clad buildings, and in 1974 one of the slabs detached from the building and crashed into the roof of the neighboring Prudential Center. An investigation revealed the completely unsuitable marble was cracking and bowing all over the exterior. Ultimately, the building was refaced with granite at a cost of more than $80 million .
John Hancock Tower
The John Hancock Tower is a 60-story skyscraper in Boston that was designed by the I.M. Pei & Partners architectural firm and unveiled in 1976. Its striking, minimalist appearance won it accolades from the architectural community, but it was famously plagued with problems.
One major issue the building encountered concerned its windows: They were falling out and crashing to the pavement hundreds of feet below. In the 1992 book "Why Buildings Fall Down," authors Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori explained that this was due to unanticipated, repeated thermal stresses to the panels. Ultimately, all 10,000 windows would be replaced at a cost of $5 million.
The John Hancock Tower encountered one other major problem. Skyscrapers are meant to sway in order to absorb strong gusts of wind, though the sway is normally not felt by the building’s residents. The John Hancock Tower, however, swayed so dramatically that it gave the occupants of its upper floors motion sickness. The problem was finally solved by Cambridge engineer William LeMessurier .
Ray and Maria Stata Center
The Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was designed by award-winning architect Frank Gehry. It opened in 2004 and houses the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. It was hailed for its logic-defying angles and walls that challenged the laws of physics.
Three years after it opened, MIT filed a negligence suit against Gehry, claiming design flaws in the $300 million building had caused major structural problems. Drainage issues had caused cracks in the walls. Icicle daggers hung pendulously from the roof like deadly sash weights. Mold grew on the building’s brick exterior.
The school paid more than $1.5 million for repairs. A spokesman for the construction company, Skanska USA Building, claimed the company had tried to warn Gehry of problems with the design on numerous occasions, and had made repeated requests to use more suitable material. "We were told to proceed with the original design," the spokesman said . "It was difficult to make the original design work."
W.E.B. Du Bois Library
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is home to three distinguished libraries, which include the Music Reserve Lab and the Science and Engineering Library. However, the best known is the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, a 26-story structure that is the tallest library in the U.S .
Within two months of its opening, the building began shedding brick chips, a phenomenon known as spalling. There are various urban legends that persist about its causes, the most popular of which is that the architect who designed the building failed to take into account the weight of the books to be housed inside it.
While no official cause of the spalling was given, 60,000 books had to be moved out of the building. It was later discovered the building was sinking into the pond-saturated ground on which it was built. However, YouMass, a helpful guide to life on the UMass Amherst campus, says this claim is overblown and describes the degree to which the building is sinking as “ not so much .”
CNA Center
The CNA Center is a high-rise building in Chicago that opened in 1972. The 44-story building was designed by the firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst & White. It’s painted bright red, making it impossible not to notice.
In 1999, a large piece of a window came loose from the 29th floor of the building and plunged to the ground, causing one fatality. The culprit was thermal expansion , and after an $18 million settlement every one of the building’s windows was replaced. Each window is still checked on a monthly basis to this day.