The John Hancock Center
Possibly the second most famous skyscraper in Chicago is the John Hancock Center. It was completed in 1970, although its 897,000 square feet of Class A commercial office space, 34,000 square feet of TV and radio broadcast facilities and antennae, 700 privately owned luxury residential condos, 714-car parking garage, and 172,000 square feet of retailers including Best Buy, The North Face, Hanig's Footwear, The Cheesecake Factory, and The Signature Room were probably added on a bit later. Phew! That was one long sentence. The developers of the tower were lucky enough to find a team of architects ahead of their time in engineering and design. The team was lead by Bruce Graham, Fazlur Khan of Skidmore, and Owings and Merrill, a firm known for their cost-efficient skyscrapers. The John Hancock is also home to the world-renown tourist attraction, the John Hancock Observatory. The John Hancock Center's design was effected by its interesting location. It is just off Lake Shore Drive, and surrounded by humungous, residential high-rise buildings. It also faces one of the city's most attractive commercial streets. The engineers and designers were smart. Their design erased the need for inner support beams, which greatly increased the amount of available space, minimized the use of steel, saving an estimated $15,000,000, allows only 5 to 8 inches of sway, creates rare open space around it, and is shaped like a wedge, which gives the illusion that it is even taller than it really is (that's saying something!). After figuring out all of these adjustments the tower turned out to stand 1,506 feet tall!
Facts
- Spiders grow a lot bigger that high up
- It takes two men 40 hours each to change all the light bulbs in the Crown of Lights, on the 99th floor
- The Tower has the nations fastest elevators! You can arrive at the observatory in 39 seconds
- Birds don't fly higher than 500 feet, so you wouldn't see one eye to eye from up there
- There is so much metal in the John Hancock tower that if you melted it, you could make 96 tour buses
- There are 1632 steps from the main lobby to the observatory on level 94
- The observatory has the only open-air viewing deck in Chicago. They say fast-talking politicians gave the city its nickname, but up here, you might think otherwise