John Hancock

The John Hancock Center
The John Hancock center, engineered by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, is located on 875 North Michigan Avenue along the Magnificent Mile in downtown Chicago. The John Hancock building is the second largest building in Chicago and the twelfth tallest building in the world, standing at 1,127.6 feet to the top of the structure and 1,476 feet to the tip of the antenna.
The structure was finished in 1969 after four years of construction. This project was controversial from the beginning, due mainly to its location near much smaller buildings.
To keep such a tall building standing in Chicago, engineers had to make this building very stiff. The John Hancock Center is actually an extremely tall steel tube. Steel columns and beams are concentrated in the skyscraper's perimeter and five enormous diagonal braces are on the exterior walls of the skyscraper in order to give it extra strength in the wind. Interestingly, the diagonals completely block th...