Icicle daggers hung pendulously from the roof like deadly sash weights. Drainage issues had caused cracks in the walls. 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. It was hailed for its logic-defying angles and walls that challenged the laws of physics. 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. The Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was designed by award-winning architect Frank Gehry. The problem was finally solved by Cambridge engineer William LeMessurier. The John Hancock Tower, however, swayed so dramatically that it gave the occupants of its upper floors motion sickness. 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 encountered one other major problem.
Ultimately, all 10,000 windows would be replaced at a cost of $5 million. 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. One major issue the building encountered concerned its windows: They were falling out and crashing to the pavement hundreds of feet below. Its striking, minimalist appearance won it accolades from the architectural community, but it was famously plagued with problems. Pei & Partners architectural firm and unveiled in 1976. The John Hancock Tower is a 60-story skyscraper in Boston that was designed by the I.M. By Daniel Bukszpan Posted 22 August 2011 Aon Center What are some of the more notable architectural failures in modern history? Click ahead to find out. Those mistakes have been bigger, costlier, and more spectacular than Wright could have imagined, and there are not enough vines in the world to hide them. In "The Yale Book of Quotations," the legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright is quoted as saying, “The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.” While this statement from 1954 is still true today, it doesn’t take into account the architectural, design, and engineering errors that became possible in the decades after his death. After all, when the teenager working the drive-thru window gives you a Quarter Pounder instead of a Big Mac, it causes a lot less trauma than when a 3,000-foot-long suspension bridge collapses into the Puget Sound.
However, the workplace mistake is harder to ignore when the person who makes it is an architect. Usually, the incident is corrected and the whole thing is forgotten within minutes. People make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes happen on the job.