Pei's biggest headache in Boston is undoubtedly the John Hancock Tower, however. It seems that everybody has their own favorite anecdote about this 60-story building with its cascading windows. Yet the matter of the falling glass has tended to obscure the initial argument which Pei encountered when he was commissioned to design a home office headquarters for the New England life insurance firm in 1965.

The original dispute concerning the Hancock Tower was the size of the building itself. As soon as Pei announced the project in 1967, community and architectural leaders swooped down upon the plan and condemned it as 1.6 million square feet of blight on the serene and intimate Copley Square.

The opposing architects, led by the Boston Society of Architects (BSA), a chapter of the American Institute of Architects, claimed that Hancock's request "to increase the floor-area ratio by nearly three times that provided in the zoning ordinance, is such a flagrant breach of the existing regulations that it would make zoning meaningless as a way of regulating land use in the public interest." The architects, in a somewhat foreboding note, also criticized the Pei designers for attempting "to reduce the apparent bulk of their proposal by cladding it in mirrors. This is a device untried on any scale in an urban setting," they warned, "and it may produce unforeseen problems, of appearance, reflected heat and glare."

Pei has earned his reputation in urban design not for crafting architectural prima donnas, but for building what he has called "good neighbors," which easily fit into the scheme of the city.

The BSA voiced its disapproval of the plans after studying the proposal and meeting with Hancock architects, Pei and his general partner Henry Cobb, his chief designer for the Hancock project. The architect group urged that the Boston Board of Appeals deny Hancock's petition for zoning variance until the insurance firm could come up with a "modified" plan better suited for the character of Copley Square. The BSA feared that the building would interrupt the serene pattern of the neighboring Trinity Church and the Florentine Boston Public Library.

After holding hearings to determine if the proposed development conformed with the master plan of the city, and was in accord with the neighbors, the Hancock people finally got Pei's design okayed, in September 1968. But it was only after ten months of wrangling and a change in the zoning law that Hancock got its way.

A spokesman for the BSA said shortly after the zoning law passage that "the overall project does not recognize human values," yet he still allowed that "the Pei planners did the best they could in light of their clients' insistence on the tower and other requirements."

But Jack Feeley, director of public information for Hancock, said last week that his firm had told Pei only "to create a site that would accomodate space needs and have aesthetic qualities at the same time." And architect Henry Cobb, in Nadel's Esquire article, said he decided himself that since the building "had to be tall, near the size of the Prudential Building...if you're going to be near the size of the Prudential, it's better to be taller, than shorter."

So, contrary to what the BSA had previously suggested, it was Pei and Partners which, driven by a competitive urge, wanted the building so huge as to risk zoning violations and Copley Square residents' protests.

Pei, in a 1970 Business Week story, said that when the soaring Prudential building was erected several blocks away from the Hancock site in 1967, the architectural "form" of the area was already destroyed. "Besides it wasn't a great space, like, say, the Place Vendome," Pei said. "Let's forget about the past as far as Copley Square is concerned and try to make a 20th-century space. We know it can be done. Look at Rockefeller Center."

And that is just what Cobb set out to do. In constructing the rhomboid building, the Pei partner created a building that seems inoffensive and one-dimensional from all sides. One of the men who examined the original plans, Ahern, said that the models "looked like a piece of wood covered with cigar wrappers. It looked pretty bad in the model but once built with those reflecting windows, it looked pretty vibrant and exciting." Rick Heym, president of Enviro-Design Group in Cambridge, also said that the bulding was deceptive on paper. "It looked like it would be inappropriate for the neighborhood. It gave the impression that it would be a bad neighbor, but it really is an excellent one, because it looks like it isn't there," Heym said.

But everything changed once the construction began. First, because Back Bay is all reclaimed land from the Charles River Basin, the excavation disturbed the adjacent area. Disrupted sidewalks and streets shifted and buckled, causing damages to sewage and water mains and communication lines. The city of Boston and three utility companies are currently suing Hancock for the damages incurred from this excavation.

Historic Trinity Church also received extensive damages because of the flow of mud beneath its wooden foundations. The Hancock company agreed to pay for the repairs. Various construction accidents, including a broken stained-glass window and a damaged roof, caused one enraged Trinity parishioner to comment to Time, "First they overwhelm us. Now they are trying to destroy us."

The final blows to Pei's beleaguered tower occurred intermittently during the summer of 1972, and increasingly through the winter, when the double-paned glass cracked in 3500 of 10,344 windows, some falling out of the window frames. Although this problem is not a rare occurrence--Pei's office claims that other buildings have had similar problems, without the publicity--the agony was compounded when the Hancock building replaced the broken windows with plywood sheets painted with a black fire retardant requested by the city fire inspectors.

As far as who is to blame--neither Pei nor Hancock is talking. But someone will have to pay the $7 million it will cost to replace the windows. The reflection glass, and the window company, Libby-Owens-Ford, could be at fault--the use of reflective mirror-like glass might have caused the heat stress that the BSA had originally warned the designers about. But as architectural supervisor for the building, Pei and Partners again can't be totally free from blame. And it is possible that Pei and Partners might have designed a building without the materials existing to make its concept work.