Developer says it will replace the old Shreve, Crump & Low building on Boylston Street - and this time, it really means it

Wouldn’t it be easier if we asked Mr and Mrs Mallard instead of those nasty pigeons?

Needs elevators on that side of the station to reopen. That would cost millions and Druker is a miser.

It's been quite a few years since the glass was falling from the 200 Clarendon Street [formerly the John Hancock Tower] -- the building was completed and occupied in 1976. Construction had begun in 1968 and then was halted when the windows began falling shortly after they had all been installed about 1972.

I was an undergraduate at MIT during the majority of the time the window problem and the temporary solution of plywood panels were in effect. From my dorm on the other side of the Charles, you could occasionally see a falling window -- or rather a flying window. However, despite a lot of windows falling -- no one was ever hit by a flying window. The cause of the falling windows was eventually worked out and a new replacement window design developed and tested and then installed*1 -- to date it has worked.

On the other hand several people in Boston and Cambridge have recently been hit by falling masonry -- there is no easy systemic fix for that problem.

You can certainly argue that the presence of a glass box at that location is inappropriate -- but to condemn it because of the risk of falling glass --- have you been to Seaport Blvd. in South Boston in the past decade? Outside of the now 30 years old John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse [1999] whose harbor-side is a dramatic glass curtain wall while the Seaport Blvd side is masonry on a steel frame
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thu...
the historic Commonwealth Pier Headhouse [1901] the historic Fish Pier buildings [1914] both of which are reinforced concrete a with masonry exterior and the 3 buildings of Seaport Center constructed by Fidelity in the 1998-2000 [masonry cladding on a steel frame] -- everything is now clad in glass curtain wall.
for some examples

1. Vertex Pharmaceuticals [2014]
   https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/wp-conte...
   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cb...
2. PWC [2015]
   https://www.usa.skanska.com/globalassets/externalc...
3. Boston Consulting Group -- Pier 4 [2018-2019]
   http://www.pier4boston.com/office/office-gallery.php
4. PTC [2019]
   https://www.ptc.com/-/media/Images/Redesign/Blogs/...
5. Mass Mutual [under construction occupancy in 2021]
   https://www.connect.media/wp-content/uploads/2019/...
   its the wavy one in the middle
6. Amazon's new outpost [just broke ground for projected opening in 2022]
   https://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2018/11/B...

The above represent 3 generations of glass curtainwall buildings in the Seaport from finished and occupied to just under construction. These buildings are designed by a number of well-known architectural firms and constructed by well known general contractors and owned by well-known and well healed developers or investors with very well-known and successful tenants from diverse business sectors all with substantial reputations to protect -- No Concern of falling glass

If you don't like the idea of Drucker's Box -- use something other than falling glass as your argument -- I'd suggest -- "it still looks as if it was designed around 2008 -- how about something more current -- maybe something appropriate for the 3rd decade of the 21st C?"

*1 from the wiki article

There were problems with the innovative use of blue reflective glass in a steel tower: Entire 4′ × 11′, 500-lb (1.2 × 3.4 m, 227 kg) windowpanes detached from the building and crashed to the sidewalk hundreds of feet below. Police closed off surrounding streets whenever winds reached 45 mph (72 km/h). Under the direction of Frank H. Durgin of MIT's Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel a scale model of the entire Back Bay and an aeroelastic model of the John Hancock Tower were built and tested in the wind tunnel to identify the problem. The research raised questions about the structural integrity of the entire building (due to unanticipated twisting of the structure), but did not account for the loss of the glass panels. An independent laboratory eventually confirmed that the failure of the glass was due to oscillations and repeated thermal stresses caused by the expansion and contraction of the air between the inner and outer glass panels which formed each window; the resilient bonding between the inner glass, reflective material, and outer glass was so stiff that it was transmitting the force to the outer glass (instead of absorbing it), thus causing the glass to fail.*2

In October 1973, I.M. Pei & Partners announced that all 10,344 window panes would each be replaced by single pane, heat-treated panels at a total cost between $5 million and $7 million. Approximately 5,000 of the original glass panes were removed intact, and were later reused by artists.

*2
from When Bad Things Happen to Good Buildings
by Thomas A. Schwartz, PE, is president of Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Inc. in Arlington, Massachusetts. He was a principal investigator of the glass breakage at the John Hancock Tower and is a frequent lecturer and author on issues of building envelope performance.
http://www.architectureweek.com/2001/0425/building...

Bostonians are familiar with one of the most famous examples: the John Hancock Tower, which was clad in more than an acre of plywood after its mirror-glass windows began to fracture in 1972 and 1973.

A "gag order" imposed on the parties to the resulting legal dispute prevented the release of the facts regarding the cause of the breakage, giving rise to many theories and myths, some of which exist to this day.

Initially, many design professionals thought the reason for the breakage lay in the fact that the tower swayed excessively in the wind. Although it was indeed swaying substantially, this was not the reason for the glass breakage.

Another hypothesis was that wind forces at "hot spots," which resulted from the rhomboid shape of the tower, caused over-stressing of the glass. Substantial "hot spots" did exist, but only a small percentage of the glass was subject to anything near the load for which it had been designed.

Still another myth was that the windows broke because of the stress they endured from the settlement of the tower's foundation.

The Devil in the Detail

But in fact, extraordinary external forces and the building's structural design were not the cause of the failure. The problem actually lay in the insulating glass itself.

The insulating-glass units that made up the facade were fabricated with a thin lead-tape spacer to separate the two panes of glass. The tape was soldered to the glass after the edge of the glass was coated with a film of copper to make it more receptive to the solder.

This created a tenacious bond between the spacer and the glass, which constituted the product's greatest strength as well as the source of its demise.

The lead-tape seal insulating unit was the premier product of the time. It was expensive, but it performed very well with relatively small sheets of clear glass, the typical application in the 1940s through the early 1960s that is still performing well.

However, by the late '60s, large sheets of glass with tints and reflective coatings became popular. The large sizes and increased thermal loads associated with the tints and coatings caused substantial differential movement and increased stress along the glass-to-tape bond, and eventually, the bond began to separate.

The bond, however, was so strong in some areas that the tape ripped microscopically small pieces of glass from the glass surface. These sites concentrated stress from wind loads and ultimately proved catastrophic.