Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, John Hancock Center, 1969

Rising prominently along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, the John Hancock Center stands as a defining achievement of late-modernist high-rise design. Engineered by SOM with Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan, the tower introduced an innovative structural system in which the exterior X-bracing is both load-bearing and expressive.

This integration of structure and façade allowed for unprecedented height, reduced material use, and expansive interior spaces, while giving the building its unmistakable graphic identity. The John Hancock Center exemplifies modernism at its most rigorous: functional, efficient, and visually uncompromising, where engineering logic becomes architectural language.