John Hancock Center

John Hancock Center is a skyscraper located in 875 Michigan Avenue in Chicago. It is 1,128 feet tall. It is one of the tallest buildings in the world.

Overview
The John Hancock Center was owned by Jerry Wolman in 1965 and completed in 1969. The building is 100 stories tall and is the ninth tallest in the United States of America.

Located on the Magnificent Mile district, the John Hancock Center is a mixed-use building hosting various offices, restaurants, and approximately 700 condominiums.

The 95th floor is home to a renowned restaurant called the Signature Room, which provide patrons with a breathtaking view on the Chicago area, and on Lake Michigan. The restaurant is paired with an adjoining bar on the 96th floor, called the Signature Lounge.

An observation deck - the John Hancock Observatory - is nestled high at the 94th floor, featuring the highest balcony in America (called the "Skywalk"). Additionally, a sunken plaza sits on the west side of the John Hancock Center (on Michigan Avenue), acting as a public oasis for passers-by.

Built in a structural expressionist style, the building is also well-known for the distinct X-bracing on its facade, making the tower an "eye-catchy" landmark compared to the nearby skyscrapers. This engineering feature allowed the designers to reach a record height for the time, by reducing the lateral load on the building through shifting said-load on the outer columns, thus improving the optimization of interior spaces, without the need to add redundant columns and beams between the core and the perimeter of the building.

History
Financed by the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company, engineered by Bangladeshi structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan (considered as the individual who pioneered the "tubular system" featured on the building) and Peruvian-US architect Bruce Graham, supervized by architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, with an original idea from real-estate developer Jerry Wolman, construction of the building started in 1965.

At completion in 1969, the John Hancock Center stood as the second tallest building in the world (after the Empire State Building), the tallest building in Chicago (a status unrivaled until the erection of the Standard Oil Building nearly four years later), and the tallest building outside of New York City. Its distinction also stems from the fact that it was the only third building in the world to be higher than 1,000 feet tall, and the first to be so outside of New York.

The building came up with a series of notable innovations and architectural breakthroughs for the time. It was the first trussed-tube skyscraper ever built, and the first supertall building to pioneers the use of skylobbys (i.e. intermediate floors designed to smoothen the flow of people between floors, by using a combination of dedicated sky lobbys elevators serving local elevators).

For a few years after its inception, a private restaurant was set up in the sky lobby of the 44th floor, called the Club 44. It was exclusively dedicated to caters to the building's residents and their guests. The food was supplied by the public restaurant upstairs (the Signature Room).

In 1988, the building's owners had planned to set a gabled glass atrium over the plaza at ground-level, thus extending it to the lot line at Michigan Avenue. The project was finally scrapped after locals voiced their opposition.

Trivia

 * In 1999, at the time of Midtown Madness release, it still remained as the third-tallest building in Chicago, and the fifth-tallest in the United States.
 * Curiously, while the real-life John Hancock Center features two antenna spires, its in-game equivalent only has one.