Flood Lights on Huge Aluminum Fins Make Fantastic Tower Ornament

A MODERN skyscraper in Rochester, N. Y., surmounted by an unique illuminated decoration which spreads an aluminum sheen upwards like some huge, fantastic flower is the latest achievement of electrical engineers.

The lighting system was designed to convert a water tower into an artistic and distinctive carillon tower topped by four gleaming fins of aluminum, curving outward from their bases at the four corners of the structure. The body of the tower is buttressed at the four corners and has aluminum grill work which forms a delicate dark tracery when illuminated from within.

The whole tower rises from the tank wall parapet like a modern symbol.

Igloos for Leathernecks

THE Eskimo’s igloo melts in the brief arctic summer. But the new Marine Corps igloo, or geodesic dome, is a year-round job that has been called the first basic improvement in mobile military shelters in 2,600 years. The Gyrenes have them in four sizes with diameters of 36, 42, 55 and 117 feet, plus two larger domes which are plane hangars. A year of trial use has shown that the domes can replace all existing shelters used by Fleet Marine Aviation; moving a single Wing to an advanced base overseas equipped with domes would save Uncle Sam $15,000,000 over the present system for housing men and equipment.

Or they could just move to California. It’s a pity. It wold have been nice to have a Buckminster Fuller designed stadium in Brooklyn.

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A Dome Grows in Brooklyn

The Dodgers’ home games may soon be played under this huge plastic bubble.

By Frank Tinsley

Mechanix Illustrated takes pride in being the first to show what the Brooklyn Dodgers’ new baseball park may look like—if the 20th century’s most daring architect gets his plan accepted. Buckminster Fuller has already earned the gratitude of the armed forces and the taxpaying public with his plastic igloos that can be helicopter-toted from air base to air base to serve as hangars, barracks, warehouses, administration buildings.
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Bernstein’s was open between 1912 and 1981.  It was at 123 Powell St in San Francisco. There’s a DSW there now.

Restaurant Entrance Like Bow of Ship Attracts Business

IF a first prize were awarded for unique entrances, it would probably go to the proprietor of the Bernstein’s sea food restaurant in San Francisco. The entrance to the restaurant, shown in the photo at the right, leaves passers-by in little doubt as to the particular kind of food served there. It must, they reason, come from the sea, and on going in to investigate, they find their guess correct.

The entrance is built in the form of the bow of the ship “Nina,” on which, as every schoolboy knows, Columbus sailed on his great voyage of discovery. The model is complete, even to figurehead portholes.

The current address of the building is 2200  NE 24th avenue and is now a non-profit agency called Metropolitan Family Service. Engine 18 is in the middle of renovating their current station right now.

Novel Portland, Ore., Fire Station Looks Like a Residence
ONE of the most attractive fire stations in the country —so attractive, in fact, that it is indistinguishable from the beautiful homes of the neighborhood —is located in an exclusive residential district in Portland, Oregon. The residents of the neighborhood, threatened with increased insurance rates, and not wanting the charm of the district marred by the presence of an unsightly fire station, got together with the fire chief and an architect, and this fire station, shown in the accompanying photos, was the solution of the problem.
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Slap-Happy Homes

YOU don’t need a house to have a home!

This is a fact which many ingenious Americans have discovered in the past few years of housing shortages, and they’ve come up with some of the weirdest substitutes for the conventional love nest. It seems as though just about anything can be used for a place to hang up your hat when the situation is really rough. If you’re having house trouble, don’t be discouraged. Maybe these pictures will suggest a solution to you. And if your unusual home costs little and keeps you warm and dry, it might not be so slap-happy after all.
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First Beamless Steel Building

MADE entirely of “dished” plates of steel only 3/16 of an inch thick, this building was put up without any beams or other ordinary type of support. It is called “egg-shell type” construction. Measuring 108 feet in diameter and 28 feet high, the building is fireproof and soundproof and insulated throughout. It was built in Chicago.

New Building Bricks Are Light Enough to Float on Water

A NEW fire brick, one-third the weight of a standard brick of the same size, and light enough to float on water, is expected to revolutionize the brick industry. Robert F. Martin of Philadelphia is the inventor.

Smaller foundations will be possible in brick buildings, since the dead weight of the walls is cut in three. Handling costs will be much less. Read the rest of this entry »

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Paper Houses for Olympic Contestants

MORE than 3,000 young men athletes, representing over fifty nations at the Tenth Olympiad, at Los Angeles, in 1932, will be housed in two room structures built of paper composition on wooden frames. A minimum of 800 of these unusual houses is now being erected to form “Olympic Village,” which will be the home of the contestants while they are attending the ancient games. Read the rest of this entry »

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STRUCTURE & DESIGN

Compassionate hospital design for Philadelphia
Ruthless removal of trees in Europe
The Economist’s new mews in London
How to figure inflation in construction
Skyscrapers assume new forms

Editor Walter McQuade, A.I.A.
Research Associates Mary Jane Lightbown Jeanne Krause

A Hospital Designed to Comfort the Patients

The starchy, sanitary quality of the architecture of most hospitals often makes them oppressive to the sick. A warm and welcome corrective to this tendency will soon rise in Philadelphia, where a $4,200,000 hospital for the care of cancer patients has been designed deliberately to create a humane and appealing atmosphere. Read the rest of this entry »

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The City – Design for Living

by Lewis Mumford

The city as a purely physical fact has been subject to numerous investigations. But what is the city as a social institution? The earlier answers to these questions, in Aristotle, Plato and the Utopian writers from Sir Thomas More to Robert Owen have been on the whole more satisfactory than those of the more systematic sociologists. Most contemporary treatises on “urban sociology” in America throw no important light upon the problem.
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Architecture’s Leap into the Future

Photographed by MARK KAUFFMAN and MICHAEL ROUGIER It could have been the imagery of a mad poet or a god. A transparent bubble flung up by the U.S. breaks the sky 20 stories high, and across the way the Russians have hung walls of glass on a ski jump of a roof. The architecture of Expo 67, Montreal’s world’s fair which opens this week, is a stunning leap into tomorrow. The West Germans came with a tent you could lose a small town in and draped it over giant poles. Read the rest of this entry »