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.

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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.

Fuller’s ball park plan is at present simply a proposal to employ his geodesic dome on a truly grand scale. The dome would be 300 feet high and 750 feet in diameter. How many fans it would hold has not yet been figured, but a smaller dome design submitted by architect Theodore Kleinsasser would seat 55,000—some 23,000 more than Ebbetts Field, the Brooks’ hallowed but decaying home park. Kleinsasser’s design is more detailed than Fuller’s and includes such novelties as a small sightseeing tramway over the top of the dome.

The dome design makes feasible the demand for a ball park big enough to hold the enormous Dodger following. It would also be an all-weather, year-round sports palace capable of pulling in big money as a showplace for every kind of sporting event and exposition. The New York State legislature has created a $30,000,000 authority empowered to create such a center and the dome design helped convince the lawmakers that it could be made to pay its own way. Mere Dodger sentiment could not have done that.

Mi’s drawing of the dome as it might look on completion includes details that originated in the MI office—details that in our opinion argue strongly in favor of adopting the basic Fuller design. The numerous entrances, corridors, escalators and other facilities are MI notions. At the top of the dome a small extension houses the air venting arrangements and the shadowless lighting fixtures that will light the field only, leaving the stands in comparative darkness. A huge underground car park under the stands and field leaves only a small central area for heating and air conditioning plants.

Four automobile entrances open off intersecting streets and are provided with three-lane ramps to the level below. Circular roads surround the main parking sections with radial access drives to the individual rows of car stalls. These are separated by sidewalks leading to the promenade above. This “concourse runs completely around the building at street level, with escalator bridges over the automobile entries leading to the grandstands above. The inner wall of the promenade is lined with shops, restaurants and other facilities whose rentals would help defray the building’s maintenance costs. A 24-hour parking service, operating independently of scheduled sporting events, provides another steady source of income.

Using the authorized 500-acre plot to the best advantage, Mi’s arena building is set in the center of a four square block area. This placement permits generous loading and unloading space for buses and taxi-cabs without interfering with the flow of through traffic around the sides of the square. Numerous safety islands and cross-walks lead to extra wide sidewalk areas were ticket lines form. Subway and train connections emerge inside the building’s promenade. (The site of the dome will adjoin the Long Island Railroad’s Brooklyn Terminal.) The whole project is laid out to handle the maximum number of people safely and to facilitate the flow of vehicular traffic peaks that sport centers are bound to generate.

The Dodger Dome would certainly become an object of pride in Brooklyn. It might even rival the borough’s ball team in public esteem. In any case, no club could be more deserving of such a fabulous park than that Fabulous Flock.

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.

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.

The fire truck is housed in a garage that forms a part of the building, which has the door and driveway so arranged that the truck can make as quick a get-away as in a regular station. When the garage door is closed the station, being built according to the restricted building code, looks no different from an ordinary home, except for the scroll bearing the words: “Engine 18.”

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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.

Mr. and Mrs. Lee Andre have a silo home near Palatine. Ohio. It once stored cattle fodder, now provides over 750 square feet of living area.

In Alexandria, Egypt, a landowner found his property too small so he built this house with two rooms upstairs and a regulation door, staircase.

Sons of R. T. Troxler of Elon College, North Carolina, returned from service, found 3,000 bottles, built this three-room summer house.

Pillboxes made of steel and cement are homes to these people in Milan. Italy. They’re sturdy, built for an atomic age, say their residents.

When a Cleveland. Ohio, winery thought prohibition was here to stay 25 years ago they sold these 6.000 gallon casks, now tourist homes.

When a transit line in Santa Monica. California, discarded an old bus it didn’t dream Miss Thelma Burnette would convert it into an efficient house.

R. Guy Davis of Macon, Georgia, bought an old coach from the Central of Georgia Railroad and made it into a home with all conveniences. When he wants to move he flags a passing train, asks for a tow.

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.

Brick buildings should now be even less susceptible to changes in temperature. The many tiny air cells in the new material are almost perfect insulators of heat, making for lower home heating costs in winter.

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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.

This is the first time since the Greeks sheltered themselves in tents during the first of the Olympiads, centuries ago, that an effort has been made to bring the housing and feeding of all the contestants at any of the Olympic games into one centralized locality.

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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. In its external appearance, the American Oncologic Hospital (shown in model form, right) will achieve that result with a roof as gracefully draped as a bride’s skirt and with the various floors stepped back to give each bedroom its own door to an outside terrace.

The interiors will demonstrate an even more conscious effort to attain therapeutic reassurance through design. The rooms for patients will be grouped into pleasant little neighborhoods. Each one will have no more than six rooms and its own lounge. This arrangement will permit the patient just the amount of privacy that he wants to have. Bedrooms will have carpeted floors, louvered wooden shutters on doors and windows, and built-in cabinets and desks. The hospital expects to have a busy outpatient department —about 30,000 annual visits are anticipated—-and the facilities of that department are discreetly designed to divide groups of waiting patients according to their condition.

In the U.S. last year, total hospital and institutional construction cost close to $2 billion, of which nearly three-quarters was private construction. Most of it was spent in urban areas, often to enlarge already existing institutions and to group specialized services. The Oncologic Hospital will share a site in the Fox Chase section of Philadelphia with two other organizations largely devoted to combating cancer: Jeanes Hospital and the Institute for Cancer Research.

Architect for the Oncologic is Vincent G. Kling, forty-eight, a Philadelphian who recently has been moving from a sharp industrial style toward shapelier designs. Kling appears the prototype of the slim, wavy-haired, pipe-smoking, casual kind of architect favored by fiction writers; inside the tweedy sheath, however, he is all cool efficiency. In 1946 he left a designer’s job at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to set up his own office in Philadelphia. Several of his buildings have won prizes for their sleek functionalism.

Kling’s new style, emerging in the Oncologic Hospital, is also seen in the Philip T. Sharpies Dining Hall at Swarthmore (below). The building sits between an area of residential-scale fraternity lodges and the two big gray Victorian buildings that house most of the college classrooms. In its own way, the new dining hall is a match for the Victorian mammoths, not only in material but in its looming shape.

Road Gangs Revise Europe’s Travel Posters

The streets of the Great Society, President Johnson has declared, ought to be shaded and lined with trees. Such words from such a source have proved meat and drink to U.S. conservationists, who have been encouraged in fights to save the red- woods of California and the sycamores around Boston. Ironically, however, the conservationists of Europe, whose environment is so often idealized in American minds, have been losing ground—and trees. ? Punishing the Italian poplars. The Italian national agency for highways, Azienda Nazionale Autonoma Delle Strade, mailed a circular to all its department heads last year advising them to use the ax if trees impeded visibility on curves. Large and lovely trees soon began to topple, particularly in Tuscany and in the north country around Milan and Turin. On one highway through a hunting preserve near Como, ANAS crews took so savage a toll that complaints poured in from conservationists, who said that “No Passing” signs would have sufficed. But ANAS spokesmen shrugged and replied that Italian drivers would never slow down in open country; ANAS had to “save Italian drivers from themselves.”

Meanwhile, trees were also being cut down in urban areas. The avenues of Rome were not exempt. Responding to public protests, the Italian Minister of Public Works has appointed a commission to recommend a policy wiser than the blind slaughter of trees. But considerable numbers of poplars are already lost. Pruning in Spain. Spanish officialdom is even less accommodating than Italian. When a horrified Barcelona architect wrote indignantly in Serra d’Or, a Benedictine magazine, about the despoiling of plane trees along the roadsides of Catalonia, he was hauled into court by the highway builders. Charged with “insults to state bureaucracy,” he was finally declared not guilty, but numerous trees were left pathetically truncated.

The Gentlemanly New Brutalists

When London’s Economist announced in 1961 that architects Peter and Alison Smithson had been selected to design its new headquarters group on St. James’s Street in London, the choice seemed an odd one. The young Smithsons, husband and wife, were the belligerent protagonists of the New Brutalism—a movement specializing in burly, raw modern buildings deliberately refuting English architectural gentility. St. James’s Street hardly seemed the place for brutality; it is lined with old buildings that shelter such elegant shops as Lock the hatter, and Lobb, bootmaker to the Duke of Edinburgh, as well as gentlemen’s clubs like the Devonshire, Brooks’s, White’s, the Carlton, and Boodle’s.

But the early alarm soon died down. The Smithsons have labored successfully to produce a charming mews. On a paved courtyard opened to St. James’s Street they arranged three buildings: a bank with shops to front directly on St. James’s; behind it the sixteen-story Economist tower; and a block of apartments; all are bold in materials but discreet in shape. Staid old Boodle’s, instead of being injured, picked up an additional bay window facing into the courtyard.

This rare coincidence of structural conviction and strength in context is not the general rule in London. The city has been cheapened in recent years with so much monstrous speculative office building that the Labor party, when it came to power, abruptly brought new office building to a halt. In the calm that has ensued, the Economist Building has stood as a model. Sir Geoffrey Crowther, chairman of the Economist, concedes that a monolith of larger size on the site would have been more profitable, but views the $6-million investment as “financially successful.” Speaking of his architects, the chairman adds: “Our only hope of immortality is as a footnote to them. Who, after all, were Sir Christopher Wren’s clients? . . . We met the Smithsons six years ago with trepidation and take leave of them now with affection and awe.”

How to Budget for Inflation in Construction

How to figure out what inflation will do to estimates of costs for heavy construction jobs long has baffled both clients and contractors. The vague, provisory phrase adding “10 percent for contingencies,” which has been the standard means relied on to cover inflation (as well as other eventualities), has become a sketchy and often inadequate protection for both parties. There are ways of doing better.

Five years ago San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit District was charged with designing and estimating the costs of a new mass-transit system. The district knew that construction of the system would be a slow process. First, a bond issue had to be carried by popular vote. After approval of the issue, the money became available for the project only as bond issues were sold. And, as a practical matter, not all the streets along the route could be torn up at the same time, and not all local contracting companies could be employed simultaneously in the city’s work. Looking at all that, the district engineers estimated that the job would not be finished until 1971.

The district’s solution to the inflationary pressures that were bound to appear over a ten-year period was spectacularly sound. Its engineers, Parsons Brinckerhoff-Tudor-Bechtel, plotted the course of local inflation, from 1945 on, in various categories of heavy construction from excavation to aerial construction (necessary because 41 percent of the system will be elevated). Correlating the past with the estimates of the future, the district concluded that inflation might eat up around 30 percent of the budgeted amounts before the work could be completed. Facing the matter courageously, it frankly added 20 percent for inflation to the standard 10 percent contingency. The 30 percent represented $190 million of the total $792-million bond issue, which the voters approved in 1962.

Now the wisdom of that procedure has become eminently clear. Five years after the initial estimates were made, the job is at midpoint in time, and inflation has been doing just about what it was expected to do. It has been adding to building costs at about 3 percent per year, only slightly ahead of its anticipated rate.

Office Buildings Sprout in New Hybrids

Early in this century skyscrapers were towers that grew narrower as they grew taller, often ending in delicate spires. Then the R.C.A. Building in Rockefeller Center demonstrated the grace and utility possible in an upright slab. Since that time most skyscrapers not forced into awkward shapes by building codes have been modified slabs, whose shapes followed the general proportions of king-sized cigarette packs.

But anyone taking a searching look at the urban skyline in the U.S. knows that clients’ ambition for individuality and designers’ will to invent are now changing the traditional silhouettes. The biggest postwar office building, Pan Am in Manhattan (designed by Emery Roth & Sons, with Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi as design consultants), is an immense eight-sided affair. Fattened too much, it does not compare favorably with the slender, graceful Pirelli Building—also a polygon—built earlier in Milan by Gio Ponti and Pier Luigi Nervi. (But Pirelli has such small floor areas that it would be a financial fiasco on the costly Pan Am site.) The Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Building (architect, Harrison & Abramovitz) went beyond the shape of the Pirelli Building by putting new stress on sharply ended curves.

The National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Edward Durell Stone, architect), is a conventional shape, but an old device, the overhanging cornice, succeeds in giving it a new look.

Kaiser Industries chose a long crescent for its Oakland headquarters (Welton Becket, architect). Minora Yamasaki’s recent Northwestern National Life Insurance Building in Minneapolis is a skyscraper on its side, using a columned porch, which has ancient echoes, to achieve its modern air. The new city hall (architects: the late Viljo Revell and John B. Parkin Associates) in Toronto places two tall curves of office space around a low council chamber.

Many more shapes are coming off drawing boards (below). They range from Yamasaki’s double spires for Manhattan to the low concrete Boston City Hall, which is complemented by a crescent-shaped, low office building nearby. end

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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.

One of the soundest definitions of the city was that framed by John Stow, an honest observer of Elizabethan London, who said: “Men are congregated into cities and commonwealths for honesty and utility’s sake; these shortly be the commodities that do come by cities, commonalties and corporations. First, men by this nearness of conversation are withdrawn from barbarous feritie and force to certain mildness of manners and to humanity and justice whereby they are contented to give and take right, to and from their equals and inferiors, and to hear and obey their heads and superiors. Also the doctrine of God is more fitly delivered, and the discipline thereof more aptly to be executed in peopled towns than abroad by reason of the facility of common and often assembling, and consequently such inhabitants be better managed in order and better instructed in wisdom. Good behavior is yet called urbanitas because it is rather found in cities than elsewhere. In sum, by often hearing, men be better persuaded in religion, and for that they live in the eyes of others they be by example the more easily trained to justice and by shame-fastness restrained from injury.

“And whereas commonwealths and kingdoms cannot have, next after God, any surer foundation than the love and goodwill of one man towards another, that also is closely bred and maintained in cities, where men by mutual society and companying together do grow to alliances, commonalties and corporations:’ It is with no hope of adding much to the essential insight of this description of the urban process that I would sum up the sociological concept of the city in the following terms: The city is a related collection of primary groups and purposive associations: the first, like family and neighborhood, are common to all communities while the second are especially characteristic of city life. These varied groups support themselves through economic organizations that are likewise of a more or less corporate, or at least publicly regulated, character; and they are all housed in permanent structures within a relatively limited area. The essential physical means of a city’s existence are the fixed site, the durable shelter, the permanent facilities for assembly, interchange and storage; the essential social means are the social division of labor which serves not merely the economic life but the cultural processes.

The city in its complete sense then is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action and an esthetic symbol of collective unity. On one hand it is a physical frame for the commonplace domestic and economic activities; on the other it is a consciously dramatic setting for the more significant actions and the more sublimated urges of a human culture. The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater. It is in the city, the city as theater, that man’s more purposive activities are formulated and worked out through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events and groups into more significant culminations.

Without the social drama that comes into existence through the focusing and intensification of group activity there is not a single function performed in the city that could not be performed— and has not in fact been performed—in the open country. The physical organization of the city may deflate this drama or make it frustrate, or it may through the deliberate efforts of art, politics and education make the drama more richly significant, as a well-designed stage-set intensifies and underlines the gestures of the actors and the action of the play.

It is not for nothing that men have dwelt so often on the beauty or the ugliness of cities. These attributes condition men’s social activities. And if there is a deep reluctance on the part of the true city dweller to leave his cramped quarters for the physically more benign environment of a suburb—even a model garden suburb!—his instincts are partly justified: in its various and many-sided life, in its very opportunities for social disharmony and conflict the city creates drama; the suburb lacks it.

One may describe the city in its social aspect as a special framework directed toward the creation of differentiated opportunities for a common life and a significant collective drama. As indirect forms of association, with the aid of signs and symbols and specialized organizations, supplement direct face-to-face intercourse, the personalities of the citizens themselves become many faceted: they reflect their specialized interests, their more intensely trained aptitudes; their finer discriminations and selections. The personality no longer presents a more or less unbroken traditional face to reality as a whole.

Here lies the possibility of personal disintegration, and here lies the need for re-integration through wider participation in a concrete and visible collective whole. What men cannot imagine as a vague formless society they can live through and experience as citizens in a city. Their unified plans and buildings become a symbol of their social relatedness, and when the physical environment itself becomes disordered and incoherent the social functions that it harbors become more difficult to express.

Before man can become fully humanized the social man must break up into a thousand parts, so that each grain of aptitude, each streak of intelligence, each fiber of special interest may take a deeper color by mingling with other grains, streaks and fibers of the same nature. The undifferentiated common bond of primary association is weakened by these specialized associations, but the cable of civilization itself becomes stronger through such multiform twisting into a more complex and many-colored strand.

From simple consciousness of kind in the tribe or family to the developed consciousness of kind that goes with special associations and differentiated groups, from habit to choice, from a fixed mold to a dynamic equilibrium of forces, from taking life as it comes to comprehending it and redesigning it—that is the path of both human and civic development. This transfer of emphasis from the uniformities and common acceptances of the primary group to the critical choices, the purposive associations and the rational ends of the secondary group is one of the main functions of the city. The city is in fact the physical form of the highest and most complex types of associative life.

One further conclusion follows from this concept of the city: social facts are primary, and the physical organization of a city, its industries and its markets, its lines of communication and traffic must be subservient to its social needs. Whereas in the development of the city during the last century we expanded the physical plant recklessly and treated the essential social nucleus, the organs of government and education and social service, as mere afterthoughts, today we must treat the social nucleus as the essential element in every valid city plan. The spotting and inter-relationship of schools, libraries, theaters, community centers is the first task in defining the urban neighborhood and laying down the outlines of an integrated city.

If this is the correct interpretation of the nature of the city a good part of the work that has been done under the name of city planning must be discounted and discredited. It has no more to do with the essential functions of living in cities than the work of the scene shifter and property man have to do with the development of Hamlet. This is not to deny its use, for scene shifters have their use, but it is to cast a doubt upon its sufficiency. The planning of cities by those who have hitherto called themselves city planners is like having the play itself written by the property man or mistaking the stage directions for the lines of the actors.

Though our conception of the physical structure of cities during the last century has been inadequate even in purely physical terms, like the movement of people and the service of industries, people have been even more wantonly inept in their conception of the social structure and the social activities of cities. With their eyes on the purely material changes that are so necessary, even those who have striven most earnestly for improvement have been content to build mere buildings. But buildings do not make a city, and the adequate planning of buildings is only a part of the necessary social schema.

From the standpoint of city design the sociological theory of groups has a direct bearing upon plan. One of the difficulties in the way of political association is that we have not provided it with the necessary buildings, the necessary halls, rooms, meeting places.

Hence in big cities the saloon and the shabby district headquarters, open only to the more sedulous party members, have served. As for industries, the political opportunities for association have been even scantier. In how many factory districts are there well-equipped halls of sufficient size in which the workers can meet?

The town meeting of the New England political system had reality because it had dimensions and members. The citizens met face to face in a special building, the town hall. They saw and heard their fellow citizens and they discussed problems relating to a unit immediately within their grasp and vision.

But the peoples of the Western World have sought to live under an abstract and disembodied political democracy without giving its local units any other official organ than the polling booth. We have hitherto lacked the energy or the insight to provide the necessary meeting halls, committee rooms, permanent offices. We have still to organize neighborhoods and corporate organizations as if the political functions of the community were important ones.

In the conglomerate masses we have called cities it is no wonder that political life as a concrete exercise of duties and functions has given way to various subtle parasitisms and diversions. And contrariwise, in new communities that have been planned as social units, with visible coherence in the architecture, with a sufficient number of local meeting rooms for group activities, as in Sunnyside Gardens, Long Island, a robust political life with effective collective action and a sense of renewed public responsibility has swiftly grown up.

The moral should be plain: we must design whole social units. We must design cities, and in the order of design the arrangement of the essential social institutes, their adequate provision and servicing, is a key to the rest of the structure. It is on the purely instrumental physical services that we must practice the most stringent economy, even parsimony; it is on the political and educational services that we must spend with a lavish hand.

This means a new order of design and a different type of designer. It means that the emphasis will shift progressively from the stage-set to the drama and that the handling of the social activities and relationships will engage the fuller attention of the planner. In time this will have the effect of reducing the instrumental arts of town planning to fairly stable routine, while a greater amount of energy and economic support will be set free for the expressive arts. Painting and sculpture, drama and music will again have greater importance than sanitation and sewage and antisepsis.

The elemental unit of planning then is no longer the house or the houseblock. It is the city, because it is only in terms of this more complex social formation that any particular type of activity or building has significance. And the aim of such planning is not the efficiency of industry by itself or the diminution of disease by itself or the spreading of culture by itself: the aim is the adequate dramatization of communal life, the widening of the domain of human significance so that ultimately no act, no routine, no gesture will be devoid of human value or will fail to contribute to the reciprocal support of citizen and community.

When this drama is sharply focused and adequately staged every part of life feels an uprush of social energy. Eating, working, mating, sleeping are not less than they were before but far more. Life has despite its broken moments the poise and unity of a collective work of art. To create that background, to achieve that insight, to enliven each individual capacity through articulation in an intelligible and esthetically stimulating whole is the essence of the art of building cities. Less than that is not enough!

One more point about the social nature of cities. Reformers and renovators, whose work usually is prompted by some raucous failure in the social machinery, are tempted to oversimplify in the opposite direction. They seek a harmony too absolute, an order whose translation into actual life would stultify the very purpose it seeks to achieve. The student of utopias knows the weakness that lies in perfectionism, for that weakness has now been made manifest in the new totalitarian states where the dreams of a Plato, a Cabet, a Bellamy have at many removes taken shape. What is lacking in such dreams is not a sense of the practical. What is lacking is a realization of the essential human need for disharmony and conflict, elements whose acceptance and resolution are indispensable to psychological growth.

Communities that are so small that the essential differences between people and groups must be prudently glazed over, or so large that they cannot intermingle and clash without violent disorder, fail to provide the best environment for the development of human character.

But good-fellowship is not the whole duty of social man, and some of the highest products of the spirit have been achieved not out of small contentments but out of great frustration, antagonism, disappointment, bitterness. Koheleth and Isaiah, Euripides and Shakespeare, Dante and Machiavelli offer testimony to the higher disharmonies possible in Jerusalem and Athens and Florence and London. Psychological growth is more important than somatic satisfaction, and in designing cities we must provide an environment broad enough and rich enough never to degenerate into a “model community!”

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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. The British gaily cantilevered exhibitions far out over a yawning moat. In all ways, Expo, which cost $1 billion, turns out to be the biggest show ever. Queen Elizabeth is coming, and so too are the Bolshoi Opera and Olivier and La Scala and Dietrich. Wise visitors will not wait for the crowds to thin out. On the principle that a good show leaves them shouting for more, Montreal has decided there will be no Expo 68.

A skyline of amazing shapes

Expo occupies two islands in the St. Lawrence, connected by bridges {right). There are 63 national pavilions, far more than any other fair has assembled. Some of the most striking are pictured on these pages.

The fair was built with the convenience of visitors in mind. Admission is inexpensive and the average visitor will spend less than $5 daily inside the gates. Because a train will transport him around the grounds without charge, his feet will pain him less than at any other major fair in recent memory. Nor will he have to waste hours in queues: computers will digest information about lines and flash the minute-by-minute situation onto big electronic tote boards. {“Skip the British Pavilion. Crowded,” the boards might read.) However, Montreal {pop.: 2 million) has not yet solved the problem of lodging its expected 35 million visitors.

A wild Irishman’s space journey—with its volcanic splashdown

Just before Expo opened, I became one of the first human passengers to take a trial spin on the Gyrotron, a $3 million contraption that promised to lift its passengers into a facsimile of outer space and then dunk them in a fiery volcano.

It had already been tested with sandbags in the seats instead of people. But still, as I climb aboard, I am nervous, both on my own behalf and for my friends, Sean Kenny, who designed the unholy thing, and his wife, who are sitting beside me. It would be the world’s loss if Kenny, a gifted architect and theater designer, was hoist by his own petard, only to be cooked in his own volcano.

An iron bar, like a seat belt, is locked over our laps, and we join the parade of 84 little four-seated cars rolling up a ramp into the giant Gyrotron entrance. The main structure is a huge, hollow pyramid that appears to hang inside a scaffold of aluminum tubing—27 miles of it. Once inside the dark pyramid, we orbit up an invisible spiral track. Glowing around us are spinning planets, comets, galaxies. But most impressive are the man-made satellites, Telstars, moon rockets and other vehicles. At the top we veer toward a space station where three silver-clad astronauts appear to be weightlessly afloat. Vooming in our ears are electronic ululations, deep beeps and astral snores.

We roll out of the pyramid above the Expo grounds, heading on a track for the last lap of the ride: Kenny’s volcano. It is an oddly shaped, red aluminum shaft, wafting steam. It looked as if we were about to hurtle down a huge incinerator. In my flash of fright I began to review not my own life but the life of Kenny, in whose hands at this instant my future seemed so precariously held.

Kenny’s blend of fanciful mysticism and engineering genius came to him naturally: he was born in Dublin. “I got a pretty basic upbringing in the ordinary magical life of Ireland —witches, ghosts, fantastic storytellers,” he says. “Now I’m making the magic practical.”

From his father, an architect, he got the idea of being a builder, and from some magazine pictures of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work he got the idea of studying with Wright in the U.S. After an exchange of brisk notes, Wright advised him to complete his basic architecture course in Dublin, then, “Come any time you like.” So in 1950 Kenny and three friends bought a 30-foot shrimper and set sail.

Though Kenny is soft-spoken, stocky and calm, with his short legs planted prosaically on the ground, he seems to attract theatrical events. At 21, on his Atlantic crossing, he outrode a hurricane, was met by an airplane escort over New York Harbor, made front-page news and was invited to judge a beauty contest. Reading about all this, Wright wired to New York: “What the hell are you doing?”

Kenny bought a car and drove to Wisconsin, where Wright had his great school.

“When I first saw him,” recalls Kenny, “he was having breakfast with his students. ‘I’m the man from Dublin,’ I said. ‘Good,’ he replied. ‘There’s a pick and shovel outside the door. Go and build your own house.’ ” Kenny did—in the shape of an umbrella; but after a year with Wright he returned to England. Soon Kenny was acclaimed Britain’s best stage designer. He did designs for opera and ballet. But his specialty was a series of electronically controlled sets for big musicals such as Oliver and Pickwick, sets that split apart, glided and twirled like waltzing silos. In 1964 he installed an electronic marvel at The Dunes nightclub in Las Vegas. It consisted of five spinning stages that skimmed out over the audience, heaped with nude beauties.

Kenny puts his talents to sacred as well as profane uses. He has designed a church for a mountain top and is pondering a church for the moon. Possessed of probably the most untrammeled and resourceful imagination of any living architect, he also is working on an undersea nightclub and recreation park for Nassau; and because he is out of patience with orthodox sit-still audiences, he has designed a theater that whirls spectators as if they were on a carrousel, and he envisages vast sea pageants where audiences will be submerged to watch the sinking of an entire fleet. His apocalyptic visions include taking an audience atop a hill to see a fiery chariot in the clouds. How to do it? Easy. Helicopters and smoke screens.

In his Gyrotron, Kenny feels he has taken a big step toward audience mobility. He will move 30,000 people a day straight into the jaws of hell. We begin to plunge down the red incinerator, surrounded by simulated lava, steam and demonic shrieks. Kenny’s contraption holds safely together. The ride ends as we are gobbled by a monster and finally expelled.

Actually, I like the space part of the ride better, maybe because science fiction—and science fact—-appeals to me more than horror tales. I ask Kenny what he means by this monster business, so reminiscent of old-time medieval church plays. “The monster is the kick in the tail—everything that distracts us from reality, whirring washing machines, super-duper cars, oversell and undersell. It’s what we lean on, our prop and our crutch—our jangled crutch.” Performing that symbolic function, the Gyrotron will stay on permanently after Expo closes.

TOM PRIDEAUX

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St. Louis’ two-legged tower: Tallest U.S. Monument

By Charles Remsberg
Illustrated by Ray Pioch

A SOARING arch 630 feet high, and of equal span, will soon be the tallest monument in the U.S. Its gleaming skin will be made of 886 tons of stainless steel, biggest single order on record. Trains with ingenious drum-shaped cars will run up and down inside it. Called the Gateway Arch, it forms the spectacular centerpiece of St. Louis’ new $30 million Jefferson National Ex- pansion Memorial Park. It symbolizes the city’s role as the gateway to the West after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.

Now under construction, the Gateway Arch will rise even higher than the 555-foot Washington Monument or the 302-foot Statue of Liberty when completed next year. Throughout its span the hollow structure will have the shape, in cross section, of an equilateral triangle, whose sides increase in exterior length from 17 feet at the top to 54 feet at each base.

Room at the top. Visitors to the shining arch, which will be visible 30 miles away, will be able to look back over the same 30 miles: from a portholed observation gallery at its crown. To lift sightseers to this height, conventional elevators were ruled out by the arch’s curving shape. So a brand-new form of vertical transportation is being provided.

You’ll ride aloft in a train consisting of eight five-passenger cars, propelled by a lifting cable and running along a track built into the structure. Each drumlike car hangs, free to rotate, in bearings at front and rear. Its below-center weight keeps it upright, like a seat on a Ferris wheel, during the 2-1/2-minute ascent at just under four m.p.h.

Disembarking at the top of the arch, you’ll pass through the observation gallery—and then ride down the other leg, in a “down” train just like the “up” one. (When traffic is light, each train may carry passengers both up and down.) If you’re too timorous to ride in the trains, you may ascend as far as the 370-foot level—more than halfway up—in an elevator especially designed to operate in a slanted shaft. You’ll have to complete the ascent under your own power, via stairs, which extend all the way up and down each leg.

Creator of the Gateway Arch’s design was the late Eero Saarinen, famous Finnish-born architect, whose plans for it won a $50,000 competition in 1947. The arch derives its support entirely from its double wall—a quarter-inch-thick skin of polished stainless-steel plates bolted to a 3/8-inch-thick interior wall of carbon steel. An intervening space, of up to three feet at the base, is filled with concrete to a height of 300 feet. Extending 60 feet below ground, the legs are embedded in 26,000 tons of concrete keyed to bedrock. Thus braced, the two-legged tower needs no other supporting members. It’s said to be strong enough to withstand a wind of 155 m.p.h. or more.

Underground museum. Between the legs of the 16,878-ton arch, a sunken entrance will open into a 100,000-square-foot underground center for visitors, nearly the length of two football fields. Its attractions will include a museum, where more than 200 exhibits will tell the story of westward expansion, and theaters showing documentary films of the $12,000,000 Gateway Arch’s construction. By way of this center, visitors reach the arch’s trains, elevators, and stairs.

A creeping derrick, the 100-ton monster that’s currently lifting the triangular sections of each leg into place, lays its own temporary track up the outside of the leg—and climbs as it builds. On a “moving day” the chief rigger, aloft, signals an operator in a four-drum hoist shack on the ground—and a multisheave system inches the whole derrick upward, to a level 50 feet above the last. Then five-inch steel pins make it fast. Telescoping struts beneath its steel deck, adjusted by hydraulic jacks, keep the deck level despite the constantly changing curvature of the rising leg. The same ground-based hoisting engine powers the derrick’s own lifting cables.

When the arch’s two legs have almost met, they’ll be joined by hoisting into place an eight-ton “keystone” section of the arch—its 143rd and last piece.

A 91-acre park, newly laid out on the west bank of the Mississippi at the location of St. Louis’ first settlement, provides the site for the towering monument. It took some engineering, itself. An old railroad trestle along the nearby shorefront, considered out of keeping with the scenic plan, has vanished. Through 960 feet of new tunnels and cuts that replace it, the trains will rumble past below ground level, unseen by the Memorial Park’s expected 2-1/2 million visitors a year.

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KAISER’S “CHASSIS” HOMES

They’re assembled from factory-built units, but they don’t look alike

What Henry J. Kaiser is already doing to meet the housing shortage in the Los Angeles area he regards as a sample of what he will be doing shortly near Detroit, Portland (Oregon), and other of our cities. Teamed up with Fritz B. Burns, veteran Los Angeles land developer, Kaiser is completing 1,700 homes near the California city, and before the year is over he expects to put up 10,000 more, there and elsewhere.

There’s conjecture about just how many homes Kaiser can provide in 1948, but the nation remembers how he turned production impossibilities into production records when the nation needed cement, steel, and ships.

Kaiser builds communities, not of houses, but of attractive, liveable homes, communities complete with shops, churches, schools. You pay $7,950 to $8,800, and Kaiser gives you a modern, three-bedroom home with a two-car garage, and throws in a lot worth around $2,000. Kaiser communities, under construction or in project, run in groups of 200 to 2.500 homes.

As you look at a block of Kaiser homes you can’t find two that look alike, and yet each house is the same in interior construction. This is the secret of Kaiser’s mass! production plan; he builds “chassis” for houses, as Detroit builds chassis for automobiles.

The Kaiser chassis consists of a rectangular core of 5-1/2 rooms. This he turns out in a sprawling 15-acre factory Garages, roofs, porches also are mass-produced, but the) are put on the chassis in a variety of ways.

One house may have the garage attached at the right front corner. One may have it at the left rear corner. Or a third may have it completely detached.

Some walls are a yard thick Your roof may have a high pitch and two slopes. Your neighbor’s may have four sloping surfaces and a low pitch. Your house can be white stucco, or clapboard, or dark redwood, or a combination of several finishes.

It was Kaiser’s partner, Burns, who doped out the idea of varying the exterior appearance of the factory-built homes to keep them from looking like just that. Already he and Kaiser are developing 11,500 lots on 2,000 acres in southern California sites. Their factory builds, besides the “chassis” units, wall panels, ceiling and floor panels, plumbing and kitchen cabinets.

Take as an example a panel that is a wall between bedrooms. It’s a yard thick, because it is complete with closets, cabinets, vanities. In all, 40 panels go into a three-bedroom house. (The builders place less emphasis on the two-bedroom models they have been turning out.) “Gone are the old” ways In addition to shifting garages and changing roof shapes, Burns and Kaiser use varying set-back plans, which, coupled with varying porches and exterior finishes, make an amazing difference in house appearance.

Burns says that gone forever are the old days when builders could get by with only four designs, so that two out of five houses were alike. From their basic three-bedroom chassis, he and Kaiser get no fewer than 20 different designs.

Germany Is Going Modernistic in Designing Unique Eating Places

GERMANY, one of the homes of modernism, is setting a rapid pace for architects and designers everywhere, this odd, mushroom shaped building being but one example of their efforts to attain the novel and unique in architecture.

This building, which houses a restaurant overlooking the Rhine River, is three stories high. Administrative offices, checking rooms, washrooms and the kitchens occupy the two lower floors. The upper floor contains private dining rooms, bar room and public dining balcony that hangs out over the river.

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Flowing Space That’s Sprayed on Burlap

This grotto-like edifice near Minneapolis is a monument to modern-day spray-can culture. It is a house—made of sprayed-on polyurethane foam—with 10 rooms and 4,000 unsquare feet of floor space. Its builder-owner, James Littlejohn of Maple Plain, Minn., got the idea for it when he and his wife Letabeth went to ask Minneapolis Architect Winslow Wedin to modernize their kitchen. “While we were waiting, we noticed some weird pictures of what looked like a small plastic summerhouse,” says Letabeth. “We were curious, asked about it and forgot the kitchen. The next thing I knew, Jim and I were spraying a house.” Architect Wedin, the Littlejohns and a handful of architecture students began the house by running eight nylon cables from a central concrete pylon to earth anchors some distance away. Precut burlap panels were stretched between the cables and three inches of foam was sprayed on, topped off with a thin fiber-glass coating. Interior walls were sprayed on wire and wood skeletons. Working mostly on weekends, they completed the job in four months. Since foam is an excellent insulator, the house is warm in winter and will be cool in the summer. What’s more, it won’t mildew and is unappetizing to termites. If Littlejohn ever gets bored with its layout, he can add to or alter his surroundings as whimsy dictates by chopping out and refoaming.

‘Light and airy and wondrously unpredictable’

Life in a free-form, polyurethane house is bound to have its differences, and Correspondent Joan Downs asked the Littlejohns if she might be the first to sample them. She moved in, briefly, and left with these impressions.

Seeing it piled up there like an Olympian souffle or a giant mushroom with portholes, you know from the first glimpse that it’s anything but an ordinary Minnesota farmhouse. Then, when you step inside, it’s a little like finding yourself in one of those cheap foam ice buckets. Your fingers can’t resist the wall’s blistered white surface and you try to pinch the tiny bubbles. They’re as tough as Indian corn.

But the inside is anything but cheap-looking. It’s light and airy—and wondrously unpredictable. Levels change unexpectedly, both above and below. Wall and ceiling can meet oddly and abruptly, or even, I might add, disastrously if you’re over 5 feet 8.

To one raised in the tradition of flat planes and right angles, being released to this gentle whoosh of ellipse and flowing space is mildly intoxicating. One visitor complained that every time she looked out the window the countryside appeared to be moving, giving her a bad case of mal de Minnesota. But others, especially youngsters, like the sensation of movement and, finding it hard to deny the house’s natural choreography, dance happily wherever they go.

Another delight of this house is to experience its variety of textures, from pebbly walls to deep shag rugs and slicks of concrete. A word of caution, though: don’t sit down too suddenly on the lovely pile-covered foam banquettes; foam is hard.

The appeal of life in a sculpture loses some of its luster late at night when one vainly feels along the wall trying to find which artful bump conceals the light switch. Nor does one envy the lady whose task it is to hang curtains from sloping walls, sweep cobwebs from the 30-foot dome and wipe fingermarks from yards of Plexiglas windows and furnishings.

And one other thing: when going from the master bedroom into the adjoining bathroom, it’s a good idea to proceed with extreme caution—or you’ll fall into the sunken tub.

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Smashing Down Skyscrapers for Progress

by BENNETT LINCOLN

Every day, wreckers in New York and other big cities crash down millions of dollars worth of skyscrapers which are still sound in construction and capable of many years of service. Why this seeming waste? Factors which pronounce death sentences on buildings are set forth in this article.

IF a census were taken of the skyscrapers of America you might well be astonished to find that the stanchest and sturdiest of structures is ready for the graveyard after twenty years. No matter how modern and formidable a skyscraper may be on the day its portals are thrown open, it will get whiskers with the passing of two decades and be ready to lie down and die, and another edifice, bigger and more solid, will rise over its debris.

This decay of skyscrapers has given rise to a race of skyscraper smashers whose daily toil is concerned with battering down tall buildings. The wrecking job which cleared the path for the new Irving Trust Company building at No. 1 Wall Street is a good example of the magnitude of the tasks which confront the skyscraper destroyer. The contract for this job was awarded to the wrecking corporation of which Albert A. Volk is president.

The mention of “contract” hints that the skyscraper-annihilators have a highly-organ- ized business, founded on a firm basis wherever it is carried on by big operators. It is by no means a fly-by-night adventure.

When three buildings were bought by the Irving Trust Company to be replaced by a 50-story structure, the contract for its construction was awarded to Marc Eidlitz & Son. The latter sent out notices to a list of building-wrecking firms, which they knew by previous experience or reputations, for bids.

Albert A. Volk proved the lowest bidder. One wrecking contractor would not do the job for less than $500,000. To be removed were the 16-story Chimney Building, the 24-story building at 74 Broadway, and the Central Union Trust building which was erected back in 1889, of fort-like solidity. Volk offered to clear away these bulwarks for slightly over $250,000.

“If we will examine minutely the various details which figured in this job, we will get some notion not only concerning the stupendous industry which building-wrecking has grown to be,” declared Mr. Volk, “but also we will get at the inside of the business angles which determine success or failure.

“In connection with the Irving Trust Company project let me say first that the wrecking business is a highly speculative one. It is far different from that of the building contractor who is able to calculate beforehand, rather accurately, just how much the job is going to cost and approximately the profit he stands to make.

“Although I intend to concentrate on the No. 1 Wall Street work, I shall draw from other experiences to clarify points involved in this business of tearing down so that others may build up. A building-wrecker cannot possibly determine from an inspection of a prospective structure just what encumbrances he will face when his men commence destroying it.

“Concrete buildings are particularly deceiving. It is essential that we know the kind of mortar which has been used in the masonry. More money has been lost by the wrecking contractor through his failure to gauge the hardness of the cement mortar than through any other miscalculation.

“The contractors who tore down the old Madison Square Garden almost cast their own resources into the debris because they had misjudged the size of the job. The steel frame-work which was preserved still is languishing in storage in anticipation of the day when it will be set up again in another city. However, the move has been considered doubtful economy lately, and the material may eventually wind up at the mills for resmelting.

“In that Central Union Trust Building we found walls ranging in thickness from eight to ten feet. You can readily understand what that waste of space would mean in the Wall Street district. No doubt that building was envisioned in the same light as the Egyptian Pyramids, constructed for posterity, if not eternity.

“On the other hand, what the original builders were not able to foresee was that the very tenor of business in this environment would undergo many changes in the course of time. They did not dream at what a premium space would be at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway. Such a building had outlived its economic life.

“I do not hesitate to admit that a $250,-000 contract for wrecking buildings for a site is a rather handsome one. Before the World war, I remember, wreckers would willingly pay for the privilege of salvaging a building. In those days I might have actually cleared over $100,000 on a job similar to that of the Irving Trust Company.

“The reason for this reverse in the financial status of the wrecking business is explained by the increased cost of labor. It has multiplied ten-fold. Barmen, men who use bars, are paid $1.35 an hour, and time and a half for overtime. It is strictly understood beforehand that they are going to have overtime. Should a contractor fail them in this regard, they will immediately desert him for one who will give them that concession.

“My method in drawing up my bid for the Irving Trust Company contract is typical of the usual procedure I follow. After a personal and thorough examination of the buildings to be demolished, I take into account the season of the year. Then I make my observations on the shape of the structure and its location as regards traffic. Tearing down skyscrapers becomes more difficult and hazardous in congested business districts.

“Then I take into consideration my implements at hand. Not only the seasoned workers available but also the efficiency of the machinery which can be utilized. In recent years the use of machinery, such as compressors, rock drills and derricks, has cut in half the time required for wrecking a building.

“Fortunately, I have twenty-six years of experience in this business behind me. Otherwise I am quite positive that I would be at a loss to compile figures which would represent a sane bid on any job. That is why this is one industry which necessarily must draw its leaders from its own ranks. Not only is the boss’s eye required constantly on the job, but he is the only one who can estimate costs. For an outsider it would mean ruination, and I have been witness to some disastrous episodes in that direction.

“Another clause which has entered into the wrecking contractor’s agreement is the bonus and penalty. It is stipulated at the outset that the wrecker will receive so much for each day that he completes the job in advance of the date agreed upon and he will be fined so much per day for every day he goes beyond the agreed date.

“We did the Irving Trust Company job in <32 days, which was five days shorter than the contract called for. Our agreement called for a $3,000 a day bonus, which netted us $15,000.”

Mr. Yolk’s army of wreckers took down nineteen 6-story buildings in seventeen days to make room for the Chrysler Building in New York City. This brought the Volk Company a bonus of $25,000.

“It is this swift clearing of sites which today has brought the value of salvaging materials down to a negligible point. As I said previously, in other days I could have cleared $100,000 from the salvaged materials alone in that Irving Trust Company project, apart from expenses. However, the total derived from the rescued materials amounted to $40,000.

“The $40,000 represents principally the steel which was taken from the buildings. Steel alone has any value for us today. Everything else is considered waste and use- less. The salvaged steel is scrapped and sent to the mills to be resmelted. There is a good market for this scrap metal. It is very much desired by steel manufacturers because it adds to the caliber of steel which is manufactured.

“The market for this steel by-product of the wrecking business resembles the regular steel market in many respects. That is, it fluctuates with the price of regular steel. This year we have received $8 and $9 a ton for it. In the past it has been as high as $17.

“There is quite a market also for granite. This is much in demand by stone-cutters and monument dealers who buy granite for graveyard markers. When we made room for the Standard Oil Building at 26 Broadway, we found a stone weighing nineteen tons at a height of 250 feet. I could never understand why any man ever wanted a stone like that way up there. That stone went to a number of graves.

“But in general we are only concerned with speed. The demand for it prohibits the salvaging of materials, therefore it is a big economic factor in not only the high cost of wrecking but also in the rise of construction costs in the big cities where sites are desired in definite localities.

“Since a building in a big city today becomes obsolete after twenty years, the sponsors of major building investments have to include in the calculations of operating expenses and yield the approximate cost of tearing the building down again after two decades.

“However, to revert to the matter of speed in demolition, the building contractor wants his site cleared as soon as possible. It may mean that a small fortune is wasted in keeping a site unoccupied and unproductive, even for a very brief space of time. It is for this reason that we have summoned every possible instrument of the machine age to our aid.

“When the building-wrecker of olis works today he is not conscious of the existence of objets d’art in some mansion, neither is he preoccupied with the hope that his bar or pick is going to uncover some hidden treasure. It is plain, downright smash, crash, tear down and cart off. Invariably, the whole kit and kaboodle of a structure we tackle goes gallivanting off to the ocean or to the meadows of Long Island to make fill. Only the steel and the granite remain as the salvage residue.”

“What is the economic point at which the tearing down of buildings becomes necessary?” Mr. Volk was asked.

“Various factors are involved,” he answered. “Progress of commerce in that particular vicinity may play a part in spelling its doom. Its lay-out and construction and deterioration may warrant a new structure to keep abreast not only of the progress around it but also of competition. Another tremendously important factor is the increased value of space high up, where light and air are in abundance. The higher a building goes nowadays, the higher the rental. This might well be a determining factor and most usually is.

“On the other hand, a building may be a misfit in its particular setting. Take the old Pictorial Review Building, a twelve-story affair in the garment district. Here was a building out of place. It was surrounded by structures which housed tenants engaged in the garment industry. Its floors were constructed so that they could bear 250 pounds to the square foot. That was more than twice as much as would have been necessary for sewing and cutting machines in the garment business. After a brief life of ten years, the Pictorial Review plant was replaced by a 30-story structure for the garment trades.

“The high cost of taxes in a big city like New York often makes it cheaper to tear down an old building and put up a new one in its stead. Take the case of the discarded Fifth Avenue mansions, for instance. Those structures are fast vanishing. The rental from such enormous structures which have been abandoned for country estates or co-operative apartments would not even pay for the taxes.

“Therefore, prudent real estate operators have bought up practically every one of these mansions available, and one by one they are being levelled to make room for the rise of big apartment houses, for which there has been a persistent and constant demand in recent years.

“On the other hand, vast demolition work is sometimes due to engineering and railroad activity. In paving the way for the Manhattan approach to the Fort Lee bridge, which will link Manhattan and New Jersey, nearly 1,600 structures have been razed to make way for about 250 apartment houses, whose rents will be in keeping with the real estate boom which overran this section.

“Between the years of 1913 and 1922, about 6,000 buildings were torn down in New York City. For the year of 1930, up to last Fall, over 3,000 structures were demolished.

“For every year since the war the average amount of contracts awarded for building demolition in New York City has been $5,000,000. This year there has been a slump, not out of line with general business depression, and it is not likely that the contracts will amount to more than $1,500,000.

“It is also interesting to note that $5,000,-000 in wrecking contracts during the past five years represents an annual destruction and demolition by the wreckers of $50,000,-000 in buildings each year. Although the figures do not apply strictly in every instance, generally speaking, a building which is built today at a cost of $200,000 will require $20,000 to tear down.

“One of the costliest buildings to wreck was the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. That was a $500,000 contract. Speed was a telling factor there also, as the interests which former Gov. Alfred E. Smith represented were anxious to get started on the Empire State Building. I consider that the wreckers did mighty well in getting $150,000 worth of salvage out of the old hotel.

“On the other hand, the salvage in that instance also included furnishings and other appurtenances which might be refurbished and re-installed in other hotels. However, the greater amount of that $150,000 was derived from the steel which it gave up.

“This particular cycle was completed by the erection of Al Smith’s Empire State Building intended to fill the needs of a revived business area, it having changed its complexion with the flight of years.

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The liberated house

— no hookups — it rolls anywhere and lives off the sun and earth An ingenious structure integrates many energy-conserving technologies

By EVERETT H. ORTNER

PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR AND KRISTEN PETERSON Was this the American home of the future—this cross between a submarine and a World War II Quonset hut, this metal half-sausage afloat on a sea of mud?

Probably not. My hosts, its designer-builders, Ted Bakewell III and Michael E. Jantzen, had other objectives in mind for their Autonomous Dwelling Vehicle—even though it may well unite more house-of-the-future conservation concepts, technologies, and materials that have ever been brought together in one structure. Their goal was to build a trailerable structure that would:

• First, be a mobile home, light and small enough to be towed long distances over the road, or be carried by helicopter, or even be floated on water.

• Second, be independent of utility hookups—electricity, gas, water, and sewage—and of fossil fuels.

• Third, be mass-producible at a cost competitive with luxury travelers of comparable size.

It would be just the thing that Ted Bakewell, 33, an executive with Bake-well Corp., a giant St. Louis real-estate development company, would like to park outside one of his new developments without concern for water or sewers—and in places where such hookups might not even be available.

It’s the kind of thing that Michael E. Jantzen, 31, a conservationist and designer, specializes in: “alternatives to alternatives.” Jantzen’s own house, 64 miles away in Carlyle, 111., is an expression of his absorption in the problems of conserving fossil fuels through the use of solar and wind energy (it appeared in the “What’s New” section of POPULAR SCIENCE in June 1979); and the Autonomous Dwelling Vehicle was born in an apple orchard next to his house. Actually, says Bakewell, “Michael’s house is the mother ship of the Autonomous Dwelling Vehicle.”

Silo shell “Let’s look at the external features first,” says Bakewell, leading the way through the large muddy field in the center of a Bakewell office park. “The shell, for example.” The interlocking, aluminized-steel sections that form the rounded ends of the vehicle are normally used for silo tops. The center section would normally be used to join twin silos. “They’re very thin sheets, fabricated with a ridge in each panel, so they easily slide together, interlocking, for a totally watertight seal,” Bakewell says.

The silos are made by Intercontinental Domes, in Plainfield, 111. “The people from Intercontinental came out here, and they were quite surprised to see what had happened to their domes,” says Bakewell. “Since then, they’ve hired Jantzen to see what other things we could do with them.”

Gutters on both sides of the vehicle capture rainwater. A tube carries the water to a tank, a flexible vinyl bladder that sits on the ground under the frame. Freezing doesn’t bother the bladder; it expands or compresses without damage, and it can be emptied and stowed for travel. “In a 15-minute rain, we can capture as much as 55 gallons,” Jantzen says. Bake-well adds: “But we can’t depend on the rain for all our needs. So we have a water-recycling and purification capability on board. Even the rainwater is filtered before it’s used, to remove the dirt washed off the building as well as some of the pollutants in the air.”

Little clusters of black half-cylinders stand on the decks fore and aft of the domes. They’re light and strong, and eventually they will be hinged, to open and provide an outside storage capacity. “These containers are normally used for sump pumps,” Jantzen says, “you know, sump-pump liners.”

Two bubble skylights, set in the centers of the silo domes, admit light and (in summer) air to the vehicle. They serve, too, by means of shelves that support trays, as food dehydrators. “They also help to ventilate the vehicle by a thermo-chimmey effect,” Jantzen says, “pulling the lower air out by heating the bubble.”

Turbine ventilators—three in summer, two the rest of the year—also pull out hot air. The turbines are large for the space, to assure maximum ventilation. There are vents in the ends of the structure, making for “tremendous cross-ventilation,” says Bake-well, even with the doors closed for security. The third ventilator is replaced by a stovepipe in winter. “Also, that being the highest point on the structure in the winter,” Bakewell says, “it is fitted with a branch of the lightning-rod cable, so the chimney becomes a third lightning rod at this time of year.” The cable runs to a stout copper rod planted 10 feet in the ground.

Decks, made of aluminum grating, on the two sides of the structure tilt up for travel. “For the highway, we have to trim our width down to 14 feet, and in most states there’s a height limitation of 13 feet,” Bakewell says. “Before we travel, we unscrew the lightning rods and pull the turbines off and the two top sections of those other chimneys [for the toilet and incinerator]. It trims down to 12 feet, eight inches. In transporting the vehicle from Illinois, we had to go under the lowest bridge in Missouri—13 feet, two inches—and it made it.”

Solar features Next to the entry deck is a solar photovoltaic array, with a reflector below it. With the sun shining, it has a peak output of 80 watts, going to 120 at noon when the reflector comes into use. Four 12-volt marine batteries store the electricity. “It works because we have designed our electrical needs with the most energy-efficient appliances available,” Bakewell says. “We have a truly microload demand that is matched to this small solar panel.”

The sides of the vehicle are painted black and are covered with corrugated, translucent fiberglass. There is an air space between the metal and the fiberglass. Small, super-efficient blowers (designed to cool electronic equipment in the nose cones of jet aircraft) pull air through the space and into ducts inside that carry the heated air into storage compartments.

Above that is another corrugated-fiberglass area. That’s the solar water heater. Beneath the fiberglass are copper pipes through which is pumped a synthetic oil —a heat-exchange material. The copper coils wrap around the water tank below and give up their heat. Jantzen says: “On a sunny day, you can’t touch the water—it’s so hot.”

Now we’re coming into the entry-way—an area, covered by a transparent roof, that is designed to be a greenhouse for small hydroponic plantings, an occasional cooking area (there is a solar cooker), a sun porch when a hammock is stretched across it, and a mudroom. Floors and walls are cov- ered with a material called TileDek, designed for swimming-pool decks. On the floor, mud drops through to the subfloor. On the walls, the material serves as a handsome and useful perfboard. The material is also fireproof. Where had they come across it?

Says Jantzen, “It was in your ‘What’s New’ section not too long ago” [WN Home Improvement, Aug. '79], Then they read POPULAR Science?

“I subscribe,” Jantzen says.

“Best magazine going,” Bakewell adds.

Heat storage Inside, two large, shiny, insulated ducts traverse the ceiling, carrying heated air to huge storage chambers under the bed and the dining table. Bakewell raises the cover over the bed compartment to show the tubes— Thermol 81 heat-storage cylinders-piled up in there [PS, March], “On paper,” he says, “calculations show that the material should store enough heat to keep the building at 68 degrees F for 48 hours when it’s zero outside—or about five days at 30 degrees outside.”

The table and bed are lined with superinsulating isocyanurate boards, a material called Thermax. One board has an R-value of eight. A double thickness with air space gives the heat-storage chamber an R-value of 16. Little doors at the bases open to release heat.

Inside, the structure has been sprayed with two layers of material: a polyurethane foam, 3-1/2-four inches thick, primarily for insulation, followed by a flameproofing and sound-deadening layer of Durafiber, a test material with a half-hour fire rating in addition to some insulating value.

The weight problem, as with everything in a mobile vehicle, has been carefully considered. All the polyurethane foam weighs only 200 pounds. (The metal shell for the whole structure weighs only 556 pounds.) The fluorescent lights over Bakewell’s drawing board were developed for the space program. Their secret: a high-frequency ballast used with a standard fluorescent tube. They have low and high settings.

“At night, on high beam, using only 20 watts, they give at least the equivalent in light of a 100-watt bulb,” Bakewell says. “And the low beam, 12 watts, is the equivalent of a 60-watt bulb.”

Built-in counters line both ends of the structure, where the curving walls would make it impossible for a person to stand up. At the dining end, they are used for food service. At the bed end, they cover clothes-storage compartments.

“These are 14-foot domes set on 18-inch parapet walls,” Jantzen says. “With the curved outer portion used for storage, you can stand in any part of the Autonomous Vehicle.”

Furnishings for living areas Soft foam-plastic cubes serve for seating in the sitting area—not very comfortable, I thought. An Insulating Shade—the same kind featured in Popular Science in January 1979— covers the large patio doors. Jantzen and Bakewell have had trouble rolling the shade up, but now the manufacturer has a chain mechanism that helps, and they think the problem is solved. For the coldest months, there will also be a one-inch-thick panel to increase the barrier to the cold.

A wood stove, like a black soccer ball over an orange tube, creates a not-unattractive sculpture in the sitting area. Jantzen created the design for his own house.

The last artifact in the sitting area is an ingeniously designed coffee table, made, apparently, from a half panel of plywood. There is a moment of silence when the visitor comments that Jantzen should have submitted the table to the PS plywood-design contest.

“I did,” says Jantzen.

“We all thought Mike should have won that one,” Bakewell adds.

In the dining area, inventive design abounds. Leaves drop down or snap up to extend the table. Seats drop down to get out of the way. Most of Bakewell’s cooking is done on an alcohol stove; he believes in using renewable fuels as much as possible. The refrigerator was designed from scratch. In winter, ducts below bring in cold air, saving electricity. A butterfly valve controls the amount. In summer, a solid-state thermionic device supplies cooling.

The toilet area contains a shower and a Clivus Multrum Bio-Loo, a Swedish waterless toilet that composts human waste odorlessly. The shower resembles a nylon telephone booth. Square hoops support an ingenious curtain arrangement (see photo) sewn together by Jantzen’s wife, Ellen. Bakewell economizes on water by using a special nozzle head, developed for distributing chemicals from crop-dusting planes. It is capable of producing a very fine water-conserving mist that is, he says, nonetheless very effective in washing. Or, if he feels like splurging, he can open it up all the way. Bakewell showers with, basically, recycled water from a gray-water (used wash water) tank, to which he adds, as needed, fresh water taken from the vinyl rainwater bladder.

“We pump gray water into a pressure tank,” he says. “Then it’s forced through a five-micron filter, then a 0.25-micron filter, then an iodinator. Then it goes into a storage tank. Before it’s delivered to a faucet or shower, it goes through a carbon polisher-activated charcoal. We take out the bacteria with the filters, and then we kill the viruses with the iodine.”

The gray-water tank, under the kitchen floor, is just above the rainwater tank, which rests on the ground. A pump takes water from the rainwater tank through filters to the gray-water tank.

Next to the toilet area is the opening to the incinerator. Here waste wood and paper are stored. The hot-water tank is built around the incinerator. When sun heat fails, Bakewell burns his waste material and heats his water that way.

What did all this cost? Bakewell es- timates $16,500. The cost doesn’t include their own time, but it does include all their mistakes. “One thing is important to note,” Bakewell says. “This has been a completely private endeavor—no grants, no subsidies— and as such we’ve been motivated to be a lot more clever with some of our materials and cost savings than if we’d had a huge subsidy to put the whole thing together. We have integrated in one system the state of the art in all the little systems that usually come as individual components.

But here they have been brought together in a workable system that can function in a remote area.”

A Japanese architect who visited the Autonomous Dwelling Vehicle saw it as a good mass-production possibility. With floating collars around the units, he thought, they could be grouped to form residential marina colonies in countries with poorly developed utility infrastructures.

But that’s in the future. Right now it’s probably the most energy-efficient house in the country.

Pyramid Apartment House

EVERY tenant has an outside apart ment in a pyramid-shaped house de signed by Edwin A. Koch, New York architect. Some time ago, Koch planned a bank of apartments for a steeply sloping hillside. Then the bold idea occurred to him of joining four of the dwellings, back to back in a pattern like a cross, with the result shown above. Carrying modern set-back architecture to its logical extreme, the huge building provides a private terrace, with penthouse airiness, for every tenant above the fourth floor. No windows face the interior, a naturally ventilated hollow core fourteen stories high. Its base of sixty-four-foot diameter provides ample space for cars to discharge and pick up passengers at passageways leading to the elevators. Pedestrians use exterior doors. Apartments are supplied from a central plant with washed, humidified, and heated air in winter and with unheated air for summer coolness. Open corners of the building’s cross-shaped base provide a two-way automobile drive, a parking space for visitors, and two covered garages for tenants.

Church Cut In Half To Make Way For New Street

ONE of the most unusual engineering feats in recent years was the moving of a 4,000,000-pound Detroit church steeple to make way for a wider street. The 180-foot stone tower was moved by seven men while hundreds of breathless spectators looked on. Working under the direction of Carl F. Henrichsen and Carl A. Johnson, veteran building movers, the men first cut out a 27-foot section of the church so that the front could be moved back the same amount. The front portion was then jacked up and placed on skids. Inch by inch the Structure was moved by man power until it was against the rear portion of the church after which the skids were removed and foundation cemented fast. Due to danger of the slightest jar toppling steeple, it was necessary to eliminate all machinery.

Contractors Build Freak Test House

TO DETERMINE the feasibility and artistic effect of various materials for a group of new college buildings, a test building using many different materials was erected at Principia College, Elsah, Ill From the results gleaned from the novel experiment, the combination and types of material to be used in the construction of the main buildings was determined.

The small test building was constructed of stone, brick, cast concrete, and timber in brick and concrete. One side of the roof was made of concrete covered with slate, while the opposite side was plain concrete.

Bedroom on Stilts 10 Degrees Cooler Than on the Ground
WHEN A. Winters, a Californian, needed a cooler sleeping place he built a bedroom on top of a forty-foot steel tower, up in the air where the breezes are blowing. The room is large enough for a bed, two chairs and a small table. It is reached by means of a small electric elevator through a trap door in the floor, a convenience suitable for many a two and three-story house. Records show that the temperature at the height of the sleeping room averages ten degrees cooler than on the ground and it is particularly suited for low regions where vapors and fogs lie close to the earth. The chamber makes an ideal place for reading or studying.

Canvas House Costing But $1000 to Be Home of Future

CANVAS is now being considered by architects as an attractive and economical building material for the small homes of the future. Canvas can now be treated with preservative paints to make it waterproof and fireproof.

A summer home which can be built anywhere for less than $1000 uses canvas almost exclusively as a surfacing material. The open lower deck, raised one foot off the ground to avoid dampness, is used for garage, storage, and shower bath. The main floor 8 feet above is reached by a folding stairway, as is the sun-deck above.

Octagonal Hangar Houses Planes Without Waste Space

WHENEVER a new aviation field or airdrome is planned there always arises the problem as to the type of hangar which should be erected. If the aviation field is planned for a small town or for a limited number of planes the problem is simple but when a modern airdrome with unlimited aerial traffic is contemplated, conditions are different. In this latter case the maximum amount of shelter must be provided with the minimum amount of space taken up. It is obvious that hangars can not be erected at random around the field.

Commencing with the hangars of 20 years ago attempts have been made to secure economical housing for airplanes. In order to provide shelter for these aerial vehicles which have a most unfortunate shape in so far as hangars are concerned, engineers have produced ‘T’ shaped, square and rectangular buildings. All of these types have their disadvantages and most of them have considerable waste space.

Recently the hexhangar made its appearance. This type has a hexagonal or octagonal ground plan. It provides the maxi- mum amount of floor space for airplanes and at the same time is very convenient. Any plane can be taken out without moving any of the others. Each of the six sides has a door and each door opens to accommodations for one plane. The centre of the building can be used for office space, store room, machine shops, or pilots’ and mechanics’ rooms. To date it seems to be by far the most economical and convenient hangar produced.

For faster shopping: a Revolator

Cabs in this people-mover will whisk up and down on a continuous belt—something like a Ferris wheel. The Revolator is planned for a multilevel shopping center that’s being built in Morristown, N.J. Each cab will hold 150 shoppers, so a six-unit system could transport 40,000 an hour—far more than elevators or escalators. Cabs will move in unison every 60 seconds, stopping at each floor. The glass-enclosed system gives shoppers a view of all stores as they pass each floor. “Visibility and store frontage are of prime consideration in vertical centers,” says architect Lathrop Douglas whose firm conceived the Revolator.

The Roadside Stand Goes “High Hat”

It is easily seen that refreshment – seeking youngsters pick the place that catches the eye.

There is nothing like individuality to create lasting impressions. Here is a group of the once lowly roadside stands. Kinda ritzy, what?

In “going modern,” stand owners are overlooking nothing that will add distinctiveness to their business establishments. To the west goes the honor of pioneering in this movement.

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Building a “Tarzan” Tree Hut

IF YOU want to experience the sensation of a wild ride with the airmail, select a night when the weather man predicts “whoopee,” don a helmet, goggles, leather jerkin, or what have you, and seat yourself in a swivel chair in the highest tree hut you can find. To help the imagination, take along a flash light and a book of airplane adventures. However, you won’t need these after the storm breaks. Boy! Feel those air bumps! You zoom to get above the storm. You roll! You side slip! Then, crash! The wing has crumpled! You’re in a tailspin! You grab your ‘chute! You throw open the cockpit (or hut window) ! Wow! The wind takes away your breath! The rain slashes your face! A flash of lightning! All about you empty space! Another flash! Tree branches are revealed below! You are about to crash! Too late to leap!

A good test of nerve, this, for you fellows who expect some day to pilot a plane, under varied weather conditions.

Undoubtedly, there has been an increase in the construction of tree huts in the past year. In a recent motor trip, I came upon dozens of them, some finished, many in the course of building. Aviation is having its influence on the airminded, suggesting the tree cabin as next best to owning a plane.

Where is your tree? Each tree has its particular problem. A tree with many branches affords excellent support for a hut. A straight tree with a few large branches may have a hut built around it, supported upon brackets. A group of two, three or four trees may have a hut hung between them.

The photograph shows a hut built between the branches of a willow tree by Boy Scouts of Villa Park, Illinois. The hut is not one of beauty, but new lumber was not available and the boys had to do the best they could with boards from a tumble-down barn. That is often the case, and the gang’s specifications call only for a substantial foundation, a tight roof, a door and window, bunks, a stove, and room enough to turn around in.

Tree Branches Support Floor A diagram shows how the foundation of the willow-tree hut was framed with tree branches. If 2-by-4s or 2-by-6s are available, it would be better to use them, because of the greater ease of spiking them in place. Branches used for floor sills and joists must be thoroughly tested for strength and their bark must be removed to prevent rapid decay. In addition to the framing shown in the diagram, a post extends from the tree crotch to a girder placed under the center of the floor for reinforcement; and there are block supports and diagonal braces. A careful study must be given to the framing, because each member must be secure, with no possibility of its racking loose in heavy wind. Bolting may be best in some places, anchoring with strap iron in other places.

With the framing completed and floored over, setting the wall studs, sheathing them, and constructing the roof will be quick work.

Make a lean-to or a gable roof, with a rise of at least 3 inches to the foot, to give it adequate pitch to shed rain. Lay the roof boards close together, then cover them with heavy roofing paper.

Sash Window Is Best A screened window with wooden shutter is sufficient for warm weather, but a sash of the size used for basement and garage windows is not expensive, and you will need it unless you expect to abandon the hut for the winter. Perhaps you can find an old sash. It will be no trick to reglaze a broken light or two.

A battened door is good enough, with pioneer latch and latchstring. If you install a stove, place a sheet of galvanized iron under it, and protect the wall behind it with another sheet, or with a sheet of asbestos; also protect the wall or roof through which you run the stovepipe. Double deck your bunks. Maybe you can pick up two discarded bed springs or borrow a couple of army cots.

No modern tree hut is complete without a radio, so install an aerial and a ground. A good ground will serve also as a lightning rod.

Tree huts are reached by extension ladders, rope ladders, ladders made by nailing cleats to the tree trunk, and by a combination of these. Usually the lower length is made removable, and pulled up out of reach to make the hut inaccessible.

To gain entrance to the willow-tree hut shown in the photograph, one first climbs into the crotch of the tree, then up the branch on the right of the drawbridge. When all are in for the night, and the cat has been put out, the drawbridge is raised. Obviously, this is done to discourage airminded sleep walkers from descending in scanty attire.

An accompanying diagram suggests how to frame the floor for a small two-tree hut. First, spike a pair of 2-by-4 blocks about 30 inches long to each tree (A, Fig. 2), on opposite sides, with the tops on a line with one another. Across the tops of these blocks rest two pieces of 2-by-6 (B), for floor girders, and spike them to the trees. And across the blocks near the bottom spike a 2-by-4 plate (C), one on each side of the trees. Cut separator block D (Figs. 2 and 3) to make a snug fit between 2-by-4s C, and spike it at the center of their length.

Girder B projects several inches beyond the trees, to support the end floor joists E. After cutting enough joists of the desired length, a spacing of 16 inch or so, center them on the girders and spike them in place. Then spike the headers F to their ends. Cut struts G, next, with ends notched to fit over header F and plate G, as indicated in Fig. 3. The struts must be cut accurately to make a good piece of joinery. Tie the center struts with the 1-by-6 tie plate H. With the platform framed and braced, lay the flooring, then proceed with the construction of the hut.

With the substitution of heavier timbers, and the addition of struts, the same form of construction may be used for a larger platform.

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U.S. Buries 6 Billions in Gold

Protected by water, gas and electricity.

Uncle Sam guards six tons of yellow metal from gangland and foreign foes.

by Ollie M. James

WITH utmost secrecy, Uncle Sam has buried the largest gold cache in history —192,000,000 ounces of the precious yellow metal worth $6,000,000,000. Where he has buried it, however, is no secret.

The lock box for the lion’s share of the world’s gold is a treasure chest that is a marvel of modern engineering. Located at Fort Knox, Kentucky, 30 miles southwest of Louisville, the vault is equipped with every burglar-proof device known to science and is bomb-proof and gas-proof.

Rising two stories above ground on a concrete base ten feet deep and padded with tons of re-enforcing steel as a precaution against tunneling, the building has walls of steel coated with layers of cement of secret thickness; water pipes that can immediately flood the whole building in case of emergency, and steel plates surrounding the inner vaults that set off deadly fumes as soon as a blow torch is applied.

But the most powerful protection will be the United States Army’s only mechanized cavalry unit with its squadron of Christie cars—11-ton fighting monsters able to travel 55 miles an hour over any terrain. With an elaborate air defense, Fort Knox will be a tough nut for any big-scale gang foray or an invading foe to crack. Treasury officials point out that, even if the gold was reached, its removal would be a tremendous task. Provided that an invading force could: successfully fight its way ‘through the Appalachians, reach the treasure house and rifle its vaults, it would take an army of 120,000 men, each packing 100 pounds of gold, to remove the 5,714 tons of metal.

Although constructed in the most modern manner, there is a touch of the medieval in the two water-filled moats that encircle the strong box. In addition, the whole is surrounded by an electrified ten-foot steel fence, guarded by sentries 24 hours a day. Concrete pill-boxes, bristling with machine guns, are set at each corner of the building, and a dome on top of the treasure house contains more machine guns as well as powerful searchlights.

Transfer of the gold from unsafe coastal depositories to Fort Knox was no simple matter. Fifty armored trains, each with more than 100 soldiers aboard—with thousands more strung along the route, aided by secret service men and police—moved the nearly six tons of gold from New York, Philadelphia and other cities.

The new fortress-vault at Fort Knox cost $468,000 to build, including the cost of 660 tons of re-enforcing steel and 600 tons of structural steel. Even plus the $100,000 mailing expense, Uncle Sam figures he is getting off cheap.

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Bombproof Plane Factories ROLL INTO MOUNTAIN SIDE

Raid Shelters for Assembly Plants: A Swiss Inventor’s Solution to the Problem of Protecting Production AIRPLANE FACTORIES that literally run to shelter from raiding bombers have been invented by Antoine Gazda, noted Swiss armament designer, and erected at undisclosed places in Switzerland by the Pilatus aircraft concern as a national-defense precaution. A typical installation consists of a pair of twin assembly plants, normally standing in the open where their total of 360 workers enjoy natural sunshine and fresh air. At an air-raid alarm signal, however, a “motorman” enters a control cabin at the rear center of each plant’s upper floor. He swings a switch handle, and the entire 1,600-ton factory rolls ponderously on electric-powered wheels into a cavern in a mountain side, completing its strange journey in about twenty minutes. Only its front remains exposed, and steel armor covers this end.

Meanwhile, workers reconnect quick-change electric and plumbing fittings to mains within the cavern, and attach a ventilating tube whose intake is hidden. Then the plant resumes full operation under artificial-daylight lamps. In case of a poison-gas attack, the front portal can be hermetically sealed, and fresh air drawn in through the ventilator is filtered and purified. When danger has passed, an “all clear” signal from observers brings the factory out into the open again.

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Haunted By His Ingenuity!

by Kip Blair

EVER spend a night in a haunted house?

Well I did!

While cold chills ran up my spine and the hair on my scalp seemed to rise and curl, I saw and heard things which only a ghost could explain. I saw doors open and close without a touch from human hands. I stood frozen in my tracks as a cut-glass humming bird raised its voice in macabre song. My hat and coat were hung on a hall rack which vanished into nothing the moment I turned my back. And, as I stood alone before a statue in the gloomy drawing room, I heard and saw that statue play, on a zither, any tune I chose to name!

You don’t believe me, do you? Well, I don’t know as I blame you. But, if you should go to San Francisco and wander through one of the city’s most exclusive residential areas, you couldn’t miss this house. Dilapidated, unpainted and forbidding, it looms like a spectre in the midst of the surrounding architectural opulence and beauty. But you’ll know the house I mean, all rights—for passers-by will be giving its crumbling entrance-way a wide berth.

I know I was warned the night I visited this strange California mansion. As I stood on the steps and attempted to penetrate the grime which had been gathering on the dusty windows for years, an urchin’s voice from a safe distance across the street cautioned me against attempting to gain entrance.

“Better not go in, Mister,” he shouted. ‘”That house is haunted. You’ll see—wait’ll you ring the bell!”

I saw all right—worse still, I heard. Hardly had I touched the cobwebbed doorbell, when I was riveted in my tracks in horror. From the eerie recesses of the darkened house came the sound of a bugle softly playing taps!

A moment later the great doors swung open mysteriously and, though not a soul appeared, I somehow could not restrain my desire to enter. And glad I was that I did—for, once inside, I met the master of this mysterious household, Dr. Cecil Nixon, prominent San Francisco dentist.

And, in Dr. Nixon, lies the explanation for the entire mystery. For the doctor — a black-haired, hollow-eyed wizard—is an amateur inventor, and his house, with its windows that have remained unwashed for 22 years, its paint peeled by the ravages of time, and its whole appearance one of grim foreboding, is the monument to his amazing skill.

“Come right in! Don’t be frightened,” Dr. Nixon greeted me. “There aren’t any ghosts here. It’s all done with mirrors—or, at least, mirrors and wheels.”

The outside of the house was left in an uninviting state on purpose, the dentist told me. “After all,” he explained “no self-respecting haunted house has a fresh coat of paint. That’s the reason we leave it weather-beaten and in such contrast to the beauty inside. And, of course, those who visit me can more readily enjoy the interior after viewing the outside A truer word never was spoken! The inside of the house would delight the severest art critic and the most exacting housewife. From the moment the visitor crosses the threshold, and puts behind him the dingy drabness of the house’s exterior, he realizes he is in one of the most beautiful homes in San Francisco.

Rich, deep-toned hangings, exquisitedly-carved and finely-turned furniture, rare objects of art and fine-panelled rosewood, walnut and mahogany trim, convince the astounded guest that he has passed into another world, a paradise of delicate beauty. At the same time, the very elegance of the interior, with its cathedrallike, old world richness, never permits the visitor to forget that he is in a house that would delight a Karloff.

Take the hall hat rack, for example. I put my hat and coat on it and had turned to speak to Dr. Nixon, when a whirring behind me spun me around again. The rack and my coat and hat had disappeared! Where, a moment before, I was certain I had hung them there now was nothing but the beautifully carved and panelled wall.

“I just put them out of the way,” the dentist laughed. “Here”—he showed me two little knobs in the carving—”I turn these and the rack, which is an eyesore, folds neatly into the wall.”

I resolved to be a bit more observant!

We strolled along a corridor, this strange, severely-garbed genius and I, till we came to a highly -carved and polished door. At a command from Dr. Nixon, it opened to permit us to pass through!

Once inside the drawing room, the doctor issued another quiet command. I and from a distant part of ; the house came the quietest, most beautiful, and at the same time most somber, organ music I have ever heard. It was ; as though the Angel of Death were approaching and had provided himself with suitable entrance music.

“Scared?” the dentist I smiled. “All right, we’ll do without the organ music.”

And again, without raising his voice above a murmur, he issued a command and the distant playing stopped. Beautiful as the music was, I found relief at its ceasing, for it gave me a chance to examine the exquisite paintings, sculpture and carving of the room.

In still another chamber, however — a room known as “The Death Valley Room”—I was to get my greatest surprise. For, suddenly, and at no command from the doctor, the soft tones of playing flutes seemed to come from between the walls and once again flood the room with beautiful music. Three ornamental and expensive-looking birds added to the mystery at this point by breaking into high-pitched song.

“What a place!” I shivered, as the doctor laughed at my discomfiture.

“These are but minor attractions,” he smiled. “Come—I’ll introduce you to Isis. She’s my real pet.”

Pet, indeed! Isis was the most amazing exhibit in this most amazing of all households. With the figure of an East Indian princess, she reclined on a couch, and in her lap lay an ancient zither.

“Any particular tune you’d like to hear?” Dr. Nixon asked. “Just request it and Isis will oblige.”

More in amusement than belief, I suggested “Swanee River.” Without a word or a touch from the doctor, the waxen fingers of the image began to move over the zither. The tune definitely was “Swanee River!” I mumbled other tunes, hard ones, easy ones, obscure melodies, symphonies. Isis played them all!

“Stop!” I shouted to the doctor. “I give up! Let me in on this mystery before I lose my reason.”

Dr. Nixon laughed heartily. Then came the explanations. Isis is a veritable heap of intricate mechanism—1,187 wheels (300 in her breast alone), 2,233 miles of fine wire, several hundred electromagnets, 9 watches and many jeweled movements, make up the internal organs of this remarkable creature. There isn’t a single phonograph recording in her makeup, the tunes being selected by a series of spinning discs.

Isis can play any one of 3,000 tunes at a given command. The speaker’s voice is carried through a tube at the base of her couch, and the vibrations do the rest. Isis hasn’t missed yet, and one night, during a reception at the Nixon home, she picked up the notes of a singer’s voice drifting in from the drawing room and began to pick out “Where the River Shannon Flows” on her zither.

It took Dr. Nixon three years just to draw up the blueprints for Isis, and four years for the actual construction work. “There are 150 different scientific principles involved in Isis,” the doctor said. “To explain the mechanics of her operation would require a book. I can guarantee you, though, that there isn’t an automaton like her anywhere else in the world.”

And that isn’t all— Isis even responds to heat and cold! When it gets too hot in the room, she simply lifts her hand and doffs her veil. Dr. Nixon regards that as one of his simpler inventions, however; the trick is accomplished with a thermometer attached to an electrical circuit running through one arm.

But what about the other Nixon inventions?

Well, there’s the matter of that door opening, for example, without anyone appearing to touch it. That involves one of the doctor’s latest inventions—the mechanical ear. He calls it “Sesame,” since it is imbedded in the heavy carving of the door and when you say “Open!” to it, it opens. Aside from inferring that it was another case of vibrations, though, Dr. Dixon wouldn’t explain.

The flute music is done with watches. The dentist took an ordinary pocket watch, removed the hands, and substituted a cam. The latter causes a wire lever to contact a mercury vial, which forms a contact and starts electrical current flowing from batteries concealed near the watch. The current causes a mechanism in the basement—including a bellows and a music roll—. to operate the flutes, which are concealed behind wall paintings.

Taps at a push of the doorbell is accomplished by a music box which is set in motion when the button is touched. In the construction of the box, Dr. Nixon used four small dinner chimes, and the notes are the result of four small hammers hitting the chimes.

The birds chirp because of a watch and cam arrangement similar to that used for the flutes. Actually, there are watches hidden all over the house, their mechanism set to open doors, to start music at stipulated intervals, to move panels, and to turn off the lights.

I accepted Dr. Nixon’s invitation to descend to the basement, although I confidently expected to find it lined with coffins, skeletons, shrouds and other spook paraphernalia. Instead I found a cellar resembling the power plant in a defense-contract machine shop.

The pumps, bellows, music rolls, and other equipment that made up the flutes, covered one wall, the mechanism for the other gadgets took up a second wall. The rest of the area was given over to the organ. The doctor admitted that he attended his first organ concert several years ago and came away with a great longing to own one of the instruments himself.

Not having the do-re-mi to buy one, he went to the library, read every book on organs he could obtain, and came home and built one which present-day experts describe as one of the finest in the country.

“But how was it started and stopped at your command?” I asked him.

“Easy,” the doctor said. “There’s a little pin in the floor of the drawing room upstairs—all I had to do was step on that to start and stop the music. You thought it was something supernatural.”

That’s the way the doc works. He’s been a tinkerer since he was a boy. Although he never studied any subject outside of his dentistry, he has a complete knowledge of architecture, and does all his own remodeling. He’s an artistic wood-carver, and fashioned the work in his own house. He’s a qualified electrician, has mastered medicine (treats himself for all ailments!), knows pharmacy and compounds his own prescriptions, has earned his living in shipbuilding, entertained on the stage as a magician, and can carry on a learned discourse on any form of art. He even did the sculpture which adorns his own drawing room.

“What you need,” I told him, as my coat and hat popped out of the wall and I prepared to leave, “is a hobby.”

“What I need,” said the doctor, “is a thirty-hour day.”