7 City vs Country design—Criticism of both—Indication of trends—and solution of technical design.

7  City vs Country design—Criticism of both—Indication of trends—and solution of technical design.

2In our cities, despite the many hardships of traffic congestion, and despite the great heights to which the buildings must of economical necessity rise, through segregation of functions, whole stories, and even

3 two stories, are built in a day, equivalent in volume, structurally, to as many as 20 and 30 residences, any one of which take months to reach the same stage in their building. This is because there is sufficient money, and repetition to allow of some standardization and production methods in the city building. Moreover there is sufficient money, or capital involved in these great city structures to permit of the employment of scientific minds in their creation, and to allow of machinery placement.

4 It will be observed, in the city building, that no longer, though it persisted until a few years ago, is the exterior style of the building first portrayed and the interior usefulness of the building thereto dependent. As should be the case with the small house, the large building has segregated its functions to some extent, first the framework of chassis or floor levels is rapidly erected, with no consideration of vertical walls, be they either interior partitions or exterior sheltering. As rapidly as the floor levels are created the arterial system of wiring, piping, etc., is threaded throughout the framework. The utility units of heating, ventilating, and plumbing, etc. are then applied. Finally is the now unimportant, exterior, so called ‘‘Curtain wall’’, applied floor by floor, often times starting at the top, or in the middle of the building, and working down. Though it is called curtain, implying hanging, it is still piled and pasted into position. Whole interiors of buildings, except for the final unnecessary and antediluvian plastering functions, are finished with but canvas draping, enclosing the floor levels.

5 For the sake of some real character and feeling in the architectural expression of the necessary exterior, as we are now beginning to see it, in proportion to the mass and functionalism of the great skyscrapers, it is almost too bad that the temporary exterior walls of the last thirty years, were not continued ‘‘as temporary’’, until the eyes of the architect had become accustomed to the scale of his composition. In the new architecture, rather than employing wasteful heavy masonry units in these exterior walls, actually replaceable units will really be hung, with all the simplicity of one point suspension and triangular contact. As opposed to the feeling of depression and immobility, necessary in masonry piles, will be the feeling of tension, sheer, and suppleness, lustrously revealed, as in the modern silk stocking closely drawn over the functional member, as opposed to the depth of reveal of the heavy ribs of the old fashioned, cotton stocking, which could exhibit nothing but its own soddenness. Had these temporary curtains been applied to the skyscrapers the characters of these buildings might have expressed themselves in a final shell fit to last, when finally, if the building acquired historical character and fineness, might a monumental stone finish be finally applied, as signifying public approval and affection, not otherwise. As most buildings become obsolete in their functionalism long before they can acquire any such character, this would in most cases be improbable as an ultimate finish. When we view such beautiful buildings as the Tribune Tower in Chicago, and the few other notable examples of latter-day architecture, which considers the whole mass in its design, and employ stone only as a fireproofing or purely monumental medium, there being none in its curtain panels, we particularly feel the truth of this statement.

6 The Tribune Tower is especially fine in so many ways, but possibly its hexagonal rounding plan, bespeaking permanent individualism, is its most fundamental pleasantry, lacking the usual voluble hoggishness that motivates owners, and architects who are automatically formulatic, or willing to let themselves down to it, to square buildings out to their limit inch, cutting off their own light, blindly, like a selfish person. The method of architectural designing, so widely practiced in the city, and even ludicrously seen in the suburb, or would-be-suburb of the real estate subdivision, which considers only the front or a side on a corner as necessary for some measure of design, and exposes vast blank, bare, brick walls in anticipation of a future neighbor being equally hoggish, is as offensive, when abstractly considered, as would be a persons clothing only the front of their body, leaving the great blank rear portions exposed in anticipation of their finally being concealed by proximity to other peoples. If the problem in occupancy demands so much volume on a given portion of earth, it should be simply solved on an engineering basis in the utilization of metal to attain the volume by height. The stylistic and habitual hold of masonry methods building from the outside in has made possible this lack of design and hoggishness. How much more individualistic and beautiful is a city such as Washington by virtue of the plan that prevented such hoggishness in most of its quarters.

7 Lately a grand and glorious formulatic ridiculum, superficially acquainted with the latest formulae, but unversed in composing them, striving apparently to make a modernistic impression, has been erected in a prominent position in Chicago. It has given up its cornices ‘‘like a good boy’’; and has indirectly lighted its entrance after the smart vogue; and given up its reveal in certain portions, but oh, what portions! It has placed a plain block vertical mausoleum of a million-ton apparent weight, (a forty foot reveal in itself due to its very solidity), upon an inadequate three story base of marble veneer with no greater than a 1/16 inch reveal. This veneer one inch thick (apparently) by 6 ft. square, presents the impression of carrying the Washington Monument upon a mahogany veneer high boy, both stylistically Washingtonian, let us say, but the composition being too big for the purely formulatic designer. It is, to say the least, upside down. Architecture is now in the predicament of ‘‘humpty dumpty’’ and it is going to take a new egg to set up the profession in business once more. The old egg, broken by economics and truth, was to say the least ‘‘ancient’’.

8 Architects will learn with startling interest and pleasure that the newly devised method of building from the inside out, actually makes circular, or any other plan of building, more facile than the ugly box method of building from the outside in, as well as ready attainment of volume by height, more economically, than by the present squatty-squashiness. This as will be later seen is occasioned by the central tower or natural support. Nature didn’t build trees with four legs, and cross members whose leverage is offset by gusset plates and then try to fit the branches of the tree and its other functionalism inside the frame. We are no longer ‘‘wall conscious’’ in our city building, that is we don’t know or care whether this or that wall is supporting the building, therefore if with less material and with greater facility it suddenly becomes evident that we can build much stronger and finer buildings by carrying the weight up through a central mast depending the balance of the building therefrom and deriving real utility from the tensile strength of metal, it will of economic law be necessary that we do so. Those who wish then to design in harmony with progress will have to acquaint themselves with the new method. Failure to do so will, of economic necessity, relegate them to the mausoleum designing field.

9 In further consideration of natures method of support it will be evident that, where there is requirement for more volume than can be carried on one stem, that another stem (suspended or supporting) is created. In the new method of building, central masts are created for a given cluster area of rooms, though in one building the clusters of more than one mast may be squared off to butt up, one against the other, making possible a homogenous design of exterior covering, like a conventionalized clump or grove of trees. The trunks need not show, any more than from without the forest.

10 It will be seen that a building immediately attains its full height in the form of its central permanent tower, from which it then flows down in harmony with gravity, and gravity is utilized all the way through in natural plumbing and adjustments self aligning by virtue of the new modular system of design from the inside out, with its hanging cluster of angular wedges forming immobile, horizontal, complete circle, arching.

11 In the new style of building, designing may be done by centers. There is no necessity of ‘‘partition rupture’’ of design.

12 In the new style of building no waste takes place, either in temporary scaffolding, or broken cuttings. Think of the waste that continually goes on when so well organized building firms as Thompson Starret, must cart away from one city building over a million bricks, which have in the process of handling been demolished to dust or useless broken parts.

13 It is not so much the loss of the brick material itself as in the time loss, represented by its many handlings, in manufacture, transportation, to, up, into, down, out, and away from the building. Without legislation recognizing it, the world is now on a time standard instead of a gold standard in temporal things. Wasting time is exactly the same as throwing away gold used to be. Therefore we are forced to design and figure in the fourth dimension which is time. In building, this involves the use of a trigonometrical modulus which considers the time element. Incidentally this is the occasion of its being used in ‘‘navigation’’ or mathematics involving large scale motion. A trigonometrical modulus in building, starting from the center and working out, permits absolute modular division and solution of all fitting, impossible to plane or solid geometry modular systems, starting on the outside, and working in, and based on the fallacy of a possible truly flat surface, and the fallacy of a series of right angles being created by a plumb bob line and a spirit level. These fallacies are generally accepted in the building trade, because the error is considered to be so slight, as not to be worth consideration, by the few acquainted with it at all. There is only one truth, and therefor anything based on a lie or fallacy is wrong and must eventually go. Our geometrical habits are our inheritance from our ancestors back in the days when people thought the world to be flat. Despite the truth to the contrary, the vast majority of the world, (which is always so busy with the other person’s affairs that it never thinks that the truth which disrupts its habits applies to it personally), has continued to figure and build on this fallacious basis. Because man could not by virtue of his materially small stature readily perceive that the world was spheroidal, so has he failed to perceive the time element in his buildings. It was too slow and on too great a scale for his material perception; he has known too little of abstract perception. He can visualize the time element when the material object is seen to move, in relation to the world about him, which he is used to thinking of as motionless. This is only his physical picayunness, his abstract mental, spiritual self can be as large as it wants. It is alone without time, and can, when really exercised and utilized, provide absolutely truthful proportions and characteristics of material things, his mentality if trusted will reveal the relativity of temporal (time) matter.