possible and the prickly body stowed quickly between the sheets which, if the extreme of luxury was practiced, had been previously warmed to a degree by the hot warming pan.
On Winter days the frost-cramped fingers were loosened by the dry heat from the red hot office stove to the point where they could hold the pen. Meanwhile, the ink had thawed.
The first trace of an attempt to ventilate even a public building seems to have been in 1660 when Sir Christopher Wren, by what was in effect a series of open fireplaces and their associated chimneys, sought to relieve the foul conditions in the House of Commons. A crude hand operated wooden paddle fan was introduced in 1736, and in 1834, due to the “improvements” carried out under the direction of Sir Humphrey Davey, both buildings of Parliament were destroyed by fire. Meanwhile a crude and ineffective system of heating by steam had been installed in 1824.
The development of modem methods of heating and ventilating in this country is due principally to the work of Briggs, Baldwin and Billings during the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century.
Today vast industries are engaged in the manufacture and application of devices to the end that our buildings may be the acme of sanitary luxury, and warmed and ventilated till the fresh clean atmosphere of a fine Spring day is little, if any, better. It has been proved without possibility of doubt that the working efficiency of the human machine is lowered by vitiated air.
Commonly our grandfathers lived over their places of business. Even in our childhood days, the methods of transportation were so crude that suburban life was practically unknown. Lacking a span of fine horses and the means to support a coachman or groom, one could not live further than walking distance from the money counter. The height of a building above the ground was limited both by our fathers’ capacity for climbing stairs, and by the load carrying limits of practical masonry piers, even when broadly buttressed. The elevator was still a crude and slow-moving affair — generally a hand lift and, only recently, even belt-driven from line shafting. Today the larger areas in our “older” cities are still covered with such “antiquated” structures. The first steel skeleton frame building with curtain walls was erected in Chicago so recently as 1884. The first high-speed multiple-roped hydraulic elevator was installed in 1899, and the first electric gearless traction high-speed elevator of the commonly used type was installed in 1905. Without such means of rapid vertical transportation, the modern skyscraper would be a practical and economic impossibility.
The economic pressure of our day makes such demands upon our time, that more and more concentrated effort is required of us. The working limits of dawn to dark have been removed; so, in the evenings of the shorter days, sparkling and aerie towers of artificial light rise to the darkening skies. But the incandescent lamp, even when camouflaged to the extreme of ingenuity, is not the candle. Many dangers lurk within its bright filament, and we learn that misuse of this seemingly simple thing destroys the eyes it serves. The proper use of light is essential to the efficiency of the human mechanism, and so with improved methods of lighting we find that more light properly distributed increases our ability to work intensely. The illumination of our workingplaces becomes a matter of prime importance, and again, almost over night, a great industry grows up about this new demand.
So, in a single generation, our buildings have ceased to be mere housings. They become machines requiring the sort of study in design given in this mechanistic age to other engines.
Stand on the Rector Street Station of the Sixth Avenue elevated and look East over Trinity Churchyard. Here is spread before you the entire history of the modern building — a history covering less than half a century; comparable with the short history of Athens in the Periclean age. Across Broadway is the First National Bank Building; a solid Æchean mass of masonry, and an object of astonishment when the spire of Trinity still towered above the city — a time that most of those who read this can remember. On the opposite side of Wall Street is an “early” attempt at the skeleton steel structure, near which stood the “ancient” and now insignificant Tower Building — the first of the modern buildings erected in New York.
Surrounding this historic picture is a group of modern mastadons, from the Empire Building to the Trinity Building, including the palatial home of a great financial institution and the Equitable Building, the latest and the greatest of them all.
In the foreground with its sacristy the finest bit of Gothic in this country, stands little Trinity, in its structural form typifying the construction methods of the past, and the age of handicraft. Against this looms the product of the steel mill and the factory — vast piles of machine made materials, in which, and to a lesser extent, even in our homes, hardly more than the. decorative forms originating in the structural methods of our ancestors can find a place, much after the fashion that the Romans applied ashlars and casings of Hellenistic structure in stone, to brick and concrete domes and arches.
On Winter days the frost-cramped fingers were loosened by the dry heat from the red hot office stove to the point where they could hold the pen. Meanwhile, the ink had thawed.
The first trace of an attempt to ventilate even a public building seems to have been in 1660 when Sir Christopher Wren, by what was in effect a series of open fireplaces and their associated chimneys, sought to relieve the foul conditions in the House of Commons. A crude hand operated wooden paddle fan was introduced in 1736, and in 1834, due to the “improvements” carried out under the direction of Sir Humphrey Davey, both buildings of Parliament were destroyed by fire. Meanwhile a crude and ineffective system of heating by steam had been installed in 1824.
The development of modem methods of heating and ventilating in this country is due principally to the work of Briggs, Baldwin and Billings during the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century.
Today vast industries are engaged in the manufacture and application of devices to the end that our buildings may be the acme of sanitary luxury, and warmed and ventilated till the fresh clean atmosphere of a fine Spring day is little, if any, better. It has been proved without possibility of doubt that the working efficiency of the human machine is lowered by vitiated air.
Commonly our grandfathers lived over their places of business. Even in our childhood days, the methods of transportation were so crude that suburban life was practically unknown. Lacking a span of fine horses and the means to support a coachman or groom, one could not live further than walking distance from the money counter. The height of a building above the ground was limited both by our fathers’ capacity for climbing stairs, and by the load carrying limits of practical masonry piers, even when broadly buttressed. The elevator was still a crude and slow-moving affair — generally a hand lift and, only recently, even belt-driven from line shafting. Today the larger areas in our “older” cities are still covered with such “antiquated” structures. The first steel skeleton frame building with curtain walls was erected in Chicago so recently as 1884. The first high-speed multiple-roped hydraulic elevator was installed in 1899, and the first electric gearless traction high-speed elevator of the commonly used type was installed in 1905. Without such means of rapid vertical transportation, the modern skyscraper would be a practical and economic impossibility.
The economic pressure of our day makes such demands upon our time, that more and more concentrated effort is required of us. The working limits of dawn to dark have been removed; so, in the evenings of the shorter days, sparkling and aerie towers of artificial light rise to the darkening skies. But the incandescent lamp, even when camouflaged to the extreme of ingenuity, is not the candle. Many dangers lurk within its bright filament, and we learn that misuse of this seemingly simple thing destroys the eyes it serves. The proper use of light is essential to the efficiency of the human mechanism, and so with improved methods of lighting we find that more light properly distributed increases our ability to work intensely. The illumination of our workingplaces becomes a matter of prime importance, and again, almost over night, a great industry grows up about this new demand.
So, in a single generation, our buildings have ceased to be mere housings. They become machines requiring the sort of study in design given in this mechanistic age to other engines.
Stand on the Rector Street Station of the Sixth Avenue elevated and look East over Trinity Churchyard. Here is spread before you the entire history of the modern building — a history covering less than half a century; comparable with the short history of Athens in the Periclean age. Across Broadway is the First National Bank Building; a solid Æchean mass of masonry, and an object of astonishment when the spire of Trinity still towered above the city — a time that most of those who read this can remember. On the opposite side of Wall Street is an “early” attempt at the skeleton steel structure, near which stood the “ancient” and now insignificant Tower Building — the first of the modern buildings erected in New York.
Surrounding this historic picture is a group of modern mastadons, from the Empire Building to the Trinity Building, including the palatial home of a great financial institution and the Equitable Building, the latest and the greatest of them all.
In the foreground with its sacristy the finest bit of Gothic in this country, stands little Trinity, in its structural form typifying the construction methods of the past, and the age of handicraft. Against this looms the product of the steel mill and the factory — vast piles of machine made materials, in which, and to a lesser extent, even in our homes, hardly more than the. decorative forms originating in the structural methods of our ancestors can find a place, much after the fashion that the Romans applied ashlars and casings of Hellenistic structure in stone, to brick and concrete domes and arches.