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TIMESTAMPS

The winning black and white entries in the third A Moment in Building contest are featured in this issue.

The ten books on architecture written by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio two millennia ago were a series of "how to" instructions for Roman architects to make both beautiful and practical buildings.
 

Vitruvius, a Roman military architect and engineer, left us a detailed description of Roman building science, rules of proportion, and the education, duties, and responsibilities of the Roman builder. These practical instructions for building and beauty influenced the art of building for two thousand years. The architectural historian Talbot Hamlin wrote (1940) that Vitruvius expressed ideals remarkably close to those of modern architects. Vitruvius claimed architecture was composed of the triple essence: strength, utility, and aesthetic effect. Sir Henry Wotton (1568 - 1639) quaintly changed this to, "commodity, firmness and delight." The writings of Vitruvius inspired medieval builders, Bramante, Michelangelo, Palladio, Vignola, and architects of our time, including Le Corbusier. The great engineer Luigi Nervi in his Harvard lectures of 1961 and 1962 (1) continued to affirm the guiding principles of commodity, firmness, and delight which he called "building correctly." Today (1992) Vitruvian values appear to be irrelevant. However, the art of building continues to be defined as William Prescott described it in 1847. It is "the surest test of the civilization of a people, at least, as sure as any afforded by the mechanical arts" he wrote.(2) By the "mechanical arts" Prescott meant the science, skill, materials, and methods of building. These have altered the time-tested ideals of "firmness, commodity and delight" beyond recognition in the past two decades. Yet the definition of architecture as Prescott claimed

1885 - Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz began his architectural practice with a commission to design the firts telephone building in New York City.  The Metropolitan Telephone Building was completed in 1887 and later demolished in order to build a larger building. (Architect - Haines Lundberg Whaehler, NYC) Courtesy Haines Lundberg Whaehler, NYC

1905 - The New York Times Building, one of New York City's first skyscrapers, was officially opened on January 1. It was the tallest building in New York City at the time, 419 feet from street level to top of flagpole and 57 feet below grade. The basement mechanical press room space was constructed at the same time as that of a subway line passing obliquely through the building's basement. (Architect - Haines Lundberg Whaehler, NYC) Courtesy Haines Lundberg Whaehler. NYC

The mechanical arts The history of the mechanical arts in this century is best described in the parable of the Bedouin and the camel. The camel, as you will recall, begged permission to warm its nose inside the tent. The Bedouin consented. The camel then begged leave to include its head, its neck, its hump. When the camel is entirely inside the tent, the Bedouin is out. The camel is the good Sir Henry Wollon's "utility" which is now expressed by the building's metabolic, communication, and control systems. These entered building unobtrusively a century ago with electricity and the vented plumbing trap. Today "Firmness, commodity and delight," have become "flexibility, bottom line, and interactive object." Electric motors In 1887 fifteen American manufacturers had produced over ten thousand electric motors of fifteen horsepower and under. By 1914, 30 percent of American industry was electrified and six years later it had grown to 70 percent. Between 1919 and 1927 over 40 percent of the steam engines in the United States were scrapped. Electric motors dramatically increased industrial production. They also caused a revolution in industrial construction. "Mill construction" designed around a single source of water or steam power had dominated industrial architecture from the beginning of the industrial revolution, beginning in the middle ages. Electric motors meant each machine could have its own power source

Overnight industrial buildings were changed to the single story horizontal structures we know today that are designed to accommodate the path of production from raw material to finished artifact.

Air conditioning

The city of Houston would not function today without air conditioning. Computers cannot operate at high temperatures. Drugs, synthetic fibers, precision instruments, surgery, and modern office work are all dependent on air conditioning as well. Yet, today's air conditioning is a very recent division of building science.

The first paper mill was air conditioned in 1906, followed by a pharmaceutical plant in Detroit in 1907 and a celluloid-film plant in New Jersey in 1908. Building air conditioning as we now use it was not introduced until the early 1950s.
 

Building owners were unwilling to trade ductwork for rentable space. The coil system that reduced duct sizes was introduced in the 1930s. Air shafts were eliminated and deep interior space became rentable. The 1931 Howe and Lescaze Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building was among the earliest to incorporate the new principles. However, the Empire State Building completed in the same year was not air conditioned. It had double-hung windows. Of the 22 million homes wired for electricity in 1938 less than a quarter of one percent had a single air-conditioned room. The great change took place from 1948 to 1953. Simple self- contained air-conditioning units were manufactured as plug-in appliances. Their introduction was paralleled by a sophisticated advertising campaign directed to homemakers.  They swept the market.  Sales in 1953 reached $250 million (roughly two and a half billion in 1992 dollars). Summertime awnings were discarded, and their place taken by the rumps of window air conditioners that leaked condensate on the pedestrians below. A National Association of Home Builders study claimed families in air-conditioned homes slept 10 percent longer, enjoyed their food more, did three times as much entertaining, spent one-third less time cleaning house, their babies suffered less heat rash, and their husbands brought more work home from the office. Husband, wife, and baby were less likely to kick their dogs than families in nonair-conditioned homes. By 1962 when Nervi was lecturing at Harvard, 6.5 million houses, six

1926 - When completed, the Barclay-Vesey Building was the largest telephone building in the world. It received international recognition and remains today a prominent feature of New York City's skyline. The building received the Architectural League of New York's Medal of Honor, was selected as the frontispiece in Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture , and termed the "first truly modem building designed in New York," by Lewis Mumford. (Architect - Homes Lundberg Whaehler, NYC) Courtesy Haines Lundberg Whaehler, NYC

By 1980 Houston was described as the most air-conditioned place on earth (95 percent of the homes had some form of air conditioning). It was said to contribute to the city's high murder rate because people in air-conditioned environments are isolated from the outside, out-of-touch, and become hostile.

In 1983 two thirds of all new homes and 83 percent of all new cars built in the U.S. were equipped with air conditioning. In the first nine months of that year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Americans spent $9.5 billion on air conditioning offices and factories.

Energy crisis

The "energy crisis" of the 1970s changed building configuration, window walls, automation systems, lighting, HYAC equipment, and the allocation of natural resources.

Light for working humans was halved from 100-foot candles to 50. There had been no spectacular improvement in visual acuity. The Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) simply decided workers could do with less.
 

Increased power and speed of electronic and communication equipment generated great quantities of heat inside sealed buildings. The major thermal problem was changed from heating buildings to cooling them, even in severe winters. Before the energy crisis, lighting was often controlled by a master switch on each floor. Utility companies recommended leaving the lights on all day. Today sensors detect movement in the room and turn the lights on only when occupied. Building cleaners no longer work at night but during the day to save electricity. Air ventilation consumes the largest amount of energy in sealed buildings, and to conserve energy ventilation is now minimized. The result: the appearance of a new rash of exotic respiratory diseases labeled "sealed building syndrome." Communication

1939 - The theme of the 1939 New York World's Fair was "The World of Tomorrow." of the seven exhi6ition buildings HLW designed for the fair, The Petroleum Industries Pavilion was hailed as among the "most avant-garde designs." (Architect - Homes Lundberg Whaehler, NYC) Courtesy Haines Lundberg Whaehler, NYC, Photo Ira Wright Martin

AT&T was incorporated in 1885 and a century later dismantled. It was the largest company on earth with assets of $150 billion, exceeding the combined assets of General Motors, Ford, General Electric, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola.

In 1900 the average daily local telephone calls made was 7,600,000. When split up, AT&T's assets included approximately 182,000,000 telephones and over a billion miles of wire. They employed nearly a million people and met an annual payroll of nearly $30 billion with earnings of over $15 million a day.

The result of the AT&T break up was a tremendous stimulation of the communications market. Buildings that had furnished the Vitruvian utility of 182,000,000 telephones connected by a billion miles of wire in 1984 are today being adapted to a further deluge of new electronic wizardry. Wotton's commodity is now "smart."

1990

The information and communication mechanical arts make more stringent demands on the buildings external and internal systems than the architectural and structural systems that fashion firmness and delight.

Microwave and satellite receivers demand substantial hardware and are precisely located on the roof. Building siting is determined by roof height, line of signal generation, and access to air rights imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration rather than views and sun angle as Vitruvius recommended. Receiver connections are coordinated with basement communication room locations and demand communications rooms for power rack, cable management, uninterrupted power supply battery backup systems, and multiplexers to strengthen incoming signals. These spaces are heated, air conditioned and humidity controlled, illuminated, protected from fire and water damage, accessible, and connected to vertical shafts and computers.

1980 - By 1980 Haines Lundberg Whaehler had designed over
40-miIIion square feet of research space. The Wilbur G. Malcom
Toxicology Laboratory for medical research is a state-of-the-art building.
It conforms to restrictive regulatory requirements and is
designed with interstitial floors devoted entirely to servicing the
technology of the research of the laboratories. Service spaces and
laboratories are designed for continuous and independent alteration.
(Architect - Haines Lundberg Whaehler, NYC)
Courtesy Haines Lundberg Whaehler. NYC, Photo Peter Aaron/ESTO

---

Mainframe computers are serviced by individual systems that guarantee uninterrupted power. Weight of equipment is significant, structural support and vibration control are demanded.

The quantities of air conditioning may be five to ten times that demanded by typical human occupancy. A unique controlled environment is created more like that of a submarine or space capsule than associated with at traditional building.

Costs

A study by English architect Francis Duffy revealed that ancillary areas required 10 percent of office building floor areas in 1970, 25 percent in 1980, and 40 to 50 percent by the end of the 1980s. Spaces designed for "human needs" are encroached by electronic equipment. Firmness, commodity, and delight are in short supply.

Cycles of building change are reflected in building costs. The shell of an office building consisting of structure, roof, and perimeter walls is designed to endure for fifty years. Services, elevators, air-conditioning plants, and main ducts for power, electronic data, and telecommunications may last twenty years and will be replaced three times during the life of a building.

Scenery, interior fittings, partitions, furniture, lighting, the more adaptable parts of air conditioning, finishes and decorations last five or six years and will be changed twenty or more times during the building's life.

Twenty-five years ago, Duffy claims, 70 percent of building cost was spent on the shell, 20 percent on services, 10 percent on scenery. Today it is 40 percent on shell, 40 percent on services, and 20 percent on scenery. The scenery that costs half of the shell eventually accounts for five times its cost.

Architecture as commonly conceived, taught in schools, and described in professional publications has diminished in importance as services and scenery absorb more and more of the budget.
 

Dirty power Increasingly sensitive electronic equipment demands a higher quality of power supply than utility companies normally supply. By 1987 at least three companies offered "premium grade" power for specialized equipment and services. Failures (blackouts), interruptions (outages), voltage sags and surges, harmonic distortion, frequency variations, voltage spikes, transient overvoltages, and radio frequency interference occur when power lines act as antenna, for radio frequency signals pollute the power supply. Computer crashes and scrambled data are life and death issues for hospital monitoring instruments Microprocessors are used increasingly in electronic cash registers, point-of-sale terminals, and test instruments. Industrial market microprocessors are incorporated into everything from home entertainment centers to kitchen appliances. Dirty power is a scourge from the trading center to the kitchen toaster. Brokerage houses with millions of dollars of transactions passing through their networks take few chances. They pay for better quality systems than hospitals or the Federal

1989 - The Union Pacific Harriman Dispatch Center is a remodeled 1891 brick freight and "head" house converted to a computer and dispatch center. It holds the nation's most technically sophisticated electronic rail dispatch center and controls 700 trains running on 23,000 miles of track. The center, constructed and in operation in eight months, was described as a "...high-tech bunker. ..epitomizing the brave new electronic future of railroads..,."  (Architects - Leo A. Daly of Omaha, Nebraska, and Washington, D.C., and Vahr, Vermeer & Hacker Architects, Lincoln, Nebraska) Courtesy A. Daly, Architects

Commodity, firmness, and delight for the mechanical arts of 1992

Today's office building is an information processing center. Designers find communications and information flow determine design solutions as surely as the electric motor determined the design of modern factory buildings. No building is exempt. Homes, schools, stores, museums, amusement parks, and factories are transformed by the electronic mechanical arts.

What do industrial designers design in a postindustrial age? The use function of industrial objects is associated with their form. The shape of the chair is dictated by the human sitting apparatus. Doors are scaled to human proportions. Steps are a series of horizontal planes to raise or lower human elevation by moving human feet up or down a series of horizontal platforms. Designed form describes its utility ("commodity)."

Miniaturized electronic technology blends invisibly into forms and shapes that tell us nothing of their operation. The size and form of a calculator watch is determined by the fingers that operate it. Artifacts are designed as control displays. The credit card sized piece of plastic can be a calculator operated by a solar cell, a door key, or credit card.

Designers have been trained to design tangible objects. This is what design teachers know how to teach and design students trained to learn. Humanoids, humanists, and history professors have been hooked on functioning artifacts beginning with sharp stones for 2 million years. What happens to human factors and ergonomics? Do designers design "smart" chairs for "wise arses?"

Electronic media are the common language of computers in office communication, telecommunications, home entertainment, and weapons systems. Smart machines their technology. The first obvious step is to demystify the digitized world.

Interactive articulate objects can not be measured by physical beauty. Functions are flexible and difficult to categorize. A personal computer performs vital and frivolous functions without distinction. It audits books, designs bridges, and plays computer games with equal facility.

Traditional objects interact passively as the user chooses. The new generation of objects can modify their behavior on the basis of external variables. They are not passive. They interact with the user or environment.

Nothing is expected from a passive object. An interactive object is expected to "act." Intelligent and communicative objects are in search of shape and form, for miniaturization means freedom from shape.

The way the "smart" object is regarded and its form are not subject to traditional judgment. For designers whose principal role has always been that of giving quality to shapes in space, interactive means exploring new ground. Here cultural references, Ezio Manzini suggests (3), can be sought in the theatre, movies, and music in activities whose quality is due to a sequence of events. Traditionally design has been creating shape in space (firmness, commodity, and delight). Design must now impart qualities no longer derived from three dimensional spatial arrangements. Relationships vary in time.

Time is another dimension. Chicago in the industrial age was 450 miles from Washington D.C. Today in the postindustrial age it is 50 minutes distance. Describe the scenery.

(1) Nervi, Pier Luigi, AESTHETICS AND TECHNOLOGY IN BUILDING (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass 1965), Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1961-1962.

(2) Prescott, William Hickling, THE CONQUEST OF PERU, Bk. I, ch. 8.

(3) Monzini, Ezio, INTERACTIVITY Technological Culture, OTTAGONO Quarterly review of architecture, interior design, furniture, and industrial design, March 23, 1988.

Forrest Wilson is a contributing writer for the museum.