CHSA Mexico City had many highlights, but one bucket-list item for many of us was seeing this adorable piece of concrete-shell construction on UNAM’s campus.  I’ve used Felix Candela’s Cosmic Ray Pavilion to introduce students to shell principles for well over 20 years, so seeing it in person was a much-anticipated stop on our campus tour.

Candela was commissioned in 1951 to design and build the pavilion to house sensitive equipment used to detect incoming cosmic rays, high-energy particles that would have been absorbed by heavy building materials.  For their experiments to work, the researchers required the pavilion roof to weigh less than 8 pounds per square foot.  This would have been achievable in aluminum, but at a high cost, or in timber, which would not have been permanent enough.  Traditional concrete would have been way too heavy, but Candela, by this point, understood how to use doubly-curved geometry to create shell structures—forms that, because of their shape, funneled stresses along their surfaces rather than relying on the depth and mass of girders or slabs to sustain loading.

The pavilion isn’t particularly big—just about 33’ square—but a traditional beam-and-slab system spanning that far would need to be about a foot deep—far too much material.  From the outside, Candela’s basic structural solution is obvious.  The parabolic shape in cross section is close enough to a true catenary that the dead weight of the roof is carried almost entirely through compression within the shell itself.  Thin members in compression, though, risk buckling, so Candela also gently curved the shell in the lateral direction, giving it resistance to that force perpendicular to the parabola.  You can just barely see this from the sides—the crown of the roof looks like it’s sagging—this secondary curvature tracks over the roof’s summit.

The double curvature creates a stiff shell structure—one that can only change shape if the material itself fails.  Changing an eggshell’s shape requires crushing it, and for the Pavilion’s roof to change shape, it would have to crack.  If the secondary curvature wasn’t there, the roof could simply unfold.[1]  In Candela’s words:

“Any shape that can be formed by bending or folding a piece of paper cannot be considered a shell, because the shape is not really stable. You can bend a piece of paper, unbend it and it becomes flat again. Therefore, stability of form depends either on the flexural strength of the material or on some outside element of support. But, if one has a double chord surface, such as a dome, made of any unextensible material, it cannot be made flat again unless the material is completely destroyed.”[2]

So, ideal structural shape, but complex.  Candela’s real genius was that he was a builder as well as an engineer, and he could translate another mathematical idea into concrete using widely available lumber and relatively unskilled labor.  Ruled surfaces are generated by straight lines (generatrices) that connect points on two out-of-plane axes (directrices).  The gradually changing three-dimensional angles of these lines produce surfaces that naturally have curvature in two directions, guaranteeing that they will be what Candela termed “lamina,” or shells.  What Candela realized was that straight pieces of lumber could translate the “rulers” of these surfaces from abstract mathematics into, well, concrete construction. 

By laying out grids of long, thin pieces of wood in gradually transforming angular forms, Candela created formwork onto which concrete could be placed and troweled, creating a doubly curved shape without the complex carpentry necessary to form, say, a perfectly hemispherical dome.  Here, Candela used two layers of straight lumber—one of 2x4s providing structural support for another of tongue-in-groove, flat elements at a 60° angle to it.  The few construction photographs of the result have their own geometrical beauty, but they also show how simple the woodwork was.  Three arches stiffen the shell and are connected to crossbeams and arches that lift it off the ground.  This provides a ‘front door’ beneath, reached by a stair cantilevered from a single central stalk.  (Locked, despite our best efforts…)

So, a shape that is both structurally and constructionally efficient—but Candela brought the entire idea back around, noting that the mathematics of ruled surfaces allowed for “the feasibility of making accurate calculations quickly.”  He wrote that his own engineering abilities were limited, and that he lacked the computing power and time necessary to analyze complex shells.  This family of shapes—infinite in number but restricted by their reliance on straight-line generators and directors—reduced the mathematics involved to “a very simple equation of the second degree (one of the quadrics)….[with] only three co-ordinates and a single constant.” 

Elsewhere, Candela emphasized that, as compelling as his doubly curved surfaces were, they relied on simple ideas.  “’It is better to use simpler procedures which, in most cases, are sufficient when the designer is a constructor.”[3]  But the discipline to achieve that simplicity also, in Candela’s mind, offered a ready-made source of beauty:

“A shell cannot be drawn by hand with a happy pencil. On the contrary, one must have a very close geometrical surface or form. This is a very good discipline because, if one is guided by geometry, it is probable that the structure will look attractive. It is one of the amazing properties of this surface that it is extremely difficult to do ugly things with it. A kind of automatic beauty is achieved . . . somewhat similar to design by computer. This is a very interesting proposition for architects.”[4]

Indeed.

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[1] See Tyler S. Sprague, “Beauty, Versatility, Practicality”: The Rise of Hyperbolic Paraboloids in Post-war America.” Construction History, vol. 28, no. 1.  2013. 165-184

[2] Felix Candela, “Shell Structure Development.”  The Canadian Architect, vol. 12, no. 1. Jan., 1967.  33.

[3] Quoted in Reyner Banham, “Concrete: Simplified Vaulting Practices.” The Architectural Review, vol. 114, no. 684.  Sep 1, 1953. 199,

[4] “Shell Structure Development,” op. cit., 34.

Returning home from a stellar few days at UNAM in Mexico City, where the Construction History Society of America held its 10th regular meeting as part of a bi-national event with the newly formed Mexican society, which announced its founding as part of our closing ceremonies.

When CHSA started in 2007, we debated whether the right term was “of America” or “of the Americas,” and this week was clear evidence that the boundaries between largely English-language work north of the Rio Grande and largely Spanish-speaking scholarship south of it are at once important and permeable. With simultaneous translation available on any mobile phone, being able to present and understand in multiple languages has enriched events like this, making more scholarship available to those of us who aren’t multi-lingual, and provided broader audiences for those who aren’t working in a discipline’s lingua franca.

All of which is to say that it was a real joy to hear about a modernist baseball stadium in Oaxaca, or the use of iron in Guastavino vaults in Jefferson’s Rotunda (!) delivered in scholars’ native languages and be able to follow along. The conference’s chronological range matched its geographical reach, with good papers on 16th century vaulting in central America, the selling and lived experience of Chicago skyscrapers in the 1890s, and the design and expansion of UNAM itself, reflecting the huge range that Construction History encompasses, and the enthusiasm its practitioners have for seeing some of our basic principles applied across time and space.

That UNAM paper was particularly fascinating, since the campus itself (one of two educational precincts in the Americas designated a UNESCO site, along with UVA) is an incredible collection of ambitious postwar design, from the famous mosaic-clad library tower to the football (yes, football) stadium that hosted track and field events for the 1968 Olympics. The welcome there, thanks to our UNAM hosts and a small army of student volunteers, was particularly warm, a day-long group bus tour of Teotihuacan was jaw-dropping, and the food was stellar. Hoping to be back soon.

In the meantime, the next big Construction History event will be the next International Congress in Turin in June, 2027. Want to join that good looking group above? Submit an abstract! There are still three weeks before the submittal deadline, and there’s a particularly good session on the history of Vertical Urbanism (subtle), more information here…

How do you combine an accreditation-required Integrated Design Studio with curricular requirements for a high-rise project and a general interest among students in adaptive reuse? You Frankenstein a program together with some help from ace professionals with connections and their own ideas for recycling historic buildings into economically viable, culturally and socially relevant additions to downtown.

William LeBaron Jenney’s Second Leiter (also Siegel-Cooper) Store is a massive, half-block structure that served as a department store for the first chapters of its life, and was then carved up into academic facilities for Robert Morris University in 1998. When RMU merged with Roosevelt University several years ago, the building was mothballed, leaving something like 440,000 square feet of space in a prime Loop location vacant.

What to do with that much space? Unlikely in this development climate that it could work as commercial office space, so working with Ken DeMuth of Pappageorge Haymes and Kim Clawson of WJE, we developed a program for academic and dormitory space for the Loop’s “Seven Colleges,” small liberal-arts or professional schools that looked at developing a shared “University Center” about ten years ago (some survivors may remember that this accidentally turned into a “Chicago’s Tallest Building” studio for a graduate class at Iowa State…). We added the adjacent corner site, at Wabash and Van Buren, and proposed about 1.3 million square feet of residential and academic facilities, which could be distributed between the existing structure and a new, corner tower.

The catch, of course, is that the Leiter Building’s floor plates are massive–and too deep to easily adapt to apartment or dormitory functions. But its column grid–varying, but around 22′ square–doesn’t leave much room for the large classrooms that the program required. So students had to think not only about replanning the building’s floor plates; they also had to make value judgments about how much to alter the existing structure to make the program work, and/or whether to do the hard structural work of building a high-rise tower atop a bunch of long-span classrooms.

After a stellar field trip in January, where we got to tour the existing building and see newly-archived original drawings from Jenney’s office, students got to work on the Jenga-like massing studies required to fit rectangular pegs into (differently-sized) rectangular holes, all the while thinking about what it meant to build within and adjacent to a classic Chicago School building. We did exercises tracing the building’s elevations (Ken, Kim, and I have a working theory about its odd proportions and how tall it was really supposed to be…) and looking at materials and composition strategies from other 1890s buildings in the Loop. And, since it was an Integrated Design Studio, teams spent the time to figure out exiting strategies, mechanical system layouts, and cladding details.

This cohort of graduates will likely spend half their professoinal careers working on existing buildings–if not more. Giving them the experience of the constraints and inspirations that the process brings with it has become an important part of our studio teaching at Illinois, and this program and site nicely balanced their understandable desire to design something “new” with the guiderails of a rigorous column grid and a building fabric that they had to treat as a ‘ready-made.’

Teams came up with genuinely innovative ideas, either carving light courts and multi-bay voids into the existing building’s grid or, in one case, slicing the outer bays out of the building to leave the facade standing as a screen shading a covered collonnade/balcony space for retail and residential units behind. As the tower schemes developed, we also talked about the importance of a presence on Chicago’s skyline, and how sculpting architectural solutions into civically relevant forms was another dimension of the city’s skyscraper heritage.

Most of these folks are freshly graduated and in the first weeks of their careers…a great bunch to work with, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they take this experience into practice. Thanks to everyone who supported the studio, including Nathaniel Parks, the Tigerman McCurry Director of the Art Institute of Chicago Archives Research Center, who alerted us to the drawing tranche there and generously provided access, and to Rachel Will of WJE who rode shotgun as we mulled over how to develop the program. Finally, huge thanks to Tom Liravongsa, Instagram and YouTube’s “Skyscraper Guy,” for providing access to the Leiter Building.

[Continued from here]

“Ask anyone conversant with urban problems to tick off the names of private builders who are devoting their efforts to building ‘a better civic civilization’ through urban redevelopment, for example, and chances are he could do it on the fingers of one hand.  And it is a safe bet that one of the names mentioned would be that of ‘Herb’ Greenwald.”

David Carlson, “City Builder Greenwald.”  Architectural Forum, May, 1958.  118.

Herbert Greenwald’s internship in Holsman’s office quickly turned into a partnership.  After briefly quitting real estate to teach at Hebrew schools in Chicago during WWII, Greenwald returned to the firm with a collaborative effort; Sherman Garden Apartments in Evanston.  Constructed in 1946 at the intersection of Sherman Avenue and Emerson Street near the Northwestern campus, this development included 132 apartments in three seven-story blocks surrounding a courtyard. 

Holsman, Holsman, Klekamp, and Taylor were the architects, and the buildings were clear relatives of the Holsman organization’s contemporaneous developments—Lunt-Lake in particular—with curving windows, efficient planning, and many of the construction innovations that had made previous projects efficient but comfortable.  Greenwald, listed as “Agent for the Trust,” led the project, but D. Coder Taylor, of the Holsman firm, was listed as an actual Managing Trustee.[1]  Given that, Sherman Garden Apartments was a tentative first step by Greenwald toward his own career as a developer and builder.

His next step, however, was ambitious—and history-making.  Greenwald formed his own development corporation—Metropolitan Structures—and a related construction company—Herbert Construction.  The pairing was very much in line with Holsman’s model, and Greenwald stated his goals in much the same terms as Holsman had articulated his.  Covering his meteoric rise a decade later, Architectural Forum described his approach as “making civic humanism pay,” that is, applying the values he had learned under Mortimer Adler and at the Holsman firm to development projects that would at once address Chicago’s housing shortages—and earn a reasonable profit.  To do this, he would rely on the Holmsans—particularly Henry’s son John, who had taken over much of the development arm of the organization.  But he would expand his sights to larger projects and even more innovative architects.

In 1946, Greenwald convinced local Chevrolet dealer Samuel Katzin to invest in a plot of land on the lakefront in Hyde Park.  The two had met through Jewish philanthropies, and Katzin had been impressed with Greenwald’s plan.  The site was close enough to the University of Chicago that, like Sherman Garden Apartments, it would have a natural constituency among faculty.  But it was also highly visible and, with views over the lake, an ideal location for a high-rise apartment building. 

Greenwald’s initial queries to architects were charmingly innocent; after Eero Saarinen turned him down and Frank Lloyd Wright agreed—for a fee of $1,000,000—Walter Gropius responded to Greenwald by pointing out that “the father of us all,” Mies van der Rohe, was literally just up the street.  Mies, who had yet to design a high-rise that was built, was keen to come on board, but Greenwald also hired Charles Genther, a former Holabird and Root employee who had assembled PACE Architects out of fellow H&R alumni, as architect of record—and Holsman, Holsman, Klekamp, and Taylor as mechanical engineering and financial consultants. 

Promontory was developed along exactly the same lines as Sherman Gardens and the Holsman’s concurrent developments—as a Mutual Ownership Trust.  As groundbreaking as Mies’ design was, Architectural Forum dedicated as much space to its financial arrangements as its architecture, describing these succinctly and, as it would turn out, presciently:

“Most co-ops are tax-conscious devices where the promoter leaves the tenants on their own after the building is built. Mutual Trust, on the other hand, provides for promoter responsibility during the whole life of the building. Tenants buy a trust certificate representing their share in the building, but they do not run it. The promoter sets up a board of trustees, usually including himself, to do the job. Perhaps the most compelling proof of the promoter’s responsibility under mutual trust is that he and the other trustees are fully liable in the event of financial difficulty. (Tenant liability, on the other hand, is limited to their original equity investment).”[2]

Holsman, Holsman, Klekamp, and Taylor played the same role in 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, which was also financed on the Mutual Ownership Trust plan and completed in 1952.  Notably, Mies’ planning for the units in 860-880 was rejected by Greenwald under pressure from lenders for its lack of partitions between bedroom and living room spaces and for exposing those bedroom areas in the building’s corners.  As built, the apartments’ plans are more traditional—and they bear more than a passing resemblance to many of the planning tactics used by the Holsmans in their contemporary projects.  PACE certainly also had input on these, as the architects of record here, as they had been on Promontory, but a comparison between Holsman’s plans for Lunt-Lake and 860-880—both published in the same issue of Architectural Forum in 1950.[3]

Mies, Greenwald, PACE, and Holsman’s firm collaborated on at least two other projects in 1950-52.  The Algonquin Apartments in Hyde Park (1950-51) are the better-known of these, though Mies so strongly objected to the inclusion of ground-floor units in these six towers that he had his name removed from the project.  More intriguing was the same group’s proposal for a 10-story office building at Rush and Huron in 1948, “the most functional and severely plain office building in the Midwest,” according to John Holsman.  Designed by Mies, the project was to have radiant concrete structural elements, just like those in Holsman’s residential developments, and to be funded by commercial tenants.[4] 

In 1951, the Holsmans—on their own—proposed a 12-story tower that placed ten floors of apartments atop a podium of shops and offices.  In addition to mixing commercial and residential uses—a radical idea at the time—the design, for the site of the McCormick Mansion at Rush and Erie streets, was to have “skip-stop” elevators, reducing the need for corridors by having tenants walk up or down one floor from elevator landings to their apartments.[5]

Neither of these last two projects was built.  The brief 1948-50 recession, coupled with the restrictions that accompanied the onset of the Korean War in 1950, seriously affected the Holsman model.  Contractors could not readily obtain construction materials, in particular steel, without going through a lengthy, unpredictable application process after the outbreak of hostilities and the passage of the Defense Production Act in September of that year. 

William T. Holsman later testified that a single contractor’s default on an unnamed project (likely Parkway Gardens) triggered a cascading financial crisis within the Holsman organization; after an FHA commissioner refused to reassign the work, the Holsman trust faced delays that threatened the project.  Future residents had already invested in that project’s trust, and the Holsmans had to move money from other trusts to cover their losses.[6]  This skirted legality, but when the firm was unable to proceed with a planned third phase of the Winchester-Hood project, investors and prosecutors pounced. 

While Henry and William Holsman both made convincing defenses that this was simply a business failure, the fact that nearly $250,000 of the Winchester-Hood Trust’s funds had already been spent on architects’ fees—to Holsman, Holsman, Klekamp, and Taylor—and that just $190 remained in the Trust’s accounts made for terrible optics.  In February, 1955, father and son were indicted on federal securities and mail fraud charges; they were convicted in January, 1956 of defrauding 124 prospective residents out of $677,387 and sentenced to four years in prison each.[7] 

Ultimately, the younger Holsman’s sentence was reduced to three years by a District Court judge who noted that the Holsmans hadn’t actually profited from the debacle. The same judge, apparently disgusted with the lower court’s verdict, reduced the elder Holsman’s sentence to a single hour, citing his advanced age.[8]  Henry K. Holsman died in 1961, at the age of 94, in Lake Genoa Wisconsin.[9]  After serving his time, William T. Holsman and his brother practiced around Lake Geneva and Delevan, Wisconsin.

The later developments by Greenwald and Mies—Commonwealth Promenade, Esplanade, and 2400 Lakeview—were all designed after the Holsman bankruptcies and, thus, with other firms.  Genther and Mies parted ways as well, particularly after a falling out over the competition for Chicago’s Federal Center competition in 1959.  Greenwald would perish in a plane crash in February of that year, in the midst of projects for apartment developments that combined Mies’s designs with Holsman’s mutual ownership plans in Detroit, Newark, San Francisco, and Baltimore, only some of which survived his passing.[10]

The Holsman’s downfall revealed a major flaw in Mutual Ownership: the significant and ongoing risk that each trust’s management took in accepting residents’ funds before construction and acting as a fiduciary while managing the project.  Fewer developers were willing to take this on.  In 1963, Illinois passed legislation enabling condominium ownership—essentially removing the requirement for property to be tied to an actual piece of land.  While co-ops continued to be organized, condominiums offered developers a shorter period of liability and vulnerability, requiring only repayment of construction loans and mortgages.  This allowed them to get in and out of projects quickly, and the type spread throughout the city, in high-rises on the lakeshore to low-rise developments throughout Chicago.

Interviewed by Architectural Forum just months before his death, Greenwald avoided mentioning Holsman—understandable given the stigma attached to his recent conviction.  But just two years prior, he had paid, perhaps, a silent tribute to the inventor, architect, and developer who had been his mentor and partner.  Invited to a panel on multifamily housing construction at the Drake Hotel in April, 1957, Greenwald lamented the state of building technology as a major reason for Chicago’s ongoing housing shortage.  “Because of a 20-year lag in construction,” he told the audience, “we don’t have a window in an apartment as good as in a car or airplane.”[11]  Holsman, of course, had worked on exactly this, taking the expertise gleaned from a short but productive automotive career and translating it to the architectural world.

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[1] Sherman Garden Apartments: Better Living Through Mutual Ownership. (Evanston: Wallace and Orth Sales and Management Agents, 1946).

[2] “The Financing of Promontory.” Architectural Forum, Vol. 92, no. 1.  Jan., 1950.  77-78, 124.

[3] “Glass in a Steel Frame,” and “Pioneering Construction Ideas,” Architectural Forum, Vol. 92, no. 1.  Jan., 1950.  76-77, 81.

[4] Al Chase, “Plan Chicago’s First Big Co-Op Office Building: Rush-Huron Project to Cost $1,300,000.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 12, 1948. 1-nA. 

[5] Al Chase,  “Big Apartment House to Have Skip-Stop Lift: Site That of Cyrus McCormick Home.” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 19, 1951. 1-b5.

[6] “Chicago Firm Links FHA Aid to Bankruptcy: Architect Criticizes Powell’s Rulings.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr. 22, 1954. 2.

[7] “Son, Father, 89, Convicted Of Defrauding 124: W. T. Holsman, 50, Gets 4 Year Term.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan. 20, 1956. 10.

[8] “Sentenced To 60 Minutes in $667,387 Fraud.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb. 21, 1956. 12.

[9] “Holsman, Noted Designer, Dies in Genoa City.”  Lake Geneva (Wis.) Regional News, May 25, 1961.  19.

[10] “Herbert S. Greenwald.”  The New York Times, Feb. 5, 1959.  22.

[11] Ernest Fuller, “Urge More Research in Construction.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr. 21, 1957.  A7.

Holsman’s low-rise forays into the Hyde Park and South Shore neighborhoods were successful enough that he moved on to taller buildings: an eight-story building containing fourteen apartments at 5617 Dorchester (1928),[i] and a fourteen-story tower with twelve apartments, each taking up a whole floor, around the corner at 1321 E. 56^th Street (1929-30).[ii]  The taller structure on 56^th was planned with “sky playgrounds” for children on the upper floors, and what was becoming a trademark for Holsman’s developments, an “English basement,” or split-level first floor that provided privacy for the first story of residences and easy access from the street for boilers and service rooms below.  Holsman argued for higher quality in these buildings—neither was a “shirtfront affair,” according to contemporary press accounts, meaning that they were designed with face brick and stone ornament on all four sides, not just the street fronts.  Because residents had financial stakes in the buildings, he suggested, they were willing to see such improvements as investments.  Developers of traditional rentals had no such incentives; as commodity housing, their projects emphasized cost over value.  Co-ops, or “Mutual Ownership,” in Holsman’s words, not only democratized equity; they also encouraged better building.

That distinction in terms proved important when the Depression hit.  Traditional co-ops had no out clauses; if a shareholder went bankrupt, the remaining co-operative was on the hook for their annual rent.  Holsman’s arrangements were subtly different.  His real estate firm, Parker, Holsman, Leigh, Inc., actively managed these buildings, and non-payment of the monthly rents terminated a shareholder’s rights to their unit.  Other owners were spared both the cost of absorbing the obligations of bankrupted residents and the awkward, fraught legal process of ejecting a one-time neighbor from their homes.  After the 1929 crash, co-ops throughout the city suffered huge defections and failures.  The eight Mutual Ownership projects that Holsman had built by then, however, remained solvent.  “Not one person in these eight buildings in eight years has taken a loss on account of such investment,” Holsman told the Tribune in November 1931.[iii]

By that point, though, his market had been fairly safe.  All of these developments were in the relatively stable environs of the University of Chicago, within a mile or two of campus and—if not immune to the financial crisis enveloping Chicago and the world, at least not as volatile as other parts of town more directly impacted by the stock market or the Depression’s crushing losses in manufacturing.  Holsman’s focus gradually shifted; he and his design and development companies sought ways to use the technical innovation he brought from his automotive experience to address the growing housing crisis in Chicago.

He had a bully pulpit that allowed him to publicize the cause of good housing.  As former president of the Illinois AIA, he was a familiar name to the profession, and he lectured widely on the need for modern developments to house not only Chicago’s population—which grew explosively as the Great Migration brought refugees from the Jim Crow South north—but residents throughout the nation.  He authored a 1933 report, sponsored by the national AIA, that decried conditions in Chicago’s expanding Black belt, where absentee, largely white landlords charged exorbitant rents for sub-standard rentals—often carved into small “kitchenette” apartments that proved vulnerable to fire.  Speaking to the Tribune in the wake of the report’s release, he argued that

“Modern building methods and financial organization…can provide good fireproof homes in this region for from three to six times the present population and leave one-half the land for open air gardens and playgrounds at a cost to tenants of about what they now have to pay.”[iv]

While Holsman was best known at the time for the Mutual Ownership scheme, the “modern building methods” he spoke of soon came to define his operation.  In 1934, he was commissioned to design a model farm house for Chicago’s Century of Progress Exhibition.  His effort didn’t gain the attention of the Keck Brothers’ two “houses of tomorrow,” but he was nonetheless able to experiment with—and to show off—new techniques that would become part of his palette in the coming decade.  The house was supported and enclosed by precast concrete panels clad in face brick, which allowed rapid construction by modestly skilled workers.  The end result, though, was a house that appeared to be of finished masonry.[v]  Those precast panels supported floors of poured-in-place concrete, formed by v-shaped steel pans left in place to create ceiling surfaces for the spaces below.  The house’s windows were double-paned glass—an early effort at insulated glazing that predated the introduction of commercially available “Thermopane” by five years.[vi]

“Re-inforced Brick Panels Used in World’s Fair House.” American Builder and Building Age, vol. 56, no. 7.  July 1, 1934. 41.

Such efforts won Holsman leadership roles on early Chicago Housing Authority projects, in particular the Frances Cabrini Rowhouses (1942).  He led a team of architects designing 586 units for the sixteen-acre site, bringing with him ideas about economic massing and construction.[vii]  Stacking two-story family apartments above English basement one-bedroom units intended for elderly residents saved on stairs and height.  Holsman pioneered new concrete finishes for interior floors and developed precast stairs that could be quickly installed, saving time and labor.[viii]  These rowhouses would be overshadowed by the later high rises that transformed their tightly organized townscape into Cabrini-Green.  But in their early years, they proved remarkably successful; originally intended to replace slum housing in a largely Italian-American neighborhood, the development was quickly converted into wartime worker housing.  Black and white residents alike were housed there, and while not without incident, it proved to be a relatively harmonious development.  Holsman led one other major wartime housing project: Princeton Park, at Wentworth and 95^th, which was completed in 1944.  It featured 256 two-story townhomes, initially laid out along winding streets and eventually expanded to more than 1,000 units across 80 acres.  Privately funded but supported by Reconstruction Finance Corporation funds and FHA mortgage insurance, Princeton Park was, at the time, the “largest privately owned housing project” for Black residents in the U.S.[ix]

Holsman’s attitudes toward race were progressive; he saw housing for Black Chicagoans as a particularly important problem and aimed much of his effort at addressing the unique socio-economic challenges faced by those coming north as part of the Great Migration.  In his office, he hired and mentored at least two Black engineers—Lemuel G. McDougal, who went on to become Chief Superintendent for the CHA’s Associated Housing Architects, and George M. Jones, a University of Michigan graduate who was part of the consortium designing the Cabrini rowhouses.[x] 

The next phase of Holsman’s career—also the most productive—would see his firms accelerate development in both construction technology and financing to address the demographic boom accompanying the postwar era.  He would be credited with designing “the only modern things in Chicago,” and would play a crucial role in another protégé’s career, one that changed the city’s skyline and lakefront.

[cont.]

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[i] “Plans Unique Building For Harlem-North.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb 20, 1927. B3.

[ii] Al Chase,  “Fourteen Story Co-operative Apartments for Hyde Park.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb 17, 1929. B1

[iii] “Here’s Group Of 8 Co-Ops That Are 100% Full: All Designed By Henry K. Holsman.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov 1, 1931. 24.

[iv] “Houses Better Than Weapons…” New York Herald Tribune, May 21, 1933. C2

[v] “Re-inforced Brick Panels Used in World’s Fair House.” American Builder and Building Age,vol. 56, no. 7.   Jul 1, 1934.  41.

[vi] The Country Home Model Farm House (New York: Cromwell Publishing Co., 1934).  8-9.

[vii] D. Bowly & D.J. Bowly, D. J. The Poorhouse : Subsidized Housing In Chicago. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).  31-32.

[viii] Al Chase, “New Construction Methods Save Time and Materials in CHA Housing.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug 23, 1942. B10

[ix] Al Chase,  “War Workers Move into Big Home Project: Section of Princeton Park Completed.”  Chicago Daily Tribune. Jun 11, 1944.  A7.

[x] “Race Architect to Work On $7,000,000 Project,” The Chicago Defender, Dec 9, 1939. 2; and “McDougal Named Chief Of Housing Architects.” The Chicago Defender, Nov 14, 1942. 24

Quick—name a Chicago architect in the center of a Venn diagram containing:

• Mies van der Rohe,
• A defunct automobile company,
• The 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition,
• Michelle Obama, and
• The shortest (perhaps?) federal prison term on record.

As you can tell, this is quite a story.

Henry Holsman was born in 1866 in Dale, Iowa (pop. 40). After working as a farm laborer, he earned an undergraduate degree from Grinnell College at age 25.  His early career is obscure, but he seems to have studied architecture at the short-lived Chicago School of Architecture at the Art Institute.[1]  After working for two years as a superintendent for interior decorators and contractors, he opened a practice with William L. Brainerd, an MIT graduate, in 1893.[2]  Brainerd & Holsman were successful, designing houses, churches, and college buildings throughout the Midwest, including the Rand Gymnasium at Grinnell (burned, 1940), the Kimball Conservatory of Music at the University of Nebraska, churches at Illinois College in Jacksonville and in Keokuk, Iowa, and homes, apartments, and commercial buildings in Chicago and Paducah, Kentucky.[3] 

That partnership lasted only four years—Brainerd left Chicago for Paducah, where he set up his own practice. On his own, Holsman designed several buildings at Parsons College (now Maharishi University) in Fairfield, Iowa.  As those projects were underway, he and his brother built a prototype automobile, a “highwheeler” that debuted in 1902. The car was an immediate success.  The Holsman Automobile Works produced more than 2400 of them over the next eight years from its factory at 36^th and Morgan; the company’s main office and Holsman’s architectural practice were in adjacent suites in the Monadnock Block; Holsman and his artist wife, Elizabeth Tuttle Holsman, lived in a comfortable suburban home in Beverly.

Holsman filed a dozen patents for automobile parts and systems, but the company failed to keep pace with industry developments, continuing to manufacture the buggy-style “highwheeler” even as other manufacturers moved to more compact, lower chassis designs.  After an overly ambitious financing scheme left the company with inventory it couldn’t sell, Holsman Automobile sold its patents to the Plano-based Independent Harvester Company, which manufactured tractors.[4] 

Henry Holsman returned to architecture, but his experience in the automotive industry left him frustrated by the comparatively slow pace of construction development and interested in applying automobile engineering’s more rigorous standards to building projects.  He designed suburban houses at first, gaining attention for his (understandable) interest in refining garage designs, and eventually rose within the profession to become President of the Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1919.  His inaugural address included a paean to the “professional man,” who “stands ready to serve other men in their health and happiness, in their organizations and enterprises, in all their conceptions and achievements.

“What great commercial enterprise or what mighty utilization of forces would have been achieved by the so-called masters of industry had it not been for the professional man who patiently and systematically worked it out, practically for the joy of achieving it; or what one of the great machines of finance or industry, or what government in war or peace could survive and develop, but for the continued devotion of the professional man?”[5]

Holsman’s career—as both a mechanical engineer and an architect—had thus far illustrated exactly this sort of diligent “working out” of technical problems.  In his houses, these solutions were dressed with aesthetically acceptable styles at a domestic scale.  His houses appeared alongside those of Frank Lloyd Wright, George Maher, and others in House Beautiful and similar magazines during the 1910s, but never attracted the same national recognition.  Holsman, however, was increasingly interested in the materials and systems that were typically hidden by that decade’s prairie and craftsman styles, and in how those could be applied to the city’s growing housing issues. 

In addition to suburban houses, Holsman and his son, Henry T. Holsman, built and managed half a dozen four-story walkup apartment complexes in Hyde Park and South Shore in the early 1920s, all still extant, including 5529 University Avenue (1921), 1145-51 East Fifty-sixth Street (1925), and the Rainbow Park Apartments at 7855-61 South Shore Drive (1926). All drew attention for their clever use of concrete.  Done in a nominally collegiate gothic style appropriate to the neighborhoods adjacent to the University of Chicago, Holsman noted in published accounts that their structures—concrete slabs on shallow beams, supported by girders integrated into brick supporting walls—saved considerable height over traditional wooden construction. 

“The saving in height thus secured makes it feasible to omit the usual partly underground full basement and to lay the first floor six inches above sidewalk level. This permits the planning of four floors for residential purposes and needs a height from ground level to roof of only a little over 37 feet. The usual English basement apartment house would have but three residential floors in about the same height of structure.”[7]

Exposing the concrete and painting it, rather than concealing it with plaster ceilings, further saved time and construction expense.  Holsman explained:

“The lumber for the forms for the reinforced concrete floor beams is dressed and selected for grain,” “Then when the beams are cast and the forms removed the imprint of the wood grain makes it possible to finish and decorate these beams to resemble wood.  Thus they form part of the decorative scheme of the apartment interiors.”[8]

To be sure, this was a minor innovation, and one that other Chicago architects had already put to good use—Marshall and Fox described a similar approach to decorating concrete beams in their Edgewater Beach Hotel in 1917.  The University Avenue apartments also used steel instead of concrete for their beams and girders.  But while this tentative improvement would set the stage for Holsman’s later work, he and his son also pioneered what I’ve come to think of as financial technology.  Multi-unit apartments suffered from real estate legislation grounded in archaic English common law, which defined ownership in terms of land (“real estate”).  Taking ownership of a unit above others was impossible given this definition.  Wealthy residents had long used a financial mechanism, the co-operative apartment, as a way around this, buying shares in a building corporation that gave them the right to then rent a unit within the building. The first of these in Chicago, a nine-story building at Elm St. and Lake Shore Drive, was built in 1911. The “Millionaire’s Flat,” as it became known, was a working model for other “co-ops” that catered to wealthy residents who already owned “town houses and country homes,” but who wanted a pied-a-terre on the Drive–with rooms for butlers and chauffeurs among the dozen or more rooms such developments offered.[9] 

Holsman pioneered methods for bringing the “co-op” to middle-class residents.  “Most of the shareholders of the property at 5529 University Avenue are members of the University of Chicago, and these shareholders will be the first occupants of the apartments, holding leases in perpetuity at fixed rental rates,” he explained about the first of these in 1921.[10]  The units in the building, and those in the subsequent projects, were occupied by the sixteen shareholders, who each put up an initial investment of $3000 (about $55,000 in 2026 dollars) that gave them “1/16 interest in the land and building” and entitled them to rent a unit (at a substantial discount to rates in surrounding apartment buildings) in perpetuity.  Holsman’s real estate company then managed the project’s finances and upkeep, adjusting rents annually to cover their costs and to take a 10% profit. By handling the legal and financial machinations that had been typically handled by lawyers and bankers available only to the city’s wealthy, Holsman’s company made it possible, for the first time, for ordinary residents to have equity in multi-unit buildings.

These early middle-class co-ops were successful enough that Holsman ventured higher, designing, constructing, and financing taller buildings around Hyde Park and South Shore that gently pushed concrete technology—and co-op financing—further.  While these were aimed entirely at those neighborhoods, his interest in addressing the city’s housing shortage, his latent interest in optimizing building construction based on his automotive endeavors, and his skill at putting the latter to work in service of the former would make him a Zelig-like figure through the next decades—figuring in some of Chicago’s most prominent residential buildings while constructing across the city’s economic, social, and racial lines. 

(To be continued)

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[1] “Holsman, Noted Designer, Dies in Genoa City.”  Lake Geneva Regional News, May 25, 1961.  19.

[2] Grinnell College. Quinquennial Register of Iowa College, 1897: Semi-Centennial 1848-1898. [N.p.], 1898.

[3] “Among Architects and Builders.: Building Planned or Under Way in and About Chicago.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 Apr., 1897. 34; “New Structure for Illinois College.” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 19, 1896. 10; and “Chicago and the West,” Engineering Review, Dec. 15, 1894.  18.

[4]David Young “Unhappy With Early Autos, Architect Designed His Own.” Chicago Tribune, Jun 21, 1998. J1

[5] “Inaugural Address of Henry K. Holsman, President-Elect Illinois Chapter American Institute of Architects.” The American Architect, vol. 116, no. 2271, 1919. 2-a6.

[6] “Chicago, Illinois, U.S. Housing Corporation, Correspondence with Field Agents.” Black Workers in the Era of the Great Migration, 1916-1929; Entry 64: Correspondence with Field Agents. 1918. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/archival-materials/chicago-illinois-u-s-housing-corporation/docview/2900640223/se-2.

[7] “An Economically Designed, Fireproof, Cooperative Apartment House.”  Buildings and Building Management I, vol. XXIII, no. 23.  Nov. 12, 1921.  36-41.

[8] “Space Saving Design for Apartments.”  Buildings and Building Management, Vol. XXVI, no. 24.  Nov. 22, 1926.  40-43.

[9] “Prominent Families Favor Apartments; Lake Shore Drive Scene of ‘Flat’ Building.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 29, 1911. 1

[10] “An Economically Designed, Fireproof, Cooperative Apartment House,” op. cit. Among those University of Chicago faculty members was Arthur Compton, a physics professor who was one of the original owners. He would win the Nobel Prize for physics in 1927.

Under the unlikely headline “Mushroom Infringement Suits,” the trade journal Cement Age published an article by C.A.P. Turner in May, 1911, announcing that he had brought suit against the Deere and Webber Company for building a bootleg version of his mushroom slab system in their new building (still standing) on Washington Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. “It is the intention of Mr. Turner,” he wrote, “to rigidly prosecute all infringers.  This news item will undoubtedly be of interest to general contractors and builders.”¹. This kicked off more than ten years of concrete patent battles between Turner and a Chicago-based group of legal rivals over the development of flat slabs in concrete.

Turner had good reason to be upset. Deere and Webber had been a licensee of his system in their gigantic factory and warehouse in Omaha, finished in 1908. That building had been built by a Chicago contractor, the C.M. Leonard Company, and had employed Arthur Talbot, of the University of Illinois’ Experiment Station, as a consultant. Deere and Webber hired Leonard to build the Minneapolis structure and gave Talbot and his protege, Arthur Lord, permission to load test its floor slabs. But they did not license Turner’s system, even though the structure bore an obvious resemblance to the warehouses and industrial buildings he had been building nearby. Instead, Deere and Webber employed a system of reinforcement supplied by the “Concrete Steel Products Company” of New York and Chicago.

Concrete Steel Products had joined forces with a handful of other engineers and builders who had developed flat slab systems and faced an increasingly combative Turner. The “Flat Slab Patents Company” (seriously) had an office on Michigan Avenue–but no factories. Instead, it provided administrative and legal support for six other systems: Condron and Sinks’ AKME (developed from Chicago’s Studebaker Building), Francis Barton’s “Spiderweb,” and Concrete Steel Products, among them.

Flat Slab Patents had cleverly dug through the archives and found that Boston contractor O.W. Norcross had received a patent in 1902 for “Flooring for Buildings” that proposed using sheets of metal mesh to reinforce flat slabs along orthogonal and diagonal lines–similar in plan to Turner’s system, but without the mushroom-shaped reinforcing cages, and supported by steel columns instead of concrete. Norcross’ claim is intriguing, given Turner’s patents:

“This invention relates to a flooring for buildings which has been designed with a view of securing the advantages, first, of entirely dispensing with all girders or floor-beams, which have heretofore been regarded as absolutely essential for supporting the floors of buildings; second, to provide a form of flooring which will utilize to best advantage the immense crushing strength of concrete, and, third, to provide a strong inexpensive solid inflexible flooring which can be laid in place by unskilled labor.”²

Norcorss went on to explain that the metal mesh was to be arranged so as to “…permit concrete alone to resist compressions and to supply a maximum amount of metal at points where the flooring is to be subjected to greatest tensions and shearing strains.” But, as you can see from his patent drawing, he (or, more likely, his draftsman) failed to show how the reinforcing would be placed to do this. In a flat slab, the greatest positive moment is at the center of the span, while the greatest negative moment is over the column supports; to work properly, metal reinforcement should therefore be placed at the bottom of the slab in the middle, and at the top of the slab over the supports.

Nonetheless, Leonard negotiated with Norcross for rights to his patent, and his company’s secretary, John L. Drum, filed suit against Turner in 1913, claiming that Turner’s entire system had been foreseen by Norcross. Turner sued Leonard for violating his patent by using flat slabs and a suspiciously mushroom-like column in the Minneapolis Deere Building. For good measure, Turner also sued Deere–perhaps out of spite that he’d been left off the construction team–and a handful of other companies that had leased space in flat-slab structures in Minneapolis. While Turner won an initial ruling, public opinion gradually turned against him. He argued that the courts were incapable of understanding the fine points of slab behavior, which may have been true, but which won him no allies in the legal profession–taking out a gloating advertisement in the Western Architect in 1914, he railed against Drum and Leonard’s claims that the Norcross system represented a complete solution:

“the astounding assertion was made by witnesses for the plaintiff that this concrete, unreinforced over the support would resists the same bending moment as though steel were present to give it rigidity, a proposition in defiance of the law of conservation of energy, the theorem of least work and the principle of rigidities.”³

Flat Slab Patents and Condron & Sinks eventually got into the melee as well, generating a slew of claims, counterclaims, and rulings that ultimately found Turner’s patent infringed on Norcross, despite the earlier patent’s technical error. “There is today,’ a federal appeals court held, dismissing one of Turner’s suits,

“neither invention nor novelty in merely placing metal reinforcement in concrete at places at which strains come…one striving to find a new principle, or to invent a new means of concrete reinforcement under the old principle, enters a well-known and widely practiced art, and must do something more than care for tensile strains at places where they are known to come”⁴

Turner eventually was forced to pay royalties to Leonard and the Flat Slab Patents Company, after the cases were finally resolved in 1922, a humiliation and financial penalty that largely ended his career as a builder of warehouses and factories. His work in reinforced concrete, however, did lead to a healthy second career as a bridge engineer. By that time, the Norcross patent had expired (though Norcross himself filed an updated version, with the reinforcement placement corrected, in 1917). Still, Turner remained bitter about the decade-long fight to claim the invention of a technique that would become standard practice in multi-story concrete construction with the patent disputes cleared. In a combination memoir/textbook published in 1919, Turner included a full appendix, written in the third person, that reiterated his case for primacy in the invention of the flat slab and argued for a full Congressional hearing to overhaul the patent system. Titled–none too subtly–“State Of the Art of Reinforced Concrete from the Patent Standpoint and the Menace to Progress by Unscientific Decisions,” the screed concluded that

“competent scientific ability is not required of the judge who passes upon the validity of the patent. Thus the final step which renders the system beneficial on the one hand or a menace to progress on the other, is taken haphazard without the guidance of competent scientific ability.”

The expiration of the Norcross patent in 1919 roughly coincides with the more widespread use of flat slab construction in high-rises other than factories — while steel remained in use for tall residential buildings, the shallower overall depth of flat slabs soon made them standard in apartment hotels and other domestic skyscrapers. While avoiding potential lawsuits surely aided the spread of the technique, a parallel effort to understand the mechanics of flat slabs — still led by Talbot but joined by other researchers at universities and laboratories — was also critical in refining the dimensions and reinforcement of those slabs.

1. “Mushroom Infringement Suits.”  Cement Age, Vol. XII, no. 5.  May, 1911.  285. ↩︎
2. O.W. Norcross, U.S. Patent No. 698,542.  “Flooring for Buildings.”  Filed Nov. 22, 1901, Granted Apr. 29, 1902. ↩︎
3. Advertisement, C.A.P. Turner, The Western Architect, Vol. 20, no. 12.  December, 1914.  XXII. ↩︎
4. Turner v. Lauter Piano Co., 248 F. 930 (3d Cir. 1918)
   U.S. Court of Appeals, January 17, 1918 ↩︎

As always, happy to weigh in on the latest political news.

Yesterday saw extensive coverage of the remodeling of the “Lincoln bathroom” in a central Washington, D.C., residence, along with historians (amateur and professional) weighing in on the fact that its adjacent bedroom had actually been Lincoln’s office and that the conversion to a guest bedroom happened in the 1940s.

I’ll leave the interior design critique to the professionals. Still, having just given the “Electricity and Sanitation” lecture in my History of Construction class (better known by at least one student as the “Light Bulbs and Poop” lecture, great), I’ll weigh in on the business end of things.

The American flush toilet dates back to this patent, issued in 1857 to James Henry and William Campbell, both of Philadelphia. Almost all the parts of a modern toilet are there–the bowl, the reservoir of fresh water to wash down the contents, and a lever to get the fun started. What’s missing is a trap — a way to keep a water seal above the foul gases in the sewer pipe. That technical innovation had been thought of, as early as 1775, by Scotsman Alexander Cummings, but somehow that didn’t make it into Henry and Campbell’s patent.

Still, manufacturers added S-traps to fixtures based on that early patent — above are two from J.L. Mott’s Iron Foundry catalogue from 1888. These have a raised tank to improve water pressure, a pull chain for convenient control, and S-traps to keep sewer gases out of the room.

All well and good, but the provision of toilets inside a large Washington residence only got sewage so far. That city, like many of the era, laid pipes to provide fresh water to much of the city in the early 19th century in an effort to address the constant problem of cholera and typhoid outbreaks. But providing ample fresh water had the unfortunate effect of encouraging residents to… use it. Where to take that water once it had been fouled remained a problem, whether it was used for washing, chamber pots, or, later, fancy toilets. Chemical engineer Edward C.C. Stamford noted in 1869 that:

“The present water closet system, with all its boasted advantages is the worst that can be generally adopted, briefly because it is a most extravagant method of converting a mole-hill into a mountain. It merely removes the bulk of our excreta from our houses, to choke our rivers with foul deposits and rot at our neighbors’ doors. It increases the death rate, as well as all other rates, and introduces into our houses, a most deadly enemy, in the shape of sewer gases.” (Scientific American, July 24, 1869).

Stamford and others argued for large landfills, treated with various chemicals, to gradually turn waste water and sewage into compost, but it wasn’t until 1871 that Washington began to build sanitary sewers–until then, water closets (whether Lincoln’s or any other resident of the District) simply discharged into the nearest convenient ditch, canal, creek, or river, all of which festered and contributed to the spread of disease–not to mention a general stink throughout the city. Even early efforts by the city (detailed here) were problematic, combining storm and sanitary sewage into one stream that washed everything into local waterways. Not until 1890 was a single sanitary system built, ensuring that all wastewater in Washington would be discharged downstream from the city into the Potomac.

Like Chicago and many other cities, simply moving the foul discharge as far away from any source of drinking water reduced mortality from waterborne diseases, but it wasn’t until 1938 that Washington built its first treatment plant, which used sedimentation and organic methods to break down and purify the city’s sewage.

All of which is to say that any effort to restore the “Lincoln bathroom” to its alleged 1860s status probably doesn’t understand the full scope of the issue. Unless the renovation included a handy chamberpot, or a Henry + Campbell, wooden-seated water closet discharging into the Rose Garden, it’s probably best to avoid any talk about authenticity. Especially, as noted by plumbing engineer John Lansing, the choice of water closet appears to be a Home Depot-stocked Kohler Highline model