The First Reinforced-Concrete Skyscraper: the Ingalls Building in Cincinnati and Its Place in Structural History Author(S): Carl W
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The First Reinforced-Concrete Skyscraper: The Ingalls Building in Cincinnati and Its Place in Structural History Author(s): Carl W. Condit Source: Technology and Culture, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan., 1968), pp. 1-33 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Society for the History of Technology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3102041 Accessed: 13/11/2008 22:21 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Society for the History of Technology and The Johns Hopkins University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Technology and Culture. http://www.jstor.org TheFirst Reinforced-Concrete Skyscraper THE INGALLS BUILDING IN CINCINNATI AND ITS PLACE IN STRUCTURAL HISTORY CARL W. CONDIT Among the major pioneer works of reinforced-concrete construction, the Ingalls Building (now the Transit Building) in Cincinnati possesses a special importance. A skyscraper according to the standards of the time, its design involved peculiar problems, the successful solution of which provided valuable lessons for the subsequent evolution of the structural arts. To understand the meaning of this achievement, how- ever, requires that we place the building in its full historical context, first describing the previous innovations which with suitable modifica- tions were incorporated in the finished work, and finally examining briefly certain separate but parallel developments that soon converged into a unified body of techniques available to the whole range of con- crete construction. I. General Background of Construction in Reinforced Concrete The history of reinforced-concrete construction is sometimes re- garded as originating in the seventeenth-century invention of strength- ening masonry by the introduction of iron tie rods and armatures into the body of the masonry work.' The essential factors in the progress of the art, however, are the revival of concrete as a structural material and the practice of reinforcing it with metal in order to secure a prop- erty thought to be lacking in the material itself. The precise beginning, then, may be said to have occurred in 1848, when Josef Lambot of France built a rowboat of poured concrete reinforced with a grid of PROFESSOR CONDIT, of Northwestern University, is the author of The Rise of the Skyscraper,American Building Art, and The Chicago School of Architecture. This paper was originally presented at a seminar sponsored by the Department of Civil Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., March 1966. lSee, e.g., S. B. Hamilton, "Building and Civil Engineering Construction," in Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall, and Trevor I. Williams (eds.), A His- tory of Technology (5 vols.; Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1954-58), IV (1958), 474-75, 480. 1 2 CarlW. Condit thin iron rods to increase the cohesion of the concrete and hence its total strength. There is no evidence that Lambot, or anyone else for more than twenty years, understood that the role of the metal is main- ly to impart a workable tensile strength to a material which, like stone, possesses this property only to a negligible degree. From 1848 to the end of the century there flowed a steadily broadening stream of patents, experiments, and structures embodying various techniques for rein- forcing mortars, plasters, and concretes.2 The decisive innovations came in the decade of the 1870's, and for the next thirty years the typical evolution of a pioneer stage of technical development took place, one in which a kind of natural selection operated on the di- versity of inventions through the medium of increasing scientific in- sight into the properties of this novel composite material. A small group of European and American inventors were the chief figures in the early phase. The French took an early lead, but the United States quickly caught up, in spite of the scientific backward- ness that marked its technological progress in the nineteenth century. FranSois Coignet obtained a patent in 1855 for a two-way grid of iron rods imbedded in concrete floor slabs and securely fixed to the walls, but his rather ambiguous description suggests that his intention was as much to prevent the overturning of the walls in monolithic con- struction as it was to increase the strength of the concrete. Josef Monier was destined to play a more important role when he was granted a patent in 1867 for the reinforcing of flowerpots and garden tubs by means of a heavy wire mesh imbedded in the mortar shell. Ten years later he received another patent for a considerably more advanced technique, namely, the reinforcing of concrete columns and girders with a grid of iron rods. He recommended this technique for the con- struction of rail and highway bridges, but it is doubtful whether Monier ever understood its true function, believing that its purpose 2 Thereare several accounts in Englishof thisdevelopment, all of themsuperficial and none perfectlyreliable in its chronology.Chief amongthem are PeterCollins, Concrete:The Vision of a New Architecture(London, 1959), Part I; Carl W. Condit,American Building Art: The 19th Century(New York, 1960),chap. viii; S. B. Hamilton,"Building Materials and Techniques," in Singeret al. (eds.), Vol. V (1958), Part VIII; and Aly Ahmed Raafat,Reinforced Concrete in Architecture (New York,1958), chap. i. A moredetailed work is GustavHaegermann, Von Cce- mentumzum Spannbeton(Berlin, 1964-65). In additionto thesethere is a valuable paper by A. W. Skempton,"Portland Cements, 1843-1887," Transactions of the NevwcomenSociety, XXXV (1962-63),117-52, but it is concernedmainly with the physicalproperties of Portland-cementconcrete and the testingmethods by which they were determined.All these works includebibliographies of varyinglengths, thoseof Collinsand Raafat being the mostthorough. The FirstReinforced Skyscraper 3 was to increasegeneral inner cohesion rather than to provide a tensile strength. The transformationof Monier's invention into a valuable scientific technique was largely the work of German builders and engineers. Before this next phase of Europeandevelopment occurred, however, two extremely important contributions came, respectively, from the United States and England.In 1871-76 William E. Ward built a house for himself on Comly Avenue in Port Chester,New York, that proved to be the first complete work of reinforced-concreteconstruction. The architect was Robert Mook, but the structural designer was Ward himself. His account of the genesis of the idea, while illuminatingin one respect, makeslittle reference to the role of the iron reinforcing, although it is clear that Ward understood this very well. "The inci- dent which led the writer to the invention of iron with beton occurred in England in 1867, when his attention was called to the difficultiesof some laborers on a quay trying to remove cement from their tools. The adhesionof the cement to the iron was so firm that the cleavage generally appearedin the cement rather than between the cement and the iron."3Ward's own experiments,conducted during the early phase of construction,led him to an understandingof the statical action of the two materials.In his own words, "The utility of both iron and beton could be greatly increased for building purposes through a properly adjusted combination of their special physical properties, and very much greater efficiency be reached through their combina- tion than could possibly be realized in the exclusive use of either ma- terial separately,in the same or in equal quantity." The structural system of the house is redundant for the load re- quirementsof a residence,as Ward's exacting tests revealed.The floor slabs are reinforced with a two-way grid of iron rods and supported on concrete beams reinforced with wrought iron I-beams. The iron membersare correctly located in the lower portion of the beam, where the tensile stress would be concentrated under a positive bending moment. The columns were poured as hollows cylinders reinforced with hoops. A heavy balcony at the rear of the house is cantilevered 4 feet from the wall. Ward tested the parlor floor under a weight of 26 tons located at the center of the 18-foot span. After leaving it 3 William E. Ward, "Beton in Combination with Iron as a Building Material," Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, IV (1883), 388-89; quoted in Ellen W. Kramer and Aly A. Raafat, "The Ward House: A Pioneer Structure of Reinforced Concrete," Journal of the Society of Architectural His- torians, XX, No. 1 (March 1961), 35. For a more analytical treatment of the struc- ture of the house, see Condit, pp. 233-34, 337-38. 4 CarlW. Condit throughout the winter, he measured a resulting deflection of only 0.01 inch. The house was undoubtedlyinfluential in the United States and France, even though Ward himself did no further work in build- ing.4 The major event in the evolution of concrete construction as a scientific technology came in 1877,when the Amercaninventor Thad- deus Hyatt performed his experimentson the behavior of reinforced concrete.