16 Carl W.

Condit

we are describing here first showed the way. The difference between
the structural system of the Ingalls and that of a contemporary build-
ing is that load-bearing wall panels are seldom thought to be necessary
as supplements to the skeleton of columns and beams. The recent revival
of load-bearing wall construction, however, has brought about an ac-
companying revival of analogous components.

The soil of the Cincinnati region varies in character with the distance
from the valley floors of the main streams. The many hills are com-
posed of relatively thin strata of Ordovician limestone interspersed
with beds of soft shale. In the so-called bottom land along the Ohio
River and its tributaries, however, this rock is overlain by varying
depths of sand, clay, and gravel, of which the sand and gravel are sufh-
ciently compacted to have a high bearing capacity. All columns and
wall footings of the Ingalls Building are of reinforced concrete resting
on a sand-and-gravel mixture with a maximum bearing capacity of
20,000 pounds per square foot, well above the actual footing load of
10,000 pounds per square foot.?*? The shapes and dimensions of the
footings vary considerably, depending on whether they carry party
walls, single columns, or two columns paired along the transverse col-
umn lines.

The footings for the party walls (along the elevations facing away
from the streets) are continuous slabs 7 feet 6 inches wide, with the wall
falling close to the outer edge of the slab. The upper surface of the in-
ward portion slopes downward from a thickness of 2 feet at the earth
side to 6 inches at the inner edge, a shape which indicates that the de-
signers thought of the footing as an inverted cantilever extending on
either side of the party wall and subject to maximum bending force
immediately under the wall. “The concentration of lateral reinforcing
near the bottom of the footing further confirms this view. There are
two types of column footings, the shape and size determined by
whether the footing carries a single column or pairs of the more closely
spaced columns along the transverse lines. The former is a truncated
pyramid, square in plan, the upper horizontal face of which carries the
cast-iron pedestal that receives the lower end of the column. Some of
the single-column footings are large enough to be regarded as the type
known in Chicago as floating-raft footings, since they measure 12 feet

22 The finer surface material at Cincinnati is alluvial, while the coarser gravels
are glacial in origin. The load-bearing capacity of the gravel beds may be judged
from the fact that the towers of Roebling's suspension bridge at Cincinnati (1856-
67) rest on this glacial gravel.