12 Carl W.

Condit
framed construction, and there were several builders eager to try their
hands. A powerful impetus to the acceptance of their art was the dis-
astrous Baltimore fire of 1904, which paralleled the fires of the 1830's
and *40's in their stimulus to cast-iron construction.

Ml. The First Concrete Skyscraper

In 1903 the leading American firms of designers and builders in re-

inforced concrete were Ransome and Smith of San Francisco, the
Baltimore Ferro-Concrete Company, the Ferro-Concrete Construction
Company of Cincinnati, and the Trussed Concrete-Steel Company of
Detroit. By 1905 they had been or were to be involved in the design
and construction of three building triumphs that may be said to have
brought the new structural techniques to maturity in the United States
and to have established them as potentially competitive with steel con-
struction. All three survive today in active use—the Ingalls Building in
Cincinnati (1902-3), Terminal Station in Atlanta, Georgia (19034),
and the Marlborough Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey (1905-6)—
and among them the Ingalls was the most daring and influential. By the
time 1t was placed under construction in the fall of 1902 the main
streams of development in reinforcing technique had come together in
the design of large buildings, and all are revealed in the structural sys-
tem of the Cincinnati project. The basic techniques were the following:
(1) Ransome's heavy monolithic beam-and-slab construction with ten-
sion reinforcing; (2) the two-way reinforcing systems of Monier and
Wayss; (3) the bent bars and stirrups of Hennebique; (4) the hoops
and continuous helixes for compression members, the former originally
proposed by Hyatt and the latter by Considére.

The Ingalls was planned as a first-class high-rise office building to be

constructed at the northeast corner of Fourth and Vine streets, in the
heart of the commercial and banking center of Cincinnati. In addition
to the department stores and financial institutions, the immediate area
included two major hotels and a number of railroad ticket offices. The
building was thus bound to attract the most desirable tenants and to

18 Ransome's firm was long established; the Baltimore and Cincinnati companies
were founded in 1901, and the Detroit organization was established in 1903 by Julius
Kahn. The last was the most successful of the four, its activities quickly expanding
to Europe as well as to major cities in the United States; yet, ironically enough, the
reinforcing techniques developed by Kahn have been entirely superseded by forms
essentially like those of the Ransome and Monier systems. Soon to compete with
the leading four in volume of large-scale construction was the Turner Construction
Co., founded in 1902 by Henry C. Turner, formerly a member of Ransome's
engineering staff.