Archive for the 'Construction' Category

Real Estate Advice 1927

EIGHT MAXIMS FOR REAL ESTATE OPERATORS
HOW to make money handling real estate was recently comprest into eight maxims by W. Burke Harmon, a well-known New York realtor, and reported as follows by the New York World:
1. Never buy for cash. The successful operator invests just as little of his own funds as possible, glad to [...]

Engineering Achievements of 1929

ENGINEERING ADVANCEMENTS 1929
Source: Popular Science Monthly - January 1930
by COLLINS P. BLISS, M.A.
Professor of Mechanical Engineering,
New York University
FORMAL opening of the eight-mile Cascade Tunnel, the longest railroad tunnel in the United States, ushered in the engineering year of 1929.
Outstanding engineering projects of the year include the great International Bridge at Detroit, longest suspension bridge in [...]

Concrete with Bamboo Reinforcing 1923

CONCRETE REINFORCED WITH BAMBOO
Bamboo, which has been chemically treated, is used as a reinforcing for concrete in Japan and, we are told in Concrete (Detroit):
“According to Henry C. Hitchcock, the American consul, Nagasaki, Japan, the chemicals used in treating the bamboo are apparently known only to the few who have made use of them. Bamboo [...]

Reducing Housing Costs 1930

Hoover Helps the Home-Builder
TO FIND A WAY TO MAKE IT EASIER for the average man or woman to obtain a home”â€”that, in the phrase of the New York World, is the object of the White House Conference on home-building and home ownership recently called by President Hoover.
Pointing out that this is the twenty-fourth commission appointed [...]

Ice Concrete 1927

ICE CONCRETEâ€”This is the name of a new, porous, astonishingly light building material invented in Finland. Like ordinary concrete, it is composed of cement and sand. Crusht ice or snow is used during the process of mixing. Says Waldemar Kaempffert in the New York Times:
Heat evaporates the water of the melting ice, and the result [...]

Hydroelectric Tunnel 1925

THE BIGGEST HYDROELECTRIC TUNNEL
COLOSSAL UNIT WILL SOON BE ADDED to the water-power system of California through the completion of a conduit fifteen feet in diameter, bored through the solid granite of one of the loftiest mountain ranges in the High Sierras. The final blast, connecting the ends of the tunnel, has been fired; excavation of [...]

Parthenon Recreated in Nashville 1925

TENNESSEE’S NEW PARTHENON
GENTLY, AS BEFITS THE FRENCH, a Parisian journalist pokes fun at the Tennesseeans for erecting at Nashville a superb copy of the Parthenon. It shows how genuinely they admire things European, he finds. Also, it reveals a certain discontent with things American. However, these are phenomena to be perceived only by those who [...]

Small Houses 1916

LITTLE HOUSES IN BRICK AND STUCCO
REASONABLENESS and imagination, recognized by the Mediaeval builders as the underlying principles of all great architecture. should be as inseparably united in the small home of today us they were in the great cathedrals of old. For the little house is an expression of thought, though a very different kind [...]

Prices of Building Materials 1916

THE TREND OF PRICES OF BUILDING MATERIALS
AMONG architects and others interested in the cost of building, the actual situation in the construction field is not always entirely understood, and at the present time particularly the percentages of increase in prices of materials that have taken place since the effect of the war in Europe has [...]