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American Cities & Technology, Chapter 4: Building Types and Construction
In colonial times, _______________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________ conditions. This was true of both housing and public buildings. During the nineteenth century, though European influences and precedents remained important, the ________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________ cities.
During the colonial period, in the entrepot cities of the eastern seaboard, the classic dwelling was the brick-built terraced house (known in the USA as a “row house”), a building type brought from England. However, by the time of the revolutionary period, inland settlements in New England hadbegun to adopt_________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________ – the American dream house… In the nineteenth century, informed by an English picturesque aesthetic, the detached house would become the characteristic type of suburban house.
Until the 1830s, methods of building US houses also followed Europeans precedents. The building of brick houses by masonry-construction methods required specialized skills and numerous laborers. Wooden houses were of braced-frame design, using medieval beam-and-post construction with mortise-and-tenon joints. This method also required skilled artisans and numerous laborers to deal with the heavy wooden members. From the early 1930s, a new method of house-building was devised: balloon-frame construction (see Figure 4.1)… Balloon-frame constructioncould be _______________________________________________________________________________________________. In contrast to buildings erected by traditional methods, balloon-frame buildings went up very speedily. Even when skilled labor was used, the cost of such houses was some 40 percent less than those build by traditional methods. The voracious appetite of the rapidly expanding cities for housing meant that the new method was soon adopted. Technical changes contributed to its spread. The _________ __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________. This simplified the construction process further, as the builder needed only to cut the timber to length with a hand-saw. The other___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________nails. House-building quickly became “industrial” in the sense of depending on mass-manufactured components, making it easier for anyone to build their own home.
By the end of the century [end of the 1800s], _______________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck. Thus by the end of the second half of the nineteenth century, ownership of the ideal home came within financial reach of many and the look of the country was transformed. Houses built for rental were also balloon-frame construction (see Figure 4.3). By the second half of the twentieth century [1900s], 90 percent of US houses would be of this type (see Figure 4.4 overleaf).
In the years following the Civil War, the romantic cottage ideal became transformed with the aid of steam-powered jigs and new synthetically colored paints, into the turreted, multicolored “Queen Anne” houses that are now thought of as characteristic of the late nineteenth century USA. Their exterior decorative features, such as the elaborate wooden decoration known as “gingerbread”,_________________________________________________________________ _______________. Inside, too, factory-produced woodwork, wall-coverings and window glass contributed to the decorative effect. Close association with the health-giving properties of nature was also stressed, and it was during this period that the ample porch became a feature of US houses, along with the custom of sitting out in the evening. In the same period, _______ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________. House purchases were aided by the new co-operative providers of mortgages: the building and loan associations. These favored individual suburban properties, seeing them as a good risk, and so further fostered the process of suburbanization.
The poor in the largest cities could not achieve this idea, however. For example, __________ ____________________________________________________________________________ _________________________. The earliest tenements were simply large private houses, vacated by the wealthy, which were subdivided for multiple family occupancy. Occasionally, concern over public health motivated civic philanthropic groups to build model blocks of improved tenement designs, but in general improvements to tenements were the responsibility of the private landlords, the majority of whom were more concerned with maximizing their income. Even the worst properties could always be let in such a rapidly growing city. ___________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________ people… Finally, New York legislation of 1901, copied by many other cities, required strict standards of ventilation, fireproofing, sanitary facilities and outdoor courtyards.
During the early years of the twentieth century, US housing underwent a major change of design. The rambling Victorian, characteristic of the years after the Civil War, gave way to___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________, especially after the economic downturn of the early 1890s. In addition, the new domestic technologies of modern plumbing and bathrooms, hot-water heaters, central heating and so on were costly.
Skyscrapers, as tall buildings came to be known towards the end of the nineteenth century, ___ ___________________________________________. They were developed to accommodate rapidly growing private-enterprise business in the highly congested entrepot cities of Chicago and New York, where specialized business districts were emerging as spatial components. The early skyscrapers were generally no more than ten to twelve stories high, so they were no taller than the decorative towers on many railroad stations and town halls that were being built at this time in Europe and the USA – or, for that matter, than some Gothic cathedrals. What startled contemporaries was that people were using the full height of the building to carry out their daily tasks.
A skyscraper is “a machine that makes the land pay”. The purpose of ____________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _______________________ from letting [renting] them. In the pre-Depression phase of skyscraper building, even many skyscrapers bearing famous corporation names were occupied only in part by their corporate sponsors; the rest of the space was intended to be let at a profit. The aim of office-building designers and owners was therefore to fit as many good quality, high rent offices as possible on to the plot of land that was available to them.
Cast-iron internal construction was introduced into the United States in Washington DC and Philadelphia early in the nineteenth century. A pioneer building of complete cast-iron framing in the USA was the five-story factory of James Bogardus in New York City, built in 1848-9. Bogardus manufactured prefabricated iron structural members for buildings. The external walls of his factory had supporting members of hand-bolted cast-iron columns. As the walls themselves therefore had no load-bearing function, they did not need to be of heavy masonry construction. He had devised a ___________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________… By that year, Chicago had six buildings between ten and fourteen stories high that had been constructed with metal skeletons. In the Fair Store, however, the metal structure was of riveted steel, a material that was beginning to be used in tall buildings. Jenney had already used steel beams in the top three floors of the Home Insurance Building. For its strength, steel was lighter then iron, so structural members could be even less bulky. Ultimately the adoption of ___________________________________________________________________________.