Gyo: Can you hear me?
Speaker 2: Yes.
Gyo: Okay.
It's interesting that I'm in a building that
I designed many, many years ago, and it's
what's called American Zinc Building.
Actually, the Park Service was responsible
for helping preserve it.
At one time, this building and the older building
that the hotel is in, was slated to be torn
down, but Esley Hamilton and others in the
city fought to preserve it, and so it was
saved.
Ray Wittcoff was the owner of the Fur Exchange
Building, the older building, and he got this
smaller lot on the corner, and he asked me
to design a headquarters for American Zinc
Company.
The site is about 60 foot wide, by 170 foot
long, and so what I did was to put all of
the fixed element, the stairways, the elevators,
on the north side, and I could have a clear
span of 50 feet within the site.
This is the main ground level.
I think it's wonderful to preserve a building
like this.
Also, I think that the people that then remodeled
it ought to have some sensitivity, but I don't
think they really did.
You could see these additions that they put
on on the end and so forth.
Anyway, it was really clear span of 60 feet
by about 110 feet, and all of the fixed elements
are on one side.
The office space was wide open.
I think these were all sort of this traditional
stuff was added on once the hotel took it
over, but it used to be just a beautiful open
space.
I wanted to use zinc as the exterior material
because it was their headquarters, but zinc
was not available as a building material at
that time, and so I went to stainless steel.
You could see that the fa�ade on one side
is vierendeel truss.
The whole block was a vierendeel truss, so
you have that three span coming over.
That shows again the vierendeel truss and
then the open span, and then the Fur Exchange
Building to the back.
This is a front that shows the clear span
of 50 feet, and then the coming under protected
to the main entrance.
The next few slides I'm going to talk about
in the 60's there were some very interesting
concrete buildings done.
Concrete was ... We were able to use concrete
because it was ... When you build concrete
structure, you have to build another structure,
wooden structure, to pour the shell over it.
The labor cost was still such that you could
afford concrete structures, but now it's really
much more difficult to do.
This is an airport that Yamasaki and I did
for St. Louis Lambert Airport.
At the beginning there were three arches,
120 by 120 foot wide.
This is an older drawing, but each of those
spaces were 120 by 120.
Then this shows another bay was added.
This is a fairly recent picture, but the tornado,
several years ago, took away a lot of the
copper roof.
This is all new copper roof on the building.
You notice those beams going diagonally across
the area.
Yama and I really didn't wasn't those beams,
but the structural engineers said that we
needed those for structure.
Later on, he admitted that he could have eliminated
them by making the corner for the arches come
together, thicking it.
Which I did on one of the building I'll show
you next.
A clear span.
Yama's idea was to try to make this building
like Grand Central Station, a gateway to St.
Louis.
This is a planetarium, another concrete structure
that was built during that period.
It's a thin shelled concrete.
The reason for this form was there was a planetarium
inside, and then there was a stairway there
wrapped around that planetarium.
You could go up to the roof, and from the
roof, after the show, actually see the stars.
They've remodeled it now so that the whole
interior is quite different than the way it
was designed.
This is the Priory Chapel.
I think you're going to go visit, but this
was built for benedictine monks who came from
England to setup a boy's secondary school
in St. Louis.
They wanted a round church because they felt
that it would bring all the boys much closer
to the center and they could pay more attention
to the ... That's the section through the
first arches, the main name, the second arches
of the sanctuary, and then the bell tower
is at the top.
The bell tower is the benedictine building
element that they used in many of their buildings.
When you build a concrete thin-shell structure,
you have to build the whole structure out
of wood.
There are four sections that they moved around.
It was interesting when we put out the ... Made
the drawings and put it out to bid, almost
no contractor wanted to build it because it
was too difficult they said.
In fact, McCarthy brothers, who got the bid,
elder brother who was the head of the company
threw the working drawings in the waste basket.
Then his brother, Paddy, picked it up and
really researched it, and figured out how
he could build it.
He was responsible for getting it built.
I mean architects can do innovative designs,
but you also need contractors who are willing
to take the chance to build it.
That shows the thin concrete.
Thank you.
