Survival City: Part II

Seventeen years ago I posted about Tom Vanderbilt's Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002). Last week a family journey to see my great-aunt Carol in Edmore, North Dakota provided the opportunity to check on the former Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex on County Road 26, across from Nekoma. To the North, one sees the former complex; to the South, one sees the North Prairie Ag (Nekoma / Osnabrock) grain elevator. 

Combining season experienced delays this year due to weather conditions. When I arrived, teams of combiners were rapidly working the fields in advance of anticipated frost. North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring recently delivered a 'doom and gloom' outlook for the state's farmers. 

Various news agencies have reported that Bitzero acquired the Safeguard property for use as a cryptomining data center. Its adjacent property is for sale. Rusty signage warns trespassers will be shot, survivors will be shot again.

Image aboves: Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, County Road 26, North Dakota; North Prairie Ag (Nekoma/Osnabrock) grain elevator, Nekoma, North Dakota, as photographed 09.30.2025 by K. Rylance.

The Goose-Egg Architect

Architect Henry Evert Wichers was born in Dispatch (Smith County), Kansas in March 1898. After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees from Kansas State College,* Wichers joined the faculty as a rural architecture specialist. Within a few years, property owners sought his advice regarding utilities, remodeling and building typologies. His suggestions frequently included analyses of prevailing winds and geographic position.

The State College of Washington (now Washington State) enticed Wichers to depart his full professorship in 1947. Assigned to the college's extension services, Wichers collaborated with Helen Noyes on a guide to making one's farmhouse functional. The publication presented a recontextualized and pared down version of Wichers' earlier "Better Homes for Kansas Farms" (1942).

Over his decades-long career, Wichers contributed many DIY farm and home publications:

Planning a Home in the Country (1961)
Planning Corrals (1956)
Planning Your Dairy Buildings, with Don Lockridge (1953)
Planning Your Farmstead (1952)
Planning Your Poultry Houses (1952)
An Easy Way of Planning a Farm House (1951)
Homes for Washington Farms (1951)--a series with various plans
Minimum Standards for Good Farm Houses Located in the State of Washington (1950)
Choose a Farm House to Fit Your Farm (1949)
Farmhouse Planning Is Easy (1948)
Floors and Pavements for House and Garden (1948)
Successful Farming Building Book (1947)
Your Farmhouse: Make It Work, with Helen Noyes (1947)
House Framing (1946)
Better Homes for Kansas Farms (1942)
Low Cost Homes (1939)
"The Farm House" in Rural Life 16 (March 1938)
How to Modernize Your Farm House, with Ellen L. Pennell (1935)
Modernizing the Kansas Home (1934)
"The Building Site Dictates the Architectural Style" and "Considerations in Farmhouse Planning," chapters in The Better Homes Manual, ed. by Blanche Halbert (1931)
"Designs for Kansas Farm Houses," M.A. Thesis, 1930
Designs for Kansas Farm Houses (1929)
"Fitting A House to Its Site." American Architect 5 May 1928: pp. 573-580.
The Design of the Kansas Home (1927)

During the Cold War period, he advised regarding inappropriate shelters:

CELLARS NOT BOMBPROOF

     "A rural architecture specialist advises that when a bomb comes your way, 'stay out of the basement.' Too often, H.E. Wichers said, one hears advice from 'so-called experts' that [it] is the place to hide from bombs. 'It is just not so,' he contended. 'Even in small houses with concrete block basement walls, an A-bomb explosion will prove about as comfortable as the wrong end of a bowling alley.'"

The Times Record (Troy, New York) 15 March 1951

Wichers became known as the "Goose-Egg Architect" because of his use of quickly articulated ovoids to help property owners determine their architectural needs. He stressed that the automatic drawing technique was an effective means to sort out patterns prior to hiring a professional architect.

Image above: H.E. Wichers, O.S. Ekdahl, & N.F. Resch. "Plan 6519, For the Southwest." In Wallace Ashby. Farmhouse Plans, U.S. Department of Agriculture Farmer's Bulletin No. 1738. Washington, D.C., 1934.

*1924

Thermo-Con Cellular Concrete

We have mentioned in previous posts the role of Andrew Higgins in developing post-War building products geared towards affordable housing. This summer, the Association for Preservation Technology International is digitizing a sizable portion of the Southeastern Architectural Archive's trade catalogs, which include Higgins promotional materials.

Image above:  Cover.  Thermo-Con Division. Building with Thermo-Con Cellular Concrete. New Orleans: Higgins Inc. Circa 1948. Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries. View the full brochure via the Internet Archive's Building Technology Heritage Library.

Field Trip: Oscar-Zero

North of Cooperstown, North Dakota on Highway 45 in Griggs County there sits the Oscar-Zero Missile Alert Facility that was once manned by members of the United States Air Force's 321st Missile Wing. Prescribing to George Washington's words that "to be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace," the missileers trained daily for a job they hoped they would never perform. . . releasing the country's arsenal of Minuteman missiles.

Decommissioned in 1997, Oscar-Zero is now a State Historic Site. Largely constructed of #18 rebars, concrete and steel plating, Oscar-Zero took two years to complete, from 1964-1966. Southern miners were transported to North Dakota to handle digging operations for this and other such launch facilities and missile silos. Both the silos and the launch control facilities had subterranean chambers with floating floors linked to enormous shock absorbers developed by Boeing. The steel was supplied by the United States Steel Company (aka The Corporation).

Oscar-Zero's two subterranean pods were protected by thick sheathing described in a previous post, as well as by enormous blast doors, one weighing 6,000 tons, the other 13,000 tons. The missileers stationed command posts in one underground chamber (shown above), while the second chamber housed equipment. Suggestive of the many hours spent underground, the pods are adorned with murals, graffiti, and wall paper depicting more idyllic tourist destinations.

Image above: Oscar-Zero Command Station, Griggs County, North Dakota, as photographed 21.10.2011 by K. Rylance.

Subterranean Steel

We recently came across an article related to the U.S. Minuteman Ballistic Missile System Program. Engineers William J. Hartdegen and John A. Quigley published their configurations for 150 subterranean missile facilities located near the Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota. The pod-like launch and control facilities were comprised of several layers of #18 rebars (top) that were designed to withstand "the high, dynamically applied pressure resulting from a nuclear attack." Dynamic strength capability tests conducted at the University of Illinois suggested that all splices of reinforcing bars of #11 and larger size required butt-welding. The pods were additionally lined with 1/4-inch steel plate in order to provide electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and radio frequency interference (RFI) shielding. A typical launch facility with a 90-foot launch tube and its adjacent capsule-shaped equipment storage space is depicted in the lower image.

Travelers to North Dakota can now visit the Ronald Reagan Minuteman State Historic Site, and journey down an elevator shaft to enter the last* post-disarmament launch control center. Learn more here.

To read more about the construction & view more images, see: Hartdegen & Quigley. "Welding Solves Problems in Multibillion-Dollar Minuteman Program." Chap. in Modern Welded Structures, Vol. III (Cleveland, OH: The James F. Lincoln Arc Welding Foundation, 1970), pp. I-16 to I-20. Available in the Southeastern Architectural Archive.

*Post-Script: As part of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, most of these siloes have been imploded. Read more here.

Thermo-Con Cellular Concrete

In the 1950s, the New Orleans-based Higgins Incorporated advertised its patented Thermo-Con Cellular Concrete System. Higgins touted its concrete as an admixture of Portland Cement, water, and "three chemicals" (actually aluminum flake, caustic soda, and bituminous emulsion). The company's advertising department took pains to communicate the product's heat-shielding properties (demonstrated by image above) and to distinguish its approach from any correlation to prefabrication:

The Thermo-Con cellular concrete system is in no way a pre-fabricated construction method. The forms are designed on a one-foot modular principle and can be arranged to fit any desired plan for a home or commercial building. Any architectural style may be chosen and interior space arranged to suit individual needs.

In 1949, New Orleans architects Sporl and Maxwell (Edward Sporl and Murvan "Scotty" Maxwell) designed a luxury Thermo-Con house (images above) for company founder Andrew Higgins (1886-1952). The Southeastern Architectural Archive retains construction drawings for the Higgins House in its Maxwell and LeBreton Office Records Collection. See photographic images on Regional Modernism's flickr set here. See and read about another Thermo-Con house here. The Thermo-Con Lakemoore Apartment Complex (1950), built in suburban Atlanta by businessman Wiley Lemuel Moore , was ultimately converted to a condo colony, the earliest condominium conversion in the city (1969). The buildings are still standing with some minor alterations to the exteriors.

After World War II, Andrew Higgins had originally hoped to develop "Thermo-Namel" homes, prefabricated structures made of enamel-coated steel. A national steel shortage forced the entrepreneur to postpone Thermo-Namel and develop Thermo-Con instead. He claimed that his new concrete foaming agent could expand a Portland cement and water mixture by 40%, and would result in a lightweight cellular concrete " 'of great insulation value and high tensile strength.'"(1)

Documents related to Higgins Industries and Higgins Resources reside in the Vertical Files of Tulane University's Louisiana Research Collection (LaRC) and in the University of New Orleans' Earl K. Long Library.

(1)"No Steel, Higgins Halts on Housing." The Times-Picayune 5 August 1947: p. 1 as it appears in the database America's Historical Newspapers.

Images above from Higgins Inc. Booklet No. 72, SEAA Trade Catalogs Collection.

Cold War Modern

Two months ago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London launched its Cold War Modern exhibition:  Last weekend, the V & A hosted a conference focused on Cold War culture; this Friday (28 November), the museum is sponsoring a symposium that brings together architects, critics and curators to discuss experimental architecture in the 1960s.   If you can't visit London before the exhibition's closing 11 January 2009, at least check out the website, which features an interactive timeline riddled with architectural drawings, photographs and models. 

Above:  Kenneth Adam, Design for the War Room in Dr. Strangelove (1962). Felt-tip pen on card.  Additional section added to drawing, 1999.  Collection Sir Kenneth Adam, London.  Didactic from exhibition.  

Blight in the Atomic Age

National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association. Film still from The House in the Middle (1954). Full film available from the Prelinger Archives: http://www.archive.org/details/Houseint1954

The subject of Cold War Architecture has come up on this blog before, in part prompted by a childhood spent in North Dakota, home at one point to an estimated 1700 nuclear weapons. Children statewide were still doing "duck and cover" drills into the 1980s. In 1999, the Brookings Institution identified the five states with the largest nuclear arsenals; North Dakota came in fifth behind New Mexico, Georgia, Washington and Nevada. Since disarmament, historic preservationists have been able to save North Dakota's last Minuteman missile launch complex, which will open summer 2009 outside of Cooperstown as the Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Missile Silo Historic Site.

1950's-1960's concrete and asbestos advertisements housed in the Southeastern Architectural Archive evidence the Cold War preoccupation with blast-proof architecture. Paint manufacturers also emphasized the atomic-prophylactic benefits of their products: The National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association produced The House in the Middle (1954) to demonstrate that the unkempt unpainted house was more susceptible to nuclear annihilation.

Nuclear Reactor on the Horizon?

DOCOMOMO-WEWA has announced that the Washington state Governor's Advisory Council on Historic Preservation will be meeting Friday, October 17th to review the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the endangered 1961 University of Washington-Seattle Nuclear Reactor Building.

The Architect Artist Group (TAAG); a collaborative group comprised of architects, an engineer and a painter; designed the campus structure. The singular TAAG building, the Nuclear Reactor garnered significant media coverage, in part because it was completed in advance of the Century 21 World's Fair in Seattle. To read more, click here.

TAAG Members:

Wendell Lovett, architect
Daniel Streissguth, architect
Gene Zema, architect
Gerard Torrence, structural engineer
Spencer Moseley, artist

Update (23.10.2008): The Governor's Advisory Council on Historic Preservation voted to list the building on the Washington Heritage Register and to forward the nomination to the National Park Service and the National Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. To read more about the nomination campaign led by a UW graduate student, click here.

At Large in the Library: Survival City

Vanderbilt, Tom. Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America. Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.

Tulane University Library: Howard Tilton Memorial, F595.3 .V36 2002

It begins. . .

"I want to get to where the Cold War is still ending in America, so I set out after sunrise one early July morning from Grand Forks, North Dakota, bearing west on U.S. 2. After some 45 miles, I turn left on N.D. 1, then drive another 45 miles down a road of typical Dakotan sparseness, so empty that passing drivers wave with old-fashioned courtesy at the sheer novelty of human company. . . "

Tom Vanderbilt's fascinating study takes the reader through the open terrain of the American West, in search of vestiges of its Cold War era architecture. He roams through the Dakotas, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and Texas as he uncovers the secret (and not-so-secret) projects of the U.S. military. He addresses the seeming paradox of co-existing International Style glass-sheathing and blast-resistant concrete bunkers.

One might imagine that the architects who conceived these remote experiments would be exclusively nameless government engineers and security officials, but Vanderbilt's book is populated with the likes of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), who designed Oak Ridge, Tennessee (aka "the atomic city"); Erich Mendelsohn, who worked on the government's Dugway Project; and Paolo Soleri, who designed the experimental community Arcosanti. Just consider the advice of the mainstream architecture community as conveyed in Architectural Record from April 1958: "'Atomic radiation is a new building design element to be taken into account with wind, weather, and sanitation.'"

I just wish the book contained an index! And my thanks to Penn State's architectural historian, Dr. Craig Zabel, for making the book recommendation. Cheers!

[Photograph: Benjamin Halpern. Safeguard Complex, near Nekoma (Cavalier County), North Dakota, c. 1970. HABS/HAER, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress]

Prefabrication and New Orleans

The Museum of Modern Art just opened its new exhibition, Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling (July 20-October 20 2008). The curators have developed a very informative website that includes a timeline of prefabricated housing and archival footage of American mass production beginning with Henry Ford's Model-T (1908). One of the contemporary projects featured in the Museum's Fifty-fourth Street lot is the Larry Sass/MIT Digitally Fabricated Housing for New Orleans, a 196-square-foot shotgun house that implements laser-cut joinery. The prefabrication, comprised of some 600 plywood and plastic sheets, is documented in stages on YouTube.

Noted New Orleans architectural historian Samuel Wilson, Jr. (1911-1993) wrote that as early as 1849, documents in the city's notarial archives made mention of prefabrication, in portable ready-made structures of canvas and cement. The Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 featured a "demountable" cypress Louisiana Cottage fabricated by the local Roberts and Company, which once occupied 299-307 Gravier Street. To read Wilson's article in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians [22:1 March 1963 pp. 38-39], consult JSTOR.

In 1935 New Orleans, concrete was being explored as a new material for affordable residential housing. The Lone Star Cement Corp., a subsidiary of International Cement Corp., approached the local firm of Weiss, Dreyfous and Seiferth with a commission to design a $10,000 concrete house. The so-called Lone Star Home, located at 5500 S. Claiborne Avenue, was erected in nine successive concrete pours with patented metal forms and was featured in both American Architect (January 1936) and Pencil Points (March 1936). For current photographs of the house, see TSA Visual Resources Curator Francine Stock's flickr Regional Modernism set.

In the late 1940s, the New Orleans-based Higgins Incorporated began to develop its own method, what came to be patented as the Thermo-Con Cellular Concrete System. Its concrete was an ambiguous admixture of Portland Cement, water, and "three chemicals." The company's advertising department took pains to communicate the product's heat-shielding properties (left) and to distinguish its approach from any correlation to prefabrication:

The Thermo-Con cellular concrete system is in no way a pre-fabricated construction method. The forms are designed on a one-foot modular principle and can be arranged to fit any desired plan for a home or commercial building. Any architectural style may be chosen and interior space arranged to suit individual needs.

The Southeastern Architectural Archive maintains project drawings for the Lone Star Home in its Weiss, Dreyfous and Seiferth Collection. Higgins company advertising brochures for "Thermo-Con" cellular concrete are located in the SEAA's Trade Catalogs Collection, Box 7.

Image: "Concrete Evidence" of heat-resistance of Thermo-Con Cellular Concrete. Photograph of a model's face being shielded from an active oxyacetelene torch by a Higgins Inc. concrete slab. From Higgins Inc. Booklet 72, SEAA.