The Raymond Arch

In 1941, New Orleans civil engineer Harold E. Raymond patented an efficient means of constructing a steel-framed arch that had been adopted by architects Diboll-Boettner & Kessels (DBK) on their 1520 Canal Street bus terminal (1936-37).(1)  Raymond claimed that his parabolic arch minimized stress and increased wind resistance. Louisiana and Mississippi builders were attracted to its use for gymnasiums, auditoriums, garages and livestock pens.

Raymond published his arch and its uses in a trade brochure.  DBK's Teche-Greyhound Bus Terminal -- adjoining the Jung Hotel -- featured prominently as one of hundreds of buildings that had employed the method.  Built for $250,000, the depot opened in January 1937. Teche-Greyhound utilized the structure as a regional hub that served municipalities to the East, North and West. The company estimated that some 1,500 people entered the city via the bus line daily, with an annual $1 million impact on the city. As the 1950s waned, Greyhound planned a grander terminal that rendered the Canal Street location obsolete. It ceased operations in 1961 and the Jung Hotel demolished it the following year as part of its own modernization.

Read more about the building's features and dedication in The Times-Picayune, Thursday, 28 January 1937.

The Southeastern Architectural Archive retains original drawings, as well as Harold Raymond's promotional work, Raymond Arch Construction.  The latter was recently digitized by the Association for Preservation Technology International as part of a summer digitization project.  Read it and other New Orleans building trade catalogs via the Internet Archive's Building Technology Heritage Library.

(1)In April 1938, Pencil Points claimed that DBK designed the structure in association with New York industrial designer Raymond Loewy.

Images above:

Top:  Teche-Greyhound Bus Terminal.  Harold Raymond. Raymond Arch Construction. New Orleans, c. 1937. Architectural Trade Catalogs, Southeastern Architectural Archive.

Second and Third:  Diboll-Boettner & Kessels, architects. Bus Terminal for Greyhound Lines. July 1936. Pencil on tracing paper.  Details.  Southeastern Architectural Archive.

Bottom:  Greyhound Lines. "Presenting the Finest Bus Terminal in America." The Times-Picayune, Thursday, 28 January 1937.   Advertising image.

New Orleans Architect Daniel Garza

In October 1926, Mexican exile Daniel Garza (b. Oaxaca 1865 - † New Orleans 1926) applied for membership in the Louisiana Architects Association (LAA). His application -- endorsed by New Orleans architects William Burk, Julius Dreyfous and Leon C. Weiss -- indicated that he had obtained his education at the Liceo Fournier and the National Preparatory School, and that he was a former vice president of the Academia de Ingenieros y Arquitectos and the Associación de Ingenieros del Colegio Militar.(1)

Garza developed a new method of reinforced concrete construction that had been utilized in his landscape designs for Chapultepec Forest in Mexico City. Prior to his exile "for political troubles" he conducted experiments with the Garza System at the Colonia de "El Imparcial" outside of Mexico City [now Colonia Clavería], that were witnessed by other architects and engineers and later published -- along with a New Orleans residence he designed -- in Building Review (New Orleans, June 1922).  He patented his system in the United States on 2 August 1921.

Less than a month after applying for LAA membership, Garza died. He was buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 3.

(1) Application. 7 October 1926. Folder 1, Box 33. American Institute of Architects New Orleans Chapter Records, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Image above: Daniel Garza. "A New System of Unit Reinforced Concrete Construction." Building Review (June 1922): pp. 11-12. Louisiana Research Collection, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Garza held the following U.S. patents:

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/bd/17/00/851a01842a7602/US1637935.pdf

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/4f/c1/95/dcee6df2240e32/US1386251.pdf

Graveley's Arch

In 1930, a Tulane University civil engineering graduate named Eugene Cenas Graveley († Costa Rica 1943) patented a welded steel roof construction method. He founded a company based on the technique and established offices in New Orleans (2126 Poland Street),  Houston and Orlando.

He stressed that his arch construction method was particularly well suited to the tropics:

"This is the only type of Construction which has withstood the TROPICAL HURRICANES 100% unhurt despite the centers of two in one month (including the most destructive one on record) passing through a nest of our Buildings."(1)

He recommended its use for auditoriums, gymnasiums, churches, dance pavilions, theaters, movie houses, railroad stations, hangars, automobile garages, dock sheds, cotton and sugar houses, machine shops, and warehouses.

His earliest buildings were automotive garages in Louisiana, with the first -- a S. Rampart Street structure designed by New Orleans architect Martin Shepard for the Rhodes Undertaking Company -- requiring a tie rod. After stress tests conducted on his building sites and at Princeton University boosted Graveley's confidence, his designs abandoned tie rods altogether.

If  you want to see a Gravely Arch in New Orleans, visit United Machinery at 2530 Canal Street. The extant structure is what remains of the engineer's Felix Garage, shown above.

(1)The Arch Construction Co., Inc. The Resurrection of the Oldest Type of Building Construction: The Arch. New Orleans: Eugene Graveley, 1929. Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries. NEW! View full document via the Internet Archive's Building Technology Heritage Library here.

Images from publication cited above.

Exhibit Highlights Superdome

Tulane University’s Southeastern Architectural Archive has announced a new exhibition:

In celebration of Super Bowl XLVII and in anticipation of the 40th Anniversary of the Louisiana Superdome, this exhibition documents the structure’s early history.  Beginning with a 1966 public referendum to establish a Louisiana Exposition and Stadium District to build a domed stadium in New Orleans, the project rapidly progressed through an exhaustive site selection phase. Governor John McKeithen proclaimed it the best thing to happen to the state since the Louisiana Purchase.

Before the structure was even begun the vox popoli had established it as “the superdome.” By summer 1967, a design team led by Nathaniel C. Curtis, Jr. was developing conceptual models. He stressed the building’s legacy as a classical amphitheatre envisioned in modern terms, a challenge to both the past and the future. His team developed the space around the spectators, then subjected the designs to computer analysis in order to determine the appropriate structural system. Additional modifications were made due to the city’s high water table and the need for the building to withstand hurricane-force winds. Helicopters delivered final building materials to the dome when cranes could no longer reach.

The resultant stadium sits on a platform twenty-five feet above grade and features a five-thousand ton dome supported by a tension ring comprised of twenty-four prefabricated sections that were welded in place. After eight years of labor, employing over one thousand people, and costing over $163 million, the Louisiana Superdome required “the unrelenting efforts of people who were not afraid to make a dream come true.”


The Dome
17 January 2013  -- 1 November 2013

Image above:

Art Associates, Illustrators.  The Louisiana Stadium. Presentation rendering. Undated. Curtis & Davis Office Records, The Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Kahn System

In March 1906, Asa J. Biggs (†1913); a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained engineer and principal in the New Orleans firm Mackenzie, Goldstein & Biggs; wrote an article for Architectural Art and Its Allies heralding a new reinforced-concrete building technique, the Kahn system. Invented by Julius Kahn and patented 18 August 1903 (Patent No. 736,602), the system featured rolled bars with diagonal "wings" bent up at regular intervals to prevent shear cracks in horizontal beams (see diagram on envelope below). Kahn's Detroit-based Trussed Concrete Steel Company manufactured and marketed the reinforcement system, and its structural engineers supplied builders with their services.

Frank Lloyd Wright employed the Kahn system in his Imperial Hotel (1913-23) in Tokyo.(1)  In New Orleans, Bemis Brothers' Gulf Bag Company building (329 Julia Street) was erected on 660 Raymond concrete piles, and its beams and floor slabs employed the Kahn system (1905-06).  This facilitated the builder's desire to span a clear space of 44 feet that would allow heavy bales of burlap cloth to be loaded and unloaded.(2) Edmund Burke Mason was the engineer in charge of construction for Bemis Brothers Bag Company of Boston, and supervised the construction of the Julia Street facility, as well as that of Bemis plants in San Francisco and St. Louis.(3)

(1) Joseph M. Siry. "The Architecture of Earthquake Resistance: Julius Kahn's Truscan Company and Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel" Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67:1 (March 2008): pp. 78-105.

(2) Asa J. Biggs. "A Re-Inforced Concrete Factory." Architectural Art and Its Allies (March 1906), pp. 13-14.

(3)John Smith Kendall. "Edmund Burke Mason." History of New Orleans, vol. 3. 1922. p. 946.

Images above: "Gulf Bag Company Building." Architectural Art and Its Allies (March 1906), p. 13; Trussed Concrete Steel Company envelope, 1909. "Louisiana Printing Co.," Martin Shepard Office Records, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Mushroom System II

We had posted an earlier entry regarding the use of C.A.P. Turner's so-called "Mushroom System" in the construction of the New Orleans Johns-Manville Building (1914). One year earlier, architect Emile Weil (1878-1945)  was touted as employing the method for the "Most Up-to-Date Wholesale House in New Orleans," his Woodward-Wight building (344 St. Joseph Street). The construction photograph reproduced above appeared in the January 1913 issue of Architectural Art and Its Allies, a local architecture/building journal.

Image above: "The Mushroom System of Reinforced Concrete." Architectural Art and Its Allies (January 1913), p. 20.  Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Mushroom System

In September 1914, the New Orleans architectural firm of Toledano, Wogan and Bernard was completing a new skyscraper in the Central Business District, the Johns-Manville Building (441 Gravier Street/225 Magazine Street).  The building employed a recently patented flat-slab construction system that allowed for thinner slabs, broader spans, and reduced shear. Minneapolis-based engineer Claude Allen Porter (C.A.P.) Turner (1869-1955) developed the system  after years working as a railroad bridge engineer for the Soo Line.

Turner's first documented mushroom system building was the Johnson-Bovey in Minneapolis (1906; razed). Milwaukee's Hoffman building (now Marshall) was completed the following year.(1)

In New Orleans, there was considerable interest in the Turner Mushroom System. J.T. Mann & Company was Turner's southern agent, and envisioned the Johns-Manville building its prototype.  The locally-published Building Review reported to the Louisiana Chapter of the American Institute of Architects:

"The building is the highest of its kind in this city and is of the Turner Mushroom system construction. It is fireproof, has a modern sprinkling system, extensive fire extinguishing devices and automatic door shutters. The walls of the building are stuccoed, trimmed with press brick and polychromatic terra cotta, models of which were colored in the architect's office, giving a general color scheme that presents a composition of refinement and good taste. The average test of the floors have proven a loading capacity of 600 pounds to the square foot in spans averaging 20x20 feet with a deflection of not more and in some cases much less than 1-8 of an inch."

(1) In 2002, the American Society of Civil Engineers declared it a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.

(2) "A New Turner Mushroom System Building." Building Review (19 September 1914), p. 8.

Images above: C.A.P. Turner, consulting engineer. Column Top Detail, Johns-Mansville Bldg., New Orleans, LA. Blueprint.  Toledano, Wogan & Bernard Office Records; "Testing Floor Load in the New Johns-Manville Mushroom System Building." Photographic reproduction. Building Review (19 September 1914), p. 8. Both Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.