Rippley's Whitewash Machine

In the early twentieth century, Rippley Manufacturing Company of Grafton, Illinois, was selling a whitewash & painting machine, a 24-gauge galvanized steel drum fitted with a ball valve brass cylinder pump, a hose and a spray nozzle.

The company provided recipes and specific instructions for operating the machine and applying various washes.

Images above: Upper: "Rippley's Whitewash & Painting Machine." Sanitary and Heating Age (1 March 1902): p. 35 available via Google Books.

Lower: "Rippley's Three Whitewash Recipes, and Directions for Applying Washes and Operating Whitewash Machines." (Grafton, IL: Rippley Mfg. Co., n.d.). Trade Catalogs Collection, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Wright's New Orleans Mission

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) visited Tulane University in 1950. He had been invited to address New Orleans business leaders by Buford L. Pickens, then director of the School of Architecture.

Years later, Pickens recounted the event:

"Well, about Frank Lloyd Wright's visit--Ken Landry drove Wright from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. During this two hour ride down, Wright had 'confessed' to him that he had done the design of the old Illinois Central railroad station, that Sullivan was busy doing something more important at the time and Wright had actually done that building. I think Wright was the chief draftsman. At the time it would have been difficult to satisfy the needs of the railway people and to keep that building. What could have been done, however, would have been to have Wright design the building to replace it. That was the whole purpose of this visit, to come down and have him present his pitch to the Chamber of Commerce or its equivalent with its big wheelers and dealers, prime movers in New Orleans. People coming down from Chicago would get off the train and walk through a palm tree garden and have a very botanical kind of setting. Prominent alumni architects in this school helped to sponsor that meeting because they were influential in agreeing with me that if we got Wright personally to confront these people, that maybe he could pull it off and get the job."

Buford L. Pickens, interview with Bernard Lemann, recorded April 1988. As transcribed in Bernard Lemann, et al. Talk about Architecture: A Century of Architectural Education at Tulane. New Orleans: Tulane University School of Architecture, 1993, p. 112.

Image above: Unknown photographer. Frank Lloyd Wright at Tulane University. 1950. Color diapositive. Frank Lloyd Wright Collection, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Following Wright

As the Southeastern Architectural Archive prepares to install its new exhibit that focuses on Frank Lloyd Wright's influence in the southeastern Gulf Region, we have pulled out some travel slides.

During the 1950s, New Orleans architect Philip Roach, Jr. visited many of Wright's then-newly constructed buildings, taking photographs along the way. Roach's admiration for Wright took him to Arizona, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Slides above, from top to bottom:

Welbie L. Fuller Residence, Pass Christian, MS (1951; destroyed by Hurricane Camille, 1969)

Auldbrass Plantation [C. Leigh Stevens Residence], Yemassee, SC (1940-51)

Anderton Court Shops, Beverly Hills, CA (1952)

All images taken by Philip Roach, Jr. Courtesy of Philip Roach, Jr. Office Records, Southeastern Architetural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Lexicon: Stair-Travelor

A previous post introduced Otis Company's Autrotronic Elevator of 1950. Over a decade earlier, New York- based Sedgwick Machine Works advertised elevators and "stair-travelors" for residential architecture. The company emphasized its products' health benefits, posting product claims in The New Yorker as well as House and Garden. These stair-travelors may still be found in some old New Orleans homes.

Image above: Sedgwick Advertisement. House and Garden (July 1938): p. 2.

Heated City of Abundant Life

This blog has previously addressed utopian views of future cities, and recently we came across a scheme designed by M. Mark Feldman and Olindo Grossi for the Exhibition Salon of various subsidiaries of the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Corporation. Feldman and Grossi envisioned a future Sixth Avenue, New York City as a glass skyscraper-lined, terraced and heated artery:

"Buildings, built of glass that admits light without images, are set well back from the street and well apart to permit maximum light, and terraces, thus created, are utilized, according to district, for sports, restaurants, etc. All terraces are heated by individual reflectors.

"Street traffic is warmed by radiant heat plates that are worked into the architecture of the buildings just above the ground floor. The plates are flared at the corners to cover the space between buildings.

"Winter and summer sports are available simultaneously in all seasons since the reflectors, which are broadcasters of radiation in winter, become absorbers of heat in summer, or vice versa. Thus skating rinks are installed at the tops of the tallest buildings and other sports, such as swimming, tennis and bowling, below.

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"In summer, heat from the sun is turned back from the glass buildings by metallic insulating reflectors that can be rolled in and out at each floor. In restaurants, theatres, etc., special metal backs for chairs and seats are used as an added means of transmitting and reflecting the radiant heat."

As reported in Pencil Points August 1937, pp. 49-50. Many issues of Pencil Points can be made available at Howard-Tilton Memorial Library through the Center for Research Libraries.

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.

$50 House 1945

I was recently at the Midwestern Region Friends of Dard Hunter Conference at the Paper Discovery Center in Appleton, Wisconsin. The Discovery Center's permanent exhibition references a paper house designed for emergency shelter (fires, flooding, or other disasters) by the Institute of Paper Chemistry. With the exception of plastic windows and metal hardware, the house (shown above) was built entirely of recycled paper products.

The structure was erected in less than one hour by two men, using chipboard that was made from waste paper (newspapers, etcetera). A fortifying agent strengthened the chipboard against water and humidity, and the house was coated with a fireproof paint. The 8 x 16' structure was intended to safely house a family of four.

Paper houses were not completely new. In 1924, a Massachusetts mechanical engineer named Elis F. Senman designed a timber-framed paper house and its furnishings. It remains a popular tourist attraction. Read more here.

Read more: "Paper House Costs $50." Popular Science (March 1945): p. 85 available from Free E-Journals. [Image above from article]