ROYAL BANK OF CANADA, HAVANA.
Built of concrete. Entrance.
Molds for Reinforced Concrete.
Reinforced concrete, like every other new building material, has called forth ingenuity in many ways. When, for instance, a factory is to be reared much inventive carpentry is required to plan and construct the forms, or molds, into which the liquid concrete is to be poured around the steel skeletons. The footings, outside and inside columns, walls, girders, beams, floor-plates, roofs, and stairs all require separate forms, intelligently devised with a view to economy. For the Ingalls Building, Cincinnati, the forms cost $5.85 per cubic yard of concrete in place. White pine is the best wood for the purpose; it is readily worked and keeps its shape when exposed to wind and weather. For common buildings a cheaper wood, spruce or fir, may be chosen; even hemlock will serve if a rough finish suffices. In most cases green lumber is preferable to dry as less affected by water in the concrete. In fine work the boards of which the molds are made are oiled, and may be used over and over again. In all tasks a strict rule is that the reinforcing metal be properly placed and remain undisturbed as work proceeds.
Lock-woven wire-fabric.
W. N. Wight & Co.,
New York.
Buildings of Reinforced Concrete.
The Pugh Power Building, erected for manufacturing purposes in Cincinnati, is a capital example of what can be done with reinforced concrete. It is 68 feet wide, 335 long, and 159 high; its columns are spaced fourteen to seventeen feet longitudinally, twenty to twenty-three feet transversely; the floors are figured to bear a load of 230 pounds per square foot. In the same city is the Ingalls Building, for offices, 100 by 50 feet, and 210 feet high, designed by Mr. E. L. Ransome of New York. Among other structures of his design, executed in the same material, is the St. James Episcopal Church, Brooklyn, New York; buildings for the United Shoe Machinery Company, Beverly, Massachusetts, and piano factories for the Foster-Armstrong Company, Despatch, New York. The inspection shops of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, West 59th Street, New York, are also of reinforced concrete: no wood is used in wall or roof.
Reinforced concrete forms nine bins in one of the grain elevators of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Port Arthur, Ontario, on the shore of Lake Superior. The walls are nine inches thick, reinforced horizontally and vertically to a height of ninety feet and a diameter of thirty feet. There are also four intermediate bins, the whole thirteen holding 443,000 bushels. At South Chicago the Illinois Steel Company has built four similar bins for the storage of cement, each twenty-five feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with walls five to seven inches thick.
Many chimneys have been built of the new material; notably the chimney for the Pacific Coast Borax Company, Bayonne, New Jersey, 150 feet high, with an interior diameter of seven feet. These dimensions are exceeded at Los Angeles, California, where a chimney for the Pacific Electric Company rises 174 feet above its foundations, with an inside diameter of eleven feet. Both structures have hollow walls of the Ransome type reinforced horizontally and vertically.