WORLD ARCHITECTURE / WRIGHT’S TERMITE PROOF CHURCH IN KANSAS CITY STILL STANDS

From the Community Christian Church blog, Kansas City Mo.

 Frank Lloyd Wright, world renowned architect, was commissioned to design the new building for Community Christian Church after fire destroyed the original building on Linwood. Wright envisioned the entire lot being devoted to parking with the church building supported on graceful pillars over the parked cars. The building would front on 46th Street with the main level of the church to be near the street level at that point. Entrance to the parking facilities, in all probability, would be made from the south and west. Plans included a 1,000-seat auditorium with accommodations for a Sunday School of more than 700. Also included were a roof garden to be used for entertainment and other church functions, as well as a radical approach in construction of heating and cooling systems.

Wright circa 1940

Wright was considered a genius by some in the architectural world, a faddist by others. He was known for his complete departure from the ordinary and it was expected that the new church building would be no exception.

“What?” one member as to exclaim later, “A building on stilts? Why, it might get to rocking and lull some of the church members to sleep.” Wright dispelled any ideas of a building “on stilts,” hinting that the pillars he was suggestiong would be similar to the mushroom-shaped supports on a $1,000,000 office building in Racine, Wisconsin.

The idea of air-conditioning for the building was met with much disfavor from Wright. “Why, I’ve gotten more colds in so-called air conditioned buildings than any other place,” he exploded. He went on to explain that the building he envisioned would be comfortably cool in the summer and warm in the winter using a floor heating and cooling system, the floor being heated or cooled as the season demanded, gravity taking care of the rest. He also suggested removable pews in order to give the auditorium capabilities for varied uses.

Burris_and_FLWWright presented his finished plans to the building and finance committees in June 1940. Parking for 150 cars was allowed; construction of the building would be of steel and rose-tinted concrete. A green copper dome would sit above the chancel area. Wright claimed the building would be fireproof, earthquake, and vermin-proof” and upkeep would be virtually nil.

The building was designed in three sections which could be constructed separately. The main part – the auditorium – would cost approximately $100,000. The second part, the chapel and social service rooms, would be $50,000; the third, with the parking areas, would be $25,000. The walls were to be 2-3/4 inches thick made from two sheets of corrugated steel with air space between. Gunnite (concrete in color) was to be sprayed on the exterior surfaces. “This is a type of architecture that should be a lesson to this city,” said Wright. “It is no mere church building, but a new order dated 10 years ahead of its time. If begun immediately, the building could be ready for occupancy by October.”

The first drawing of the Frank Lloyd Wright design concept was published in The Kansas City Star on June 13,. 1940. One outstanding feature of the design was the tower of lights which would beam from openings in the roof over the chancel area. The lights, along with bells, were to be above the sounding board that formed the ceiling of the chancel. This sounding board was to be perforated to allow light to streak the cancel area. The steeple lights were still planned as late as December, 1941, projected to consist of eight 1,000 candle power lights which would “probably be used during the holiday season.” However, this feature of Wright’s design was never completed. A 1,200-seat auditorium, sloping to a platform as in a theatre, was an integral part of Wright’s concept. The 46th Street entrance would be designed without steps, an early recognition of the needs of the handicapped.

On October 30th, Wright sat in a lengthy conference with city officials, struggling to keep his patience as he listened to the Director of Public Works and the Commissioner of Buildings. The city refused to grant a permit for the building on the grounds that it was too radical to meet the provisions of the city’s building code.

“It is a question,” said the famous architect, “whether the city officials are going to abide by the letter of an outdated building code, or will permit it to be liberalized as a tool for progress. I plan to put the weight of my building on steel and concrete piers and then put an envelope around them. I don’t need ponderous walls, such as the city code engineers think are necessary. I have no basement in this church and the weight of the congregation is going to rest right on the ground through a concrete floor. The problem of stresses and weights, as worked out in my plan, is absolutely correct and guarantees the most safety. Another thing the city engineers don’t approve is my plan for heating the church through heat units built into the floor. What more logical place could there be since heat rises?”

At the end of the conference, Wright was accused of planning to put up a circus tent, a mere shell of a building. Wright’s plans were considered “skimpy” and the city officials insisted on “plans that any good engineer could understand.” Not until a redesigning of the foundation had been accomplished was the way paved for a foundation permit. This compromise utilized concrete foundations instead of the floating foundation originally planned by Wright. Once construction began, the Commissioner of Buildings made daily inspection tours at the site and forced builders to add tons of steel to insure safety.

The construction superintendent, Victor Olle Holm, was quoted as saying of Wright, “You can learn the 5-foot modules and the angles of the building fairly easy, but it takes a lot of study to understand Frank Lloyd Wright. Me, I call him more an artist than an architect. He is like the surgeon who is trying a new operation, or an old operation in a new2 way. Wright is the experimenter looking for new and better ways, and usually his experiments set a new mark for architects to shoot at. Sometimes his new ideas may have their faults, but they can be ironed out.”

Architect's rendering circa 1940

Dedication of the new church building at 4601 Main Street (a modification of the Frank Lloyd Wright design) was held on January 4, 1942, with over 1,500 persons looking on. At the ceremonies, some $10,000 was donated toward the building fund. “In the words of the architect,” said Dr. Jenkins, speaking at the dedication, “this edifice will be here for 300 years. It is fireproof, earthquake proof, cyclone proof, and termite proof.”

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You can learn more at www.franklloydwright.org

BRIT VIEW OF BOOMER VS. MILLENNIALS

Millennials 1981-1996

First published in The Guardian, London, May 2018.

GUEST BLOG / By Yvonne Roberts, writer, The Guardian--The post ww2 generation, now retiring in luxury, stands accused of a willful failure to safeguard young people’s interests.

The late 1940s were about bombsites, rationing, loss and mourning, but amid the gloom a new generation was emerging. In the grim, grey aftermath of war, children were born on an unprecedented scale in a population explosion: the baby boomers – born between 1946 and the mid-60s – had arrived. It was time for a new life. It was time for the young to grow up with faith in a better tomorrow.

When we baby boomers reached adolescence, creating the teenager in the process, it was as if the floodlights had been switched on, revealing a colourful, contrary, anti-authoritarian Britain. In our teens, with rock’n’roll if not much cash, we were the lucky, cocky generation.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher inelegantly described the maturing of this huge postwar bulge in the population as “like a pig moving through a python”, changing society as we grew older on a scale never known before. We challenged the Victorian puritanism, censorship, class snobbery and inhibitions of the establishment. Full employment put money in the pockets of managers and factory workers alike. In spanking new houses with inside lavatories and proper bathrooms, hire purchase allowed him (and less so, her) to spend, spend, spend as if, overnight, everyone had become a toff. It could only get better.

Baby Boomers, 1945-1960

Yet today, “baby boomer” is a toxic phrase, shorthand for greed and selfishness, for denying the benefits we took for granted to subsequent generations, notably beleaguered millennials, who reached adulthood in the early years of this century. So, where did it all go so very wrong?

It may have been due partly to our irritating habit of hogging the cultural limelight, with constant references to the swinging 60s serenaded by endless revivals of Lazarus-like pop groups who refuse to die. But there are a much more serious set of charges, too. We were – and are – accused of sabotaging our children’s future, hoarding power and money while expecting those with the least to foot the potentially hefty bills as we march towards our 90s.

Leading the flood of critics has been David Willetts, author in 2010 of The Pinch, a book that sparked a flood of furious debate. Lord Willetts, then a Conservative minister, is now chair of the Resolution Foundation thinktank. “The charge,” he declared, “is that the boomers have been guilty of a monumental failure to protect the interests of future generations.”

Soon, one jury will deliver its verdict: the Resolution Foundation’s intergenerational commission publishes its groundbreaking two-year investigation into millennial Britain on 8 May. The commission rightly says that intergenerational fairness is a major issue, but so too are the troubling inequalities within the generations. “Intergenerational war doesn’t reflect how people feel about the issues or how they live their lives as families,” says Torsten Bell, director of the foundation.

The commission signals that it is time to remodel the welfare state, which was crafted at a time when a pension was only expected to last a handful of years before death took its toll. Young people are deeply anxious about housing, jobs and pensions, while those who are older are concerned about health, social care, the fragility of the welfare state – and the future of their own children.

 “Everybody wants to fix this,” says Bell. “If we want to keep our promises to the different generations – and maintain the welfare state – we have to think radically about how we do this.”

The commission has already revealed a profound cross-generational pessimism about the prospects of the young. The escalator that for decades ensured the younger generation had a better standard of living than their parents has stalled – and that has ramifications for life. Britain – along with Greece – is now the most pessimistic among the advanced economic countries, a mood that has potentially catastrophic implications for a country’s wellbeing and resilience.

“When an entire cohort is not succeeding, everyone understandably feels a real need to fight tooth and nail to keep what they’ve got. The rich are much better-suited to win that war,” Bell warns. “That’s a real challenge for social mobility, and a disaster for politics.”

Pessimism is not new. In the 1970s and 80s, inflation reached 21%, three million people were on the dole, poverty was soaring and Thatcherism had laid waste to manufacturing and industry. On a full grant, and from a working-class background, I was one of the 8% who went to university, charged up with notions of (women’s) liberation, revolution and an envy of Mary Quant’s unaffordable wardrobe.

My best friend had left school at 16 and moved up the managerial ladder, earning what our mothers called “a good wage”. Pessimism was the national trait but we all had hope. I was 28 and single when I put a deposit on a tiny flat; my parents were in their late 40s before they took out a hefty mortgage on a modest bungalow. That escalator in action.

Life, money and opportunities had an elasticity that they lack today. A minority of millennials are rich but the majority are definitely not, while almost two million older pensioners, mainly female – the silent generation – live in deep poverty. The Resolution Foundation has provided forensic detail of how this has come about – and why. A complex mix of reasons includes the financial crisis, austerity and reluctance by successive governments (albeit ones filled with baby boomers) to radically tackle the challenges of housing, health, social care, employment and a woefully deregulated market at a time when people are living so much longer – but no baby-boomer banditry. Politicians have failed to decide equitably, in this different climate, who pays and how – and what they receive in return.

We are facing a new set of problems,” says Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC and a member of the commission. “We have people with degrees doing Mickey Mouse jobs and young people who will have no occupational pension and no house to sell to see them through old age. That’s not the fault of mum and dad. If we think that, we are tackling the wrong problems. It’s not about redistributing the crumbs from the rich man’s table but restoring fairness.”

So, according to the foundation, what is life like for the average millennial, in and outside London? For some, including women, ethnic minorities and LGBT groups, progress has come in terms of rights and personal freedoms. However, even at a time when unemployment is at its lowest and inflation minimal, aspirations of having a home, a fulfilling job and a higher income than the generation before are being extinguished.

Only a third of millennials own their own home, compared with almost two-thirds of baby boomers at the same age. It will take a millennial on average 19 years to save for a deposit, compared with three years in the 1980s. A third of millennials will, it is predicted, have a lifetime of renting with less space, poorer conditions, longer commutes and more insecurity than the baby boomers experienced.

In the 1960s, those born before the second world war spent 8% of their income on housing – that has risen to almost a quarter of net income for millennials. Right-to-buy has reduced social housing stock – 55,000 homes sold in 10 years – and house building is at half the annual need required. At the same time, private landlords lack proper regulation, so families can be evicted at two months’ notice, and rents can be astronomic.

Low wages are also endemic. Two out of five non-graduate jobs are filled by people with degrees, so the less qualified, who formerly went into proper apprenticeships, are pushed into self-employment, zero hours and agency work that suits some but not all. The proportion of low-paid work done by young men increased by 45% between 1993 and 2015-6. Millennials who changed jobs in their mid-20s enjoyed 14% pay rises, higher still if they moving around the country for work. But insecurity reduces the appetite for risk, so many are staying put, receiving minimal salary increases.

 “More and more young men have moved into the low-paid, part-time, service-sector jobs that women have traditionally done,” Bell says. “They never expected to do that, and their dads didn’t do it. If a measure of your self-esteem is how well you have done compared with your parents, that’s a blow. The good news is that women’s full-time employment prospects have significantly improved – but the goal wasn’t to improve poor job options for women while making them bad for young men.”

On current trends, given high rents, low wages, Brexit and, for some, the debt of university tuition fees, will millennials have sufficient funds in retirement? Under auto-enrolment, 5% of a wage by 2019 will go into a pension pot, but on a low income, will increasing numbers of millennials opt out? In several decades’ time, millions of older people may be dependent on housing benefit, living in rented accommodation, and surviving on a state pension, which currently at £7,000 a year, is already not fit for purpose.

In contrast, some baby boomers, newly retired, are apparently living in an experiential paradise – cruising the globe, contemplating buying a second home – albeit dazed at how good pensions, secure employment and the fluke of buying at the outset of a period of rapid house inflation has catapulted us so much further, financially, than many of us expected to travel.

Some baby boomers are extremely wealthy – in assets. They have power insofar as, currently, we are more likely to vote than the young. But we also pay taxes, help with childcare, volunteer and subsidise our grown-up children. “Families are doing their bit,” says Lord Willetts. “The state needs to as well.”

 The commission heard research carried out by Professor Karen Rowlingson, from the University of Birmingham, on the scale of support given by families. The middle classes, she says, pay for their grandchildren’s education and children’s housing; the working class take out loans and sell possessions to help with their children’s debts and day-to-day living. It’s self-help that further entrenches deep inequality.

“The younger generations, aged 20-45, make up the majority of the electorate. The older voters are dying off,” says Rowlingson. “We can change policies and tackle this as a partnership between the generations.”

According to the Resolution Foundation, the cost of education, health and social security as a slice of GDP is predicted to rise at today’s prices by £24bn each year to 2030 and by £63bn a year to 2040. It’s plain that the tax burden on young people, already struggling to match the living standards of older generations, has to ease.

Ending the triple lock that updates the state pension by the highest of annual inflation, earnings or 2.5% could see 700,000 more pensioners living in poverty by 2040, Age UK has warned. “It’s not who gets the bigger pension,” O’Grady says. “It’s why no state pension is sufficient.”

The report’s proposals will be revealed next month. Options being considered include help with rental deposits, better regulation of the private rented sector, a re-evaluation of council tax (a family in a £100,000 house may pay five times more than a person living in a £1m property); a look at inheritance and a radical reform of property taxation to help first-time buyers.

The intergenerational commission’s invaluable work exposes how urgently capitalism has to be brought under control. It’s time to restore fairness to the contributory principle at the heart of a renewed welfare state, re-establish social justice and repair the damage done to confidence, trust, wellbeing and optimism by a situation where 90% of people manage on increasingly less, while the other 10% rapidly accrue more and more.

 “Wealth differences also risk bleeding into other areas of life where they do not belong,” Bell warns. “Wealth status could determine not only where you can live, but the education you can get, the risks you can take and the job you can do. Wealth is profoundly reshaping Britain.”

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