Buildings

Sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi is credited with bringing the concept of the Statue of Liberty to fruition, deriving inspiration from the 19th-century penchance for grandiose monuments. He originally designed the statue for placement at the Suez Canal, but the project was never commissioned. After a promotional trip across America, Bartholdi's ideas finally took hold in 1874, and a Franco-American coalition was formed to fund the project, with the Americans building the base and the French the statue.

The San Jacinto Monument commemorates the decisive 1836 battle near the banks of the Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto River that allowed Texas to win independence from Mexico. It is the world's tallest monument, rising 15 feet higher than the Washington Monument.

In 1936, Daughters and Sons of the Republic of Texas led lobbying efforts to allocate funds for a monument that would mark the importance of the Battle of San Jacinto. Ground was broken on April 21, 1936 - 100 years to the day after the victorious battle.

Conceived in the early years of World War II as a plan to bury four fuel containers horizontally in a hillside at the U.S. Navy facility at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility ultimately encompassed the design and construction of 20 vertical storage tanks - each large enough to contain a 20-story building - buried in the volcanic hillside and connected by tunnels to a harbor-side pumping station more than two-and-a-half miles away.

Philadelphia City Hall was the largest masonry load-bearing wall building in the world at the time of its completion in 1901, stood as the tallest occupied building in the United States until 1909, and still is the largest city hall in the United States. The building covers 14.26 acres, originally contained 634 rooms with over 1 million square feet of space, and with its tower and statue of William Penn rises a total of 548 feet above the ground. The construction of Philadelphia City Hall began in 1872 and was completed in 1901.

No image dominates the Midwestern landscape like the monolithic grain elevator, whose present shape and construction owe much to grain company operator Frank Peavy and architect-builder Charles Haglin.

Wanting to improve on the flammability and cost of traditional wood-cribbed construction, Peavy speculated that reinforced concrete, in its infancy at the turn of the century, would outperform other materials. But critics feared that the elevator would collapse due to the vacuum created when grain was emptied from the air-tight structure.

Just 20 years after settling the uninhabited Salt Lake valley, Brigham Young and his Mormon followers completed one of the nation's most impressive public structures. The 9,000-seat Mormon Tabernacle boasts a clear span roof measuring 150 feet by 250 feet, its timber trusses joined with wooden pegs and lashed with green rawhide, which shrank and tightened as it dried.

Designed by Claude A. P. Turner, a pioneer of reinforced concrete construction, the Marshall Building was constructed originally in 1906 as a five-story building. In 1911 the sixth floor of the building was added as per Turner's original design. This building is the oldest extant example of Turner's "mushroom" flat-slab system which transformed the design and construction of reinforced-concrete floors worldwide.

Built during the 1930s, when Argentina's economy was the tenth strongest in the world, the Kavanagh Building was one of the world's first reinforced concrete skyscrapers and for many years remained the tallest building in South America. Commissioned by Corina Kavanagh and designed by architect Sanchez Lago y De la Torre, the 31-story modernist structure juxtaposes five volumes in a triangular, stair-like configuration that served for many years as a representative symbol of modern Buenos Aires.

The Kamehameha V Post Office is the oldest surviving public building in the U.S.  constructed with reinforced concrete. The success of this early structure helped establish the value of reinforced concrete as a durable construction material.

Brickmaker J.G. Osborne was chosen to provide design and construction. He  immigrated to Hawaii from Yorkshire, England, and was aware of the recent  development of Portland cement and its expanding use in Europe. It is believed that the leaders of Hawaii were anxious to adopt British skills, which influenced their selection of Osborne.

The 16-story Ingalls Building, still in use today, was the world's first reinforced concrete skyscraper. Its success led to the acceptance of high-rise concrete construction in the United States.

Melville E. Ingalls, for whom the building is named, spent two years convincing city officials to issue a building permit. Skepticism was high, because the existing height record for a concrete building was only six stories.