1922 | Architecture, Real Estate
Architecture, Real Estate
The Lincoln Memorial dedicated May 30 at Washington, D.C., contains a 19-foot seated figure of the 16th president carved out of Georgia marble by sculptor Daniel Chester French, now 72. The $2,940,000 monument beside the Potomac has taken 7 years to build.
German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 35, presents an innovative plan for an office building that calls for "ribbon windows"—rows of glass evenly divided by vertical concrete slabs. He will employ the design in many European and American buildings.
Tokyo's partially completed Imperial Hotel opens July 1 across from the grounds of the Imperial Palace and becomes a center of the city's social life. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built at a cost of more than $4 million, it has a high-domed main dining room (the Peacock Room) that can accommodate 700 guests at a sitting. The handcrafted, copper-roofed building contains 4 million tiles ordered from an old kiln 200 miles south of the city and stone quarried 100 miles to the north, 600 craftsmen have carried out Wright's designs for furniture, lights, murals, and tableware, and it has taken 3 years longer than planned and cost more than ¥9 million ($4.5 million)—far more than was budgeted, and only the intervention of the imperial household has enabled the money to be raised. Not all of its 285 guest rooms, each one individually appointed, are ready for occupancy but work continues under the direction of his assistant, architect Irato Endo (Wright was stripped of his authority following a fire that gutted the old Imperial Hotel April 16 and he leaves Japan in the fall, never to return); Albert Einstein visits in the fall and entertains guests by playing his violin in the Peacock Room. Walls of the hotel are thicker at the base than at the top and move independently of each other (see environment [earthquake], 1923).
Carrier Corp. engineers replace the ammonia gas in their air-conditioner coils with dielene, a coolant that poses no hazards, and introduce a central compressor that makes the cooling units far more compact (see 1915; Rivoli Theater, 1925).