Book Description

This book contains set of fantastic water tower designs and their companion water pumping stations. It dates from the era when municipally supplied water was relatively new - Boston's first municipal water system had been inaugurated to joyous temperance celebrations just fifty years earlier. It was also the era of the City Beautiful Movement - the year when the fabulous urban vision of Chicago's Columbian World's Fair drew over 27 million visitors. And it was an era when architects could really draw. In December of 1889 a relatively new weekly journal: The Engineering and Building Record. Announced a design competition for Water Towers and pumping stations. Its publisher, Major Henry C. Meyer, a Civil War Medal of Honor recipient, had hired Charles Frederick Wingate, who knew nothing about engineering but was well connected in both literary and social reform circles, including with the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor and Jacob Riis, author of How the Other Half Lives. In 1879, under Wingate's guidance, Major Meyer's journal had initiated a design competition for an improved version of New York's notorious tenement buildings. It received over 200 entries and that same year lead to the passage of a tenement reform act. In 1880 it held a competition for a model school house. This also received nearly two hundred submissions, which were judged according on: "convenience of arrangement;" "security against fire and facility of egress;" "lighting, heating and ventilation;" and "sanitary appointments." Independently, honorable mentions were awarded for "architectural merit." In June 1889 it published a lengthy illustrated article on Boston's Chestnut Hill High Service Pumping Station. That December it announced two competitions. One offered a prize for "essays on road construction and maintenance," reflecting the growing "Good Roads Movement." The other competition arose from the Chestnut Hill article and reflected a City Beautiful sensibility. It specifically expressed concern about the appearance of water towers in prominent elevated locations as being potentially "offensive to the eyes of this and future generations." and noted that the "necessary isolation and elevation of these buildings" suggested their sites as pleasure grounds." Anticipating that many municipal water systems might be privately owned, it also suggested that good design could be a requirement for being awarded a franchise. There were seventeen winning and honorable mention submissions created at a moment of transition for a new building type that had hardly existed before in the U.S. First published over the course of several years in Major Meyer's journal, in 1893 these designs were published together in book form. This volume reassembles those drawings as originally intended, together with brief notes on the context of their creation both in the U.S. and in Europe, and touches upon the later careers of their designers, some of whom became well known and most of whom were professionally successful.