Exploring the architecture of the Salt Lake Seven featuring Ed Dreier

The Salt Lake Modern Committee invites you to the residence of Ron Henriksen Exploring the architecture of the Salt Lake Seven featuring Ed Dreier. It will be held in a beautifully remodeled Ed Dreier home in the Federal Heights area. The event is Saturday June 12th from 5:00 – 7:00. Due to limited capacity, RSVP is required by June 9th. (801) 533-0858 or via email rsvp@slmodern.org.
Our SLModern events usually fill up quick so RSVP soon if you want to come. A $10 donation is encouraged for non-members. You can join Salt Lake Modern for $40. Make sure you join the Salt Lake Modern Facebook page as well to get the latest information about mid century modern preservation in Salt Lake.

A big thanks to the sponsors;
The Green Ant
Pollard Architecture
Utah Museum of Fine Arts Young Benefactors
Poliform
Grassrootsmodern

Mid-Century Banks

This week, a new website Defining Downtown at Mid-Century, found at www.midcenturybanks.com, has been launched that will change how you look at buildings from the 1950s and 60s.

Integration of the automobile and ideas of reaching the moon changed popular culture in post World War II America. Architecture responded by adapting its designs for a new personal aesthetic, especially in the area of banking. Nearly everyone used a bank, and the automobile necessitated an explosion in the construction of branch banks and drive-throughs in every state.

The website documents this unprecedented growth in the United States through the country’s foremost design-build company of banks, the Bank Building & Equipment Corporation of America. Citing over 200 of their projects with hundreds of photographs, www.midcenturybanks.com is an exploration of the space age design, cutting edge technology, and profile of the founders and architects who streamlined today’s popular design-build process into a multi-million dollar business. Bank Building & Equipment Corporation’s Chief Designer during the Mid-Century era, W.A. Sarmiento, served a primary collaborator on the project providing personal stories and documents that are captured in oral interviews and photographs.

As many of the buildings designed by the Bank Building & Equipment Corporation are now reaching 40-50 years of age, they are being considered for insensitive alteration and even demolition. From the information contained within Defining Downtown at Mid-Century, anyone can now gain a quick understanding about the complex and broad significance of this company’s work and the steps that should be taken to raise awareness and help save these important structures in their community.

Research and development of www.midcenturybanks.com was funded by the James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation, an organization founded to encourage and support the study of the wide range of problems encompassed by the preservation and rehabilitation of America’s historic, architectural, and urbanistic heritage.

IBM Building, 1961

The I.B.M. Building’s unique structure makes it one of Salt Lake City’s modern architecture landmarks.  Its distinctive barrel-vaulted concrete ceilings and roof were considered innovative and experimental in 1961.  In addition, local newspapers touted the building as one of the first in Utah to utilize post-tensioned concrete construction.  The I.B.M. Building sparked great interest in Salt Lake City’s engineering community.  In fact, engineering professors from the University of Utah brought their students to watch its construction.

The interior of the I.B.M. Building was also very modern in design as the exterior vaults are repeated on the office ceilings.  Mostly white walls were interspersed with panels and doors of bright orange and blue.  “The effect is of a cubist painting,” noted a newspaper article.

In 1961, the I.B.M. brand was synonymous with electric typewriters.  The basement of the building combined a typewriter repair shop while the upper levels housed typewriter sales staff and customer education classrooms.

Steiner American Building, 1967

George A. Steiner started the American Linen Supply Company in 1895 in Salt Lake City because it was a great place to do business and raise a family.  Under George and later Richard Steiner’s leadership, the company experienced remarkable growth through several decades.  By 1959, the newly-named Steiner American Company was internationally recognized with more than 22 linen production plants worldwide.  Total sales by 1967 topped $41 million.

With accelerated company growth came the need for a new office headquarters.  Richard Steiner, company president at the time, wanted to set a standard for their new international prominence by having a South Temple address.  Steiner’s direction to architect William Moyle Browning of the firm Scott, Louie and Browning, was to go horizontal, not vertical, and to not violate the street’s history with something so different, or relate so closely to compete with it.  This required a very original solution that would be modern by design yet from anything else.  Browning worked with a restrictive site to design a modern brick and concrete edifice that kept cars hidden, yet created an open office floor plan with one of the first supercomputer rooms in the state.  The building has changed little since its construction and received the AIA 25 Year Award for continuing to have relevant, good design for over two decades.

Having a South Temple address for Steiner American came at the expense of one of the great mansions of the street.  The Cosgriff-Weir Mansion had been vacant for many years and though Steiner initially wanted to renovate the building for their offices, cost estimates and too small of building size became determining factors in its demolition.  While Steiner American became one of the first private companies to locate on South Temple, the demolition of the Cosgriff Mansion became the rallying point that helped form Utah Heritage Foundation as a historic preservation advocacy organization.

Stephen Macdonald

Stephen Macdonald graduated from MIT, worked in the east, and returned to Utah to teach at the new School of Architecture at the University of Utah.  He left his position to practice full time, designing with a creative eye for bringing the outside environment inside.  Macdonald was inspired by nature and inventively created forms and structures for his buildings.  With many structures located in Salt Lake City and Ogden, he designed to complement their surroundings by perching structures on steep hillsides, or nestling them into stands of oak and rock.

Dee Wilson

As a licensed architect in 1966, Dee Wilson worked on and off for John Sugden for many years.  In addition, Dee worked for many other prominent Salt Lake City firms and architects including Bob Springmeyer, Georgious Cannon, Dean Gustavson, Edwards & Daniels, and Young & Fowler (on the Marriott Library).

Wilson designed his family’s own house at the top of the Avenues in 1970 using techniques gained from working with Utah modernists like Sugden and Cannon.  A two-story structure with structural expression and gold glass, this house is nestled into the City Creek Canyon’s hillside of scrub oak.  They lived there for 25 years.

John Sugden

John Sugden studied with the masters of modernism at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and brought an eye for structural artistry in mid-century architecture back to Utah where he grew up.  The career of Sugden and his  work was exhibited for the first time in 1989, but not again until 2007.  As one of Utah’s masters of modernism, research has documented the breadth of Sugden’s construction and influence in architecture.

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