Ingalls Building

FACTSFact sheet

01A building nobody wanted to permit

At the turn of the twentieth century, Cincinnati, Ohio, was a city of railroads and banks, and Melville E. Ingalls was at the center of both. A Harvard-trained lawyer, he had come to the city in 1870 to look after a railroad in trouble and, in 1889, became president of the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis, known as the Big Four. He also presided over the Merchants National Bank. For the corner of Fourth and Vine streets, where the old Hammond Building stood, he wanted a first-class office building, as tall as the new steel buildings.

Except it would not be steel. According to Saxby's Magazine, a Cincinnati publication, in 1903, the owners compared bids for a steel skeleton and for a concrete structure, and concrete came out cheaper. The problem was that nobody had done it. The American Society of Civil Engineers records that the tallest concrete building of the day had six stories, and that Ingalls took two years to get a permit from the city, whose officials doubted the design.

02The bar that twists

Concrete resists being compressed very well and being pulled very badly. In a beam, the bottom part is pulled; in a tower, the wind pushes sideways and puts one face in tension. Left alone, concrete cracks. The help is steel inside, and the problem with steel inside is slipping: a smooth bar can come loose from the concrete when it cracks.

In 1884, the English engineer Ernest L. Ransome, settled in California, patented the solution: twisting square bars, so that the spiral would grip the concrete along its whole length. In the book he published in 1912, he recounts that the idea came to him while twisting a rubber band he had in his pocket, and that when he presented the invention to a technical society in California, he was ridiculed: people said twisting ruined the iron. The Ingalls Building used cold-twisted bars throughout. Ransome, however, does not appear as the author of the building: the design is by Elzner & Anderson, and the calculations are attributed to Henry N. Hooper.

03One block, top to bottom

In June 1904, the architect Alfred O. Elzner described the building in the magazine The Architectural Record, in an article titled “The First Concrete Skyscraper”. The structure, he wrote, is “a concrete box of 8-inch walls”, with no I-beams, no angles, no rivets and no bolts: only bars embedded in the concrete, with their ends interlaced, forming “a complete concrete monolith”.

The slabs are 12.7 cm thick and span panels of 4.9 by 4.9 meters. In the columns, twisted bars near the surface, on two opposite sides, take the wind load; in the center, round smooth bars help carry the weight and taper off until they disappear around the tenth floor, where concrete alone was enough. The beam is not attached to the column by any connecting piece: the bars of one run in among those of the other, and the concrete is all one. The walls themselves, between the top of one window and the sill of the one above, were designed as beams, and it is they that brace the building against the wind.

Elzner admitted that the columns on the lower floors came out larger than they needed to be, out of a “spirit of conservatism”, natural in so radical a break. From the outside, nobody saw the concrete: the building was clad in white marble below, glazed gray brick in the middle and white terra cotta at the top, like any skyscraper of the time.

04Three sets of forms

Work began in the fall of 1902. For the foundation, a pit 7.6 meters deep was dug and, according to the Public Library of Cincinnati, the workers found under the old basement seven wells, vaults and cisterns from the early nineteenth century. The concrete was mixed on site, in motor-driven mixers. How many men worked there, and whether any were injured, no source consulted records.

The Skyscraper Museum, in New York, says the job used three sets of wooden forms, taken apart and reassembled from the bottom up, and that one slab could be poured every twelve days. It was slower than steel: according to the museum, a steel skeleton generally went up more than twice as fast. Elzner countered that the first concrete skyscraper had taken “only a few months longer” than the most recent steel building of the time.

05Those who swore it would fall

In Cincinnati people still tell how a reporter stayed up all night in front of the building, waiting to see it collapse when the shoring was removed. The city's own Public Library presents the episode as an “often-told story”, and the Society of Architectural Historians as local tradition; no source gives the name of the reporter or the newspaper.

What was recorded is harsher. In the 1904 article, Elzner wrote that, during construction, “men of great ability who should have known better”, predicted that the building would never reach the roof; that if it did, it would crack all over from the shrinkage of the concrete; and that it would not stand up to the wind. “The facts are that it did reach the roof; that there are no shrinkage cracks, and that the building not only has not blown over, but that in the highest winds, there is not even a perceptible tremor”. As proof, he pointed to the bank vault, weighing nearly a hundred tons, resting on a 12.7-centimeter slab on the second floor.

The fire argument arrived at the same time. In February 1904, the Great Baltimore Fire destroyed that city's downtown, and Elzner opened the article by recalling that a remodeled building with concrete columns, beams and floors had remained standing in the middle of the burned area.

06From offices to hotel

The building worked, and concrete made its way into tall buildings in the United States, slowly: according to Professor Mir M. Ali, of the University of Illinois, until around 1960 a concrete building rarely went above twenty stories. In 1973 or 1974, depending on the source, the American Society of Civil Engineers declared the Ingalls Building a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark; in 1975, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In the twenty-first century, the building emptied out. It was sold in 2013 and, when the hotel project was announced, it had been empty for about seven years, according to the Cincinnati station WCPO. In July 2021 it opened as the Courtyard by Marriott Cincinnati Downtown, owned by SREE Hotels, renovated by HGC Construction. The armored door of the old vault is still there. The room that in 1904 served as proof that a concrete slab could hold nearly a hundred tons is now the hotel gym.

MYTHSWhat people say and what the record shows

• What people say

  A reporter stayed up all night waiting for the building to fall, so he could be first with the news.

  What the record shows

  It is local tradition, and the sources themselves treat it that way: the Public Library of Cincinnati speaks of an “often-told story”, with no name of reporter or newspaper. What is documented is the architect Alfred O. Elzner, in 1904, recounting that respected engineers predicted the building would not reach the roof, would crack from shrinkage and would not stand up to the wind.

• What people say

  The building stayed up because it was flexible: flexibility beat rigidity.

  What the record shows

  It is the opposite. It was designed as a rigid monolith, with the slabs working as diaphragms and the walls as beams against the wind, according to the architect and the American Society of Civil Engineers. Elzner boasted that in the heaviest winds not even a tremor could be felt.

• What people say

  It was the world's first reinforced concrete building.

  What the record shows

  No. Reinforced concrete was already being used in low buildings, in Europe and in the United States, including by Ernest Ransome himself, since the 1880s. The Ingalls Building is recognized as the first reinforced concrete skyscraper.

• What people say

  Ernest Ransome designed the building.

  What the record shows

  Ransome invented and patented, in 1884, the twisted steel bar used in the building. The design is by the architects Elzner & Anderson, and the structural calculations are attributed to the engineer Henry N. Hooper.

QUESTIONSFrequently asked questions

Next episode · Structure 24 · premieres Mar 18, 2027

Tacoma Narrows Bridge

The Tacoma Narrows strait, between Tacoma and the Kitsap Peninsula, Washington, United States · 1938–1940

Hanging 853 meters of roadway over a windy strait on a girder only 2.4 meters deep, at a time when engineering could calculate the push of the wind, but did not know how to calculate the wind twisting a bridge until it broke.

Read the story →

SOURCESSources

1. A. O. Elzner, "The First Concrete Skyscraper", The Architectural Record, vol. 15, June 1904 — archive.org
2. "Armored Concrete Building Fifteen Stories High — The Ingalls Building at Cincinnati", Saxby's Magazine, Cincinnati, 1903 — digital.cincinnatilibrary.org
3. Ernest L. Ransome, US patent 305,226, "Building Construction", 16 September 1884 — patents.google.com
4. Ernest L. Ransome and Alexis Saurbrey, Reinforced Concrete Buildings, McGraw-Hill, 1912 — archive.org
5. American Society of Civil Engineers, "Ingalls Building", historic civil engineering landmarks — asce.org
6. Society of Architectural Historians, SAH Archipedia, "Ingalls Building" — sah-archipedia.org
7. Kevin Welch, "Ingalls Building", Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, 2022 — digital.cincinnatilibrary.org
8. The Skyscraper Museum, "The Modern Concrete Skyscraper" — skyscraper.org
9. Mir M. Ali, "Evolution of Concrete Skyscrapers: from Ingalls to Jin Mao", Electronic Journal of Structural Engineering, 2001 — ejsei.com
10. Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, The Skyscraper Center, "Ingalls Building" — skyscrapercenter.com
11. Indiana Historical Society, "Melville E. Ingalls Papers, 1870–1907" — indianahistory.org
12. WCPO, "Historic Ingalls Building to get new life as hotel" — wcpo.com
13. SREE Hotels, "SREE Hotels Opens Courtyard by Marriott in Downtown Cincinnati", Hotel-Online, July 2021 — hotel-online.com
14. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, "Consumer Price Index, 1800–" — minneapolisfed.org

Images

• Fig. 01 — The Ingalls Building in 2019, at the corner of Fourth and Vine streets, in Cincinnati: Warren LeMay · CC0
• Fig. 02 — Downtown Cincinnati photographed in May 1904 from the Chamber of Commerce Building; the Ingalls Building is the one on the left: Autor não identificado (The Cincinnati Post, 26/05/1904) · Public domain
• Fig. 03 — A postcard from around 1910, which presented the building as the largest concrete building in the world: Autor não identificado (Columbus Metropolitan Library) · Public domain
• Fig. 04 — The top floor and the cornice, clad in glazed white terra cotta over the concrete structure: Hhelvey · CC BY-SA 4.0
• Fig. 05 — The door of the old bank vault, in 2021; the armored room became the hotel gym: Antony-22 · CC BY-SA 4.0
• Fig. 06 — Melville E. Ingalls, the investor who gave the building its name, in a portrait published by 1902: Franklin Co., Chicago · Public domain