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”The Kahn bar reinforcing system had a certain attractive theoretical efficiency in that its sheer reinforcing wings, bent upward at 45 degrees, acted approximately parallel to the forces tending to cause fracture; but the Kahn bar was unquestionably difficult to fabricate, and it did not easily permit hooking of the ends of members to develop bond stress. Furthermore, the use of the projecting wing as shear reinforcement imposed a limitation on either the length or the spacing of the shear reinforcing elements; that is, the closer the spacing, the shorter the member, and vice versa. In these respects the Ransome system had the advantage; consequently it, and not the Kahn bar, was the prototype of future methods.

”But if we must qualify the intrinsic importance of the Packard Building, nevertheless in other ways it played a significant role: in the race that the development of industrial architecture represents, it marked the passing of the baton to Kahn, and it shifted the race to the fast track of the automotive industry.”

The United Shoe Machinery Company complex in Beverly Massachusetts, constructed 1903-1906, has an “appearance of crushing self-assurance” and “its absence from the general literature on the history of modern architecture is a permanent reproach to scholarship[;] . . . on the score of stylistic ‘modernity,’ let alone technical proficiency and inventiveness, it is the match for anything built anywhere in the world at the time.”

- Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis

  Under construction, 1904

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