ALINCO

Posted by Twelvebit (Victoria, United States) on 2 November 2007 in Architecture.

This building in Waco, Texas, is a 22 story office building constructed in 1910. It was the tallest building west of the Mississippi until 1922. ALINCO originally meant Amicable Life Insurance Company but eventually became the American Life Insurance company --perhaps about the time Americans began to feel less amicable. Actually, I guess, it's more like a modern marriage, because if you look up the current building tenants, the company listing is for American-Amicable, which I suppose fixes the sex of this building as female --no matter what it looks like.

This building is a reminder of something I thought I'd escaped by getting back to Texas from Oklahoma: tornadoes (and I guess I have escaped, pretty much, as long as I stay out of Central Texas). In 1953 it took a direct hit from one of the worst tornadoes in US history, killing 114 people --61 in the immediate vicinity of this building-- and injuring 597. The building is steel framed and designed to withstand hurricane force winds, but is said to have swayed several feet when struck by the tornado. The debris, mostly bricks from damaged buildings, is said to have formed a pile five feet high in this part of town.

Imagine excavating the 45' deep foundation in 1910. The dirt came out by the efforts of man and mule and was hauled away in wagons. Thirteen feet down they hit water from an artesian well and it had to be pumped out --at a rate of 500 GPM-- for about two weeks before it was capped. Still, this building was constructed in one year, and that has to make you wonder about things like why it takes a whole year today to build a highway overpass or widen a half-mile of roadway?

Oh yeah. The double image of the sign. It appears to be an artifact of the HDR process. I have no idea why and I haven't seen it yield similar results with any other images. Sometimes the software just doesn't work right. I don't know if that is the case here --maybe it worked too well and brought out something not so visible in the original images. However, I have been working with the Photomatix plug-in in Photoshop Elements lately, and have found that all too often the final result does not match the image in preview mode, forcing me to drop back to the standalone Photomatix.

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