Excerpt from The Concrete House and Its Construction The demand for fire-resisting, durable and sanitary construction has been the dominant note in most that has been said and written on the subject of architecture during the last decade. The American dwelling of the best class is a model of convenience, comfort and beauty, and these attributes may be found even in houses of moderate cost. But with rare exceptions, three fatal defects accompany modern construction. Modern houses are not fire-resisting, not durable and, to a lesser degree, not sanitary. Knowledge of these facts, coupled with that newly awakened, irresistible demand for vastly increased economy and efficiency in the nations industrial and social development, has led American architects to concentrate every effort toward the solution of the problem. They found that the highest standard of fire-resisting construction was so closely allied with extreme durability and sanitary excellence as to embrace these three important structural reforms under that single head. Iron and steel did not, unless protected, represent fire-resisting construction, and in this investigation many other materials were rejected as non-fireproof in themselves. In the average house, fire starting in the cellar soon transforms the building into a smoking ruin. Only the eternal vigilance of our fire departments, maintained at a cost of more than $100,000,000 annually, prevents the destruction of thousands of homes each year. A study of the fire losses of this and European countries shows our annual loss to be $2.51 per capita, while in the cities of the six leading nations of Europe it is only 33 cents. That fire-proof construction is the exception rather than the rule, is due mainly to a mistaken idea of its cost. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.