Contributions appreciated

“The building committee for Fire Station No. 4 requested an ordinary building that was easy to maintain. The plan is simple: almost equal space is given to the apparatus room on the right and storage-living quarters on the left with a hose-drying tower in the center of the front. Because the dormitory is lower than the apparatus room, a parapet is applied to the facade on its side in order to simplify the front and enhance the scale.

“The facade is predominantly white-glazed brick that interlocks in a pattern with the plain red brick of the sides where they are allowed to wrap around the corner. The white brick, the gold lettering at the top of the tower identifying Fire Station No. 4, the tower itself, and the big flagpole in the middle of the front lawn convey the civic importance of the building.

“This crisp, functional building creates an appropriate, ordinary yet distinctive image for the activities, social as well as rescue, associated with a community fire station. As well as strengthening the civic presence of the building, the handling of the proportions of the Fire Station gives the little building big scale in its setting—a vast, flat field along a straight highway.

Details

“The architect who would accept his role as combiner of significant old clichés—valid banalities—in new contexts as his condition within a society that directs its best efforts, its big money, and its elegant technologies elsewhere, can ironically express in this indirect way a true concern for society’s inverted scale of values.”