Some Object Lessons from San Francisco 
The Mutual Life Building. Stonework damaged 
in the lower stories, brickwork untouched 
building itself will not be wrecked or des¬ 
troyed; and that the first great principle 
of fire-proof construction is isolation, or 
the making of the units of space small 
enough and so absolutely separated that 
what fire there can be in the contents of 
any one unit is held within that unit. 
This has been preached and pounded 
into architects and the public generally 
many a day, but it would seem to have 
been of but little effect. We boast of 
our progress and our supremacy in most 
things, yet as a nation we learn with 
difficulty and profit extremely little by our 
own or anyone else’s experience. Per¬ 
haps, though, this awful lesson of San 
Francisco, coming so soon after that of 
Baltimore, may have some effect upon us. 
Fortunately to make this last lesson more 
impressive, some architects did do one or 
two things well in several buildings, 
another had a good feature in one other 
building and still another architect had 
incorporated one feature of protection that 
worked admirably, though otherwise the 
building was of very inferior construc¬ 
tion. Architects, or at least the thought¬ 
ful ones, the local men, or those who have 
since been through the ruins, must have 
observed, that wherever granite, marble, 
or the several kinds of stone, were in 
any way exposed to fire, the surface went 
all to pieces and the damage is excessive; 
that wherever good brick was used, laid in good cement 
mortar, carefully bonded and rigidly fastened to the steel 
frames of the tall buildings for instance, nor fire nor quake 
bad tbe slightest effect upon it; and similarly, where terra-cotta 
was well made, of equal thickness in all its exposed parts, 
with a sufficiency of web and well fastened in place, it stood 
the best of all decorative exterior materials; that where the 
steel frames were rigidly put together and amply protected 
by fire-proofing materials—tile or even a sufficiency of excep¬ 
tionally good concrete—the frame was absolutely intact and 
resisted both fire and quake; that where that fire-proofing 
protection was in any manner weak, or improperly applied, 
and permitted fire to attack the steel, the latter was squelched 
and bent and distorted as though so much cardboard; that 
where the floors and the partitions were of properly designed 
and made and laid fire-proofing tile, or of a sufficiency of a 
very high quality of concrete again protected with wire lath 
44. Halls of Justice.—A so-called concrete floor construction; a wreck. 
45. Johnson Harness Co.—Note what is left of reinforced concrete 
beams, hanging like fenders about a boat. 46. Johnson Harness 
Co.—Another view. 47. What is left of one of the very few full-fledged 
reinforced concrete buildings in San Francisco; a one-story building 
at that. AA were vertical wall studs and C is what is left of a solid 
6-inch concrete wall 
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