The Turner City Collection: Rendering a Century of Building

April 22, 2002 - November 3, 2002

Turner Construction Company was founded in 1902 by Henry C. Turner as a contracting firm specializing in the relatively new building technology of reinforced concrete. Today, the Turner Corporation, through Turner Construction Company and other subsidiaries, is the largest diversified general builder in the United States, typically completing more than 1,500 projects every year. In 1910, Turner commissioned an artist to prepare a drawing showing the major projects built since the firm's inception, depicted to form a single imaginary city. Later named Turner City, this type of drawing became an annual tradition, with each serving as a portfolio of the company's most important work during the preceding year. Complementing these annual renderings are more than 300,000 original photographs showing Turner projects during various phases of construction.

The Turner City drawings are part of the National Building Museum's collection, while the photographic archives remain in Turner's possession. This exhibition features nine Turner Cities, along with examples of construction photographs representing noteworthy structures from the selected drawings. Taken together, the Turner City Collection and the photographic archives comprise a remarkable documentary history of twentieth-century architecture and construction, reflecting changing tastes, emerging building types and technologies, and shifting social and economic conditions.

Turner City 1902-10 reflects the company's early expertise in reinforced concrete, and the popularity of this material for industrial structures. Turner owned the rights to the Ransome System, developed by Ernest Ransome, which enabled crews to cast steel-reinforced concrete columns and other elements directly at a building site, facilitating efficient construction. Many early projects were designed in-house by Turner engineers. Though built for utilitarian purposes, concrete structures like Turner's warehouses attracted the attention of modernist architects who admired the buildings' simple, unadorned forms and brawny expressions of structural strength.

By the late 1910s, Turner had parlayed its experience with industrial projects into a number of important commissions for the U.S. military, beginning a long association with the federal government. One impressive project was an enormous complex for the Navy and War Departments on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and featured in Turner City 1918. Completed in just seven months, the complex had a total perimeter of four miles, and was the largest office structure in America when completed.

Turner City 1929 reflects the exuberance that permeated the design and building industries prior to the stock market crash late that year. Towers such as New York's Lexington Hotel are pictured along with a convention center built on a pier in Asbury Park, New Jersey. By the early 1930s, however, in the depths of the Great Depression, construction activity had slowed dramatically. Nonetheless, Turner City 1932 pictures several very large projects, including a city block-sized building for the Port of New York Authority, and the Ward's Island Sewage Plant, which, despite its unglamorous program, exhibits surprisingly beautiful concrete forms.

The Turner City drawing for 1938 is extraordinary for its depiction of several visionary works of architecture for the 1939 New York World's Fair. The General Motors Pavilion, for instance, comprised curvilinear forms that defied common preconceptions of architectural structure. Designed by architect Albert Kahn, famed for his elegantly spartan factories, the pavilion included the astonishing "Futurama" exhibition - an intricate model of an idealized future cityscape - by industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes.

In the 1940s, Turner, like many major American construction companies, focused on work for the federal government, much of which was confidential and therefore not depicted in Turner Cities of the era.

During the 1950s and '60s, as the construction industry gradually emerged from wartime footing, Turner steadily moved into diverse commercial and institutional projects. Turner City 1963 shows the firm's work for yet another World's Fair. The space-age forms of the Johnson Wax Pavilion seemed to symbolize the fanciful architectural spirit of the times. Also featured is the terminal for New York's LaGuardia Airport, part of the first generation of facilities built for the new era of jet travel.

Turner City 1983 reveals the extent to which Turner had become a major nationwide and global contractor by that time. Through such prominent projects as the post-modern RepublicBank Center (now Bank of America Center) in Houston, by Johnson/Burgee Architects, Turner put its stamp on skylines across the country. At the same time, projects like the intricately geometrical campus for the University of Qatar, in the Middle East, showed Turner's growing worldwide presence.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, major entertainment and cultural facilities became increasingly prominent in the Turner Cities. The 1991 drawing includes the Tennessee Aquarium, designed by Cambridge Seven Associates, which incorporated a computerized life-support system for thousands of animals and plants. Turner City 2000, the most recent drawing as of this exhibition's opening, features enormous sports structures like Comerica Park, the new home of the Detroit Tigers, as well as a large performing arts center for the University of Maryland. The 2000 Turner City was one of several recent ones that were also produced in an electronic format, complementing the traditional version.

Drawn by just six different artists since 1910, the Turner Cities demonstrate an unusually consistent and extensive corporate history. Together with the company's photographic archives, they afford a unique perspective on changes in fundamental conceptions of architecture and construction over the course of the twentieth century.

Turner Construction Company donated the Turner City Collection to the National Building Museum beginning in 1994. This exhibition is made possible by a grant from Turner, and makes extensive use of material from its corporate archives. The exhibition is organized on the occasion of Turner's 100th anniversary, which also prompted the endowment of the Henry C. Turner Prize for Innovation in Construction Technology. In 1984, Turner Construction Company became a subsidiary of a new holding company called The Turner Corporation. Since 1999, The Turner Corporation has been a subsidiary of HOCHTIEF AG, one of the world's largest construction companies.

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Curator: Martin Moeller