ernment grant-in-aid programs so that they are not applied one by one, but they can be comprehensively and collectively applied to an overall program rather than at awkward times to individual pieces

of it.

And finally, in this same line, as has been done in other governmental agencies, we would suggest establishment of a Government-wide data retrieval system to collect all research affecting the physical design of cities and have this available to the consultants and to the practitioners who are today actually doing the work. This information is important and should be fed to architect-engineers immediately so that it can be implemented as rapidly as it comes into being.

And so this is a short-range look at a long-range problem.

I do not mean to say by emphasizing these points that I am in disagreement at all with the other speakers, but I think this is another dimension that should be brought before us here today. (The complete statement of Lee E. Ham follows:)

STATEMENT OF AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF CONSULTING ENGINEERS; AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CIVIL ENGINEERS; CONSULTING ENGINEERS COUNCIL/USA; AND NATIONAL SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERS; PRESENTED BY LEE E. HAM, PRESIDENT, WILSEY AND HAM

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is Lee Ham. I am president of Wilsey and Ham, an architectural, engineering, and environmental design firm based in San Mateo, California, with offices in Los Angeles, Honolulu, Mexico City, and Santiago, Chile. I am a registered professional engineer licensed in eight states, and I appear before you today as spokesman for the American Institute of Consulting Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Consulting Engineers Council/USA and the National Society of Professional Engineers. Collectively, these organizations represent in excess of 100,000 U.S. engineers, who share the responsibility for actual design and specification of improvements in our cities.

I would just like to say that I am honored at having been asked to give testimony before this distinguished committee today and that I wholeheartedly endorse and support its worthy purpose of seeking solutions to present and future problems confronting our nation's cities. It is a noble cause and I hope my contribution here today will be consonant with the subcommittee's objectives. Since 1944, when my firm was founded, we have performed, as consultants, a variety of engineering and planning assignments for cities. Our city planning projects have extended from Anchorage, Alaska, to Puerto Montt, Chile. In addition, we have engineered and designed entire new communities such as Foster City, California, a city which eventually will be populated with some 35,000 people, and Sun City, California, a sprawling community of 14,000 acres specifically developed for our senior citizens.

These projects typically involve a wide range of professional disciplines including physical design, planning, and such engineering services as waste disposal and sanitation, water supply systems, airport design and study, the design of housing and industrial facilities, economic survey work, downtown revitalization programs, and urban renewal.

Basically, problems cities face can be divided into two parts: existing problems of present cities as we know them today, and the problems which will be created by adding to existing cities, as well as the problems that emerge from the cities under development or destined to appear throughout the country.

Most relevant to this, we must recognize, is the fact that cities are systems and that they are dynamic, not static. Also, we must realize that by the year 2000, our cities will have more than doubled in population and, thus, in size, requirements, needs, and services. Therefore it appears to the engineer that more than half of our concern needs to be directed at tomorrow's building activities of cities, their needs, designs and well-being. Or to paraphrase, we must find workable means to prevent creating the same problems at twice the present scale!

The physical structures of cities are rigid and fixed in our country . . . not easily moved or changed when revisions become necessary. The inhabitants of our cities are what give cities motion. People are the flexible, changeable, mobile element overloading the fixed system established earlier. And presently, we are adding increments to these overloaded systems at rapid paces in an effort to keep up with growth, which is gradually melding cities into even larger continuous metropolitan areas.

We must come up with workable plans that not only solve our problems but add to the comfort of our people, promote their well-being, provide them with opportunities to advance in life. Physical structures alone cannot solve our social ills.

Obviously the task ahead is vast and complex. To revise present cities and soundly prepare for future ones will be an expensive undertaking. However, it will be inexpensive compared with the future cost if we keep procrastinating or postponing our responsibilities.

The engineering profession firmly believes that the only solution to this problem lies in the "task force" approach . . . enlisting the talent banks throughout private industry and the professions across the country to bring together in a common effort the brains, experience, and foresight not yet mobilized. Therein lies the key to solving our growing enigma, and unless we shape the key and make it fit, we will continue building tomorrow's problems today.

If we elect to marshall a great aggregate of talent, we must also be willing to free it for its task. We must possess the ability and courage to reform our outmoded concepts and methods . . . the outdated and conflicting building codes, ordinances, and restrictions which often prevent architects, engineers and contractors from exploiting such cost-cutting techniques as prefabrication, use of components, mechanical cores, prefinished materials and modular construction. These restrictions are honeycombed in the various levels and jurisdictions of our governments and the result is a prohibition of any visionary plans and a failure to keep abreast of the times so as to avoid problems. This is especially true at municipal levels where autonomous powers stifle comprehensive regional solutions to problems which often extend beyond a state line or a city limit.

If we are to make great strides in solving the ills of the cities, we must be prepared to give our engineers and planners the same broad base of encouragement and workable frameworks of government which we give our space scientists. We must unshackle and promote their problem-solving capacities. The city has been thrust into a new era, and like the space vehicle, it now demands precise design and concentrated attention. We have been heartened to see that private industry has been making progress in opening up opportunities for disadvantaged minority groups. The private sector has contributed to space technology. There is no reason, if given the proper incentive, that the private sector cannot make a more meaningful contribution to solving the physcial problems of cities. In fact, the only way to solve the problem is through the help of the private sector.

We, as consultants, have often seen the well-intended single purpose help from federal, state, and municipal agencies solve one problem while creating another. Various levels of government often unknowingly duplicate efforts or concentrate only on the problems at hand. For instance, while San Mateo County was making a county-wide study for treatment and disposal of sewage under a federal grant, a city in the county secured another federal grant to proceed with independent expansion of its treatment plant. The piece-meal method of curing ills is no longer effective . . . for while one part of the civic body is healed, another festers. And meanwhile, the inter-related dialogues on the problems all proceed in their own separate compartments.

This brings us to a point we feel needs emphasizing . . . that private industry and private professionals can provide a great bank of talent and capabilities in designing and carrying out federal programs to solve the cities' problems. In this group of consultants, especially engineers, lies the interchange between governmental bodies and private industry. This is because engineers serve clients and have the experience of acting as emissaries in soliciting assistance and approval from governmental agencies. Thus, the consulting engineer is a catalyst . . . carrying the rrograms from one group to the other and maintaining open lines of communication between the two groups. The architectengineer-planner "team" is constantly engaged in intimate contact with the community and keeps it abreast of the state-of-the-art. Consequently, this "team"

can be readily tapped as a source of the newest and most practical information and concepts.

For example, the private engineers' talents in system engineering and their understanding of computer technology can lead to the optimum solution of the sub-systems involving communication, transportation, water supply, and waste treatment, while such things as combustion and air pollution can be synthesized to create new concepts. For example the engineering technology already exists to develop compact, pollutant-free, nuclear energy plants which can desalinize water, provide heat, electricity and waste treatment for entire communities or neighborhoods.

To take advantage of such talents, the federal government should require that recipients of federal funds include private consultants early in the plan. ning and engineering process. The engineering profession's help should be enlisted and guidelines set down to bring it into concert with the efforts of state and local agencies.

Such task forces must be included in the initial planning stages . . . the period when the problems are identified, when the alternatives are selected, when the decisions are reached. Too often when engineers are retained for the design phase only, they find they are solving the wrong problems. It has been said in jest that "a consultant is a paid professional who is called in at the last minute to take the blame." Humor often touches reality and in this case it brings home a special point: if we are going to solve our cities' problems, we must all join in the initial planning stages to set the stage for our solutions, or find ourselves "blaming" consultants.

What else can government do? It is difficult to suggest precisely what financial incentives need to be established to bring more industries into the renewal and development fields. But we need more major corporations in these fields, and incentives of money and prestige would be helpful. The reason for bringing major industries into action as developers is that they have a long-range interest in good development, stretching beyond the span of one entrepreneur's short-term ambitions. They can invest, they can experiment, they have the finest techniques of research and analysis, they can have the patience to seek solutions, beyond one or two generations. They can take the risks that are required to be visionary. Thus, more of them need to be attracted into the private development field.

The engineering profession has been interested to note the many, and in some instances, historic, proposals being submitted to Congress in behalf of America's cities. Certainly the problem of appropriating the enormous sums necessary to undertake even a portion of such programs staggers the imagination. For this reason, we particularly favor adoption of those recommendations which place a premium on private incentive. We think the value of each federal dollar can be multiplied greatly by encouraging private interest and investment in metropolitan rehabilitation.

Our recommendations for advancing the government's problem-solving program in our cities include the following:

1. Make the business of developing new cities more attractive to the kinds of private enterprise which can undertake the long-range comprehensive jobs that need to be done, and establish incentives to encourage participation of the private business sector.

2. Begin channeling federal grants for applied research to qualified consultants in engineering, architecture, planning and design as an inducement to apply new concepts, thus immediately putting these concepts into practice with the profession's clients.

3. Encourage federal and state agencies to work increasingly in association with private architectural and engineering firms and thereby take advantage of their experience and talents.

4. Provide opportunities in architectural and engineering contracts for exploring new techniques, prototypes, and design advances. Don't put short-sighted limitations into the fee structures of contracts. The "low bidder" approach will usually guarantee low quality results, lack of innovation, or reliance on old, hackneyed standards. A true bargain is that which is excellent, not that which is cheap.

5. Coordinate and harmonize the federal programs so they complement one another and so that they can be applied with a predictable schedule. In adopting remedies to the problems of our cities every effort should be made to avoid any possibility of duplication, delay and confusion similar to that which has arisen in connection with federal water-sewer grant-in-aid programs.

6. Include talent banks of engineers, architects, and planners on the key federal commissions, councils, and standard-setting bodies concerned with urban renewal and building programs to foster updating of current regulations and upgrading of goals.

7. Insist on comprehensive solutions on an area-wide basis.

8. Encourage national conferences between the design and construction professions and government agencies to discuss problems and solutions for the cities and publicize the proceedings and the results.

9. Establish a government-wide data retrieval system to collect all research affecting physical design of cities. This system should serve for the state-of-theart information which can be readily available to members of the practicing professions.

10. Stimulate, encourage, and impel the dialogue between engineers, architects, and planners on one hand, and the leaders and participants in our most vital social movements on the other. We, as engineers, need to learn more, be exposed more, to the sociological challenges of our time; those involved with sociological problems need, in turn, to face the physical problems which act on and are acted on by the humanity of our cities.

The problems facing today's cities are minimal compared with those our children and grandchildren will face unless the talents of the nation can be brought together in a common cause to solve our ever-increasing metropolitan problems. There must be a concerted effort and a united approach among all members of the design team to contribute the latest techniques, the best solutions, the finest designs, and the most visionary plans. . . or we will be forever haunted by costly piece-meal solutions and the perennial day-to-day mending of fences.

We must decide whether we will gather this talent force now to ward off urban and municipal problems that are sure to outrace our rapidly increasing population or be content to continue to squander this resource in meeting the shortcomings of poor planning that will crop up in the future at many times today's scale.

Government and private enterprise need not, and in fact, should not compete with each other. Rather they should join together for the common good, bringing greater harmony and better working plans to the cities . . . and, of course, to the people the real reason for our plans, hopes, aspirations, and ambitions.

As professional engineers, we offer our help. The problems of our cities constitute a responsibility we are prepared and qualified to accept, for anticipating and satisfying the needs of the future is. frankly, our business.

Senator RIBICOFF. Thank you.

Now, Senator Baker, you have to leave, I understand, at 12:30, so I will defer to you in case you have a question.

IMPORTANCE OF STRUCTURAL DESIGN IN CITIES

Senator BAKER. Mr. Chairman, just one or two, if I may, and I apologize for the witnesses for having to leave. But I noticed in one of the statements-I apologize to the witnesses for my inability to find the particular reference right now, but in one of the statements the proposition that there should be a qualitative emphasis on the design of city structures as distinguished from the more materialistic or I assume functional concepts of regional or city planning.

Did I understand this to mean that you propose and you believe that there should be an accommodation to what we conceive to be the human instinct of the people who inhabit those areas rather than maximum theoretical efficiency in the operation of the particular land space? Mr. ROGERS. I believe that was in my statement.

Mr. WISE. It was in mine, too.

Senator BAKER. Well, I am about to agree with both of you so I am delighted.

Mr. WISE. The point I was making, if you will excuse me for a minute, Arch, is that we have got to tool up our metropolitan areas for

the next 150 million people. And you cannot put a price-you cannot do cost-benefit ratios on priceless heritage that is a thing of the past. It is time we developed a policy in these areas that we are for good-looking things because they are priceless and they become a part of our cultural heritage, and as we crank up the next 150 million people in these metropolitan areas, if we use the past as any kind of a pattern of what is going to happen in the future we are in serious moral trouble. And I equate it that way.

CITIES SHOULD REFLECT VARIOUS LIFE STYLES

Senator BAKER. Yes, you have, and I take it that you would also agree that the needs and the desires of a particular area such as New Orleans may be very substantially different from the needs and desires of Charleston, S.C., or New York City, and these should be taken into account as well.

Mr. WISE. Definitely.

Senator BAKER. So that we do not end up with any great uniformity of appearance of our urban centers.

Mr. ROGERS. I think the point I was making in reference to your citation was that we really have a very varied system of life styles in this country. We tend to be approaching the problem of our physical chaos by substituting uniformity in our new developments. And that this uniformity is imposed by officials, by architects and by sponsors who have about the same life style, and we are totally leaving out the quality of the people who are going to use it.

Senator BAKER. Do you not think one of the problems that we might devote some attention to, or one of the areas we might devote some attention to is a better understanding of the regional tastes involved and their translation into appropriate design for those communities? Mr. ROGERS. Yes.

(The following article discussing quality of home design in America was subsequently received for the record :)

[From the New York Times, Monday, February 13, 1967]

EXHIBIT 219

HOME DESIGN DRAB IN U.S., STUDY SAYS

A FEDERAL REPORT DEPLORES MEDIOCRITY IN PLANNING

(By Ada Louise Huxtable)

The design of housing and housing sites in the United States was scored yesterday as "of mediocre quality" with "random exceptions" in a 223-page illustrated report sponsored and released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The report is the result of a two-year study of 700 housing sites in 30 cities by Robert D. Katz, an associate professor of the Department of Urban Planning of the University of Illinois. It is a scholarly indictment of current American housing practice in terms of land use planning in both the public and private sectors. Its critical observations are couched in the objective, low-key language of academic research.

Called "Design of the Housing Site, a Critique of American Practice," the study was financed by the Federal Housing Administration, the Urban Renewal Administration and the Mobile Homes Manufacturing Association.