Hicks' Parking Building
Length: 2:10
Description: A short video of the Welch (WV) Municipal Parking Building (September, 1941) designed by H. T. Hicks, a local architect. Hicks graduated from VMI (Lexington, VA) in 1917. During WWI, he served as an officer in an army training facility in Illinois and survived the 1918 Flu Epidemic. As a civil engineer he was involved in building bridges, highways, and coal processing plants in VA and WV. In the late 1920s he became licensed as an architect in WV and a member of the American Society of Architects. He designed homes, churches, hospital, memorials, office buildings, schools, and this very innovative parking building in Va, WV, and KY. Local tradition has that his curved reinforced concrete and the cantilever supports of the building influenced Frank Lloyd Wright in his design of the Guggenheim in New York. No correspondence, references, or photographs have (to date) been located in the collected works of Wright to support this belief -- but the building predates the Guggenheim design period. The parking building stands at a placed where millions of people passed during WWII. The building was on the mainline of the N&W Railway for passenger trains (countless non-military and military) passed daily during WWII. As the trains approached/exited the Welch passenger station. Hicks died in 1952 while on a beach in FL of a heart attack.
Author: charles65448
Source: YouTube
