BIG ENTERPRISE

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 54, 12 September 1928, Page 14

BIG ENTERPRISE

NEW ZEALAND ARCHITECTS (From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, 13th July. It is announced that the contract for tho first section of a vast art silk factory for the British Cclanese Company, to be erected in Derbyshire, has been lot to a Sheffield firm of building contractors. The designs have been prepared by Mr. Hal Williams, the -pllknown Now Zealandcr —an Old Christ's College boy—who is one of the leading engineers and architects in England. Associated with Mr. Williams is Mr. B. N. Vaucs (late of Dunedin). . The total cost of tho scheme is given as well over £1,000,000, and the factory will actually have a floor area of some thirty-two acres. The building will have a frontage of 1284 ft, in the middle of which will be a clock tower. It will bo three stories high, and from the back of it, at regular intervals, will run six other buildings of three stories. These will go back 470 ft, and will make a huge building like a series of "T's." Owing to the naturo of tho ground, tho building will be carried on concrete piles driven into the ground for a dis-1 tance of 20ft. Each pile is 17in in diameter, and the faet-ry will rest upon 6000 of them. When the factory is completed, the number of men and women eniplo-yed in it wi'l number no fewer than 15,000. It may bo recalled that Messrs. Hal Williams and Co. designed all tho special refrigerated cabinets in the produco hall of the New Zealand Court at Wembley, and ..they aro architects retained by the New Zealand Government to carry out the alterations to what will in duo eourso become the High Commissioner's Oflico at 429, Strand.