continued from p. 84

NAHB's Housing Center, van Ettinger thinks has "taken the first step"� toward realizing its potential by assembling 145 exhibits of building materials covering 243 products. He hopes the US center will delve deeper into technical research, basic studies of housing needs, teaching and wide distribution of industry knowhow that is now too often pigeonholed in separate compartments of industry.

Van Ettinger, a stocky, energetic man, feels he has achieved this goal in Holland. He helped organize the Bouwcentrum, a private, nonprofit institute, in 1946. From its two handsomely contemporary buildings the second opened just last December a staff of 200 aided by 450 outside experts supervises 500 exhibits of building products, conducts classes in building techniques and organization, studies better methods of building and publishes scores of periodicals and technological phamphlets including a weekly housing magazine, Bouw, which runs from 32 to 40 pages and reaches some 5,000 subscribers. The Bouwcentrum operates on an income of 3 million gilders a year ($789,000). Some of its activities:

•�    Thirty teams of Dutch women are analyzing family living needs.

•�    Researchers have built seven experimental wooden houses (the typical Dutch house is brick) to find better ways to step up Holland's housing production. With a population of 11 million, the Dutch have averaged 65,-000 new housing units a year for the last two years. Van Ettinger predicts output will jump to 75,000 houses this year, but population is growing so fast Holland still suffers from a housing shortage. And there is only enough brick making capacity in the country for 55,000 houses. It would take too long to expand brick capacity to close the gap so imported lumber is one answer.

•�    Researchers have developed an interior wall of gypsum plaster spread on bullrushes instead of wood lath. "Very cheap and very good,"� says van Ettinger.

World-wide chain

Van Ettinger hopes to start a world-wide chain of housing centers like his Bouwcentrum. He figures $500 million a day is poured

into building and civil engineering throughout the world about a third of it in the US. "Yet only one person in 15 of the world's inhabitants has a decent house. If we go on at this tempo, we'll never solve the problem."�

The answer, van Ettinger thinks, is for the world to shift a "much higher percentage of its productive capacity to housing"� plus "much more research."� He warns: "People will not stay always complacent with slums."�

That is where institutes like his Bouwcentrum can help, he believes. The big roadblock to technical progress and industrialization in building and housing is the organization of the industry itself, says van Ettinger. There are too many little enterprises and too few big ones. That is because buildings and materials are too heavy to move far. Men who build must work close to the sites.

"But small people are not too smart most of them,"� says van Ettinger. "So we need institutes to centralize not to centralizing building but to centralize the thinking and then to transmit the thinking. There is so much to do we need everybody."�

PEOPLE

Manny Spiegel, ex-NAHB president, dies

Emanuel M. "Manny"� Spiegel, 50, NAHB president in 1953 and one of the industry's ablest spokesmen, died unexpectedly June 15 in Englewood, N.J., following a heart attack.

The attack, his third in 18 months, came in his home minutes after he and his wife had finished a bridge game with friends. One of them, a doctor, pronounced him dead there.

Spiegel suffered his first attack at a dinner party just before the NAHB convention opened in 1955. Since then he had limited his activities both in industry affairs and in his own home building business in New Jersey. Spiegel's was the first death among NAHB's 16 past presidents.

A practicing attorney before he entered the building business full time in 1941, Spiegel used his legal background along with sharp insight and a keen intellect to plead the case of the building industry many times before Congressional committees and federal housing agencies.

It was during his year at the head of NAHB that NAHB leaders joined with others in the building industry to lay the groundwork, in the President's Advisory Committee on Housing Policy, for the momentous Housing Act of 1954, which created urban renewal and, among other things, provided for a new 30-year, 5% down FHA mortgage.

Spiegel was one of NAHB's most popular and respected

presidents, a fact which reflected his engaging personality and ability to get along. This ability once prompted another former NAHB president, Tom Coogan, to comment: "He can be firm, but he's not too blunt and he doesn't offend people."� Spiegel was one of the first builders to recognize the civic responsibility of the home building industry and he consistently tried to persuade others to that viewpoint.

A native of New York, Spiegel was not a big builder by comparison with other past presidents. His average annual output was 100 homes a year, all in the New Brunswick, NJ. area. His total lifetime housing output: about 2,000 units plus several apartment buildings. In the past 18 months most of the responsibility for active management of his building business had been put on the shoulders of his son-in-law and partner, Dick Geiger. They were just completing five new model homes at Englewood in the $35,000 price range.

Spiegel was one of the first builders to recognize the potential of housing development along a turnpike. He recently completed 80 homes at Neptune, N. J. near the Garden State Parkway.

Though not as active recently as he once had been, Spiegel was by no means retired. He still met with the NAHB past presidents' council. He was a director of Housing Securities Inc., the mortgage investment business started by Tom Coogan and other NAHB leaders. He was secretary of ACTION from its birth.

On Spiegel's death, one of his longtime friends in the industry said sadly: "Manny always kept housing in perspective with the rest of the economy. He was interested in what was good for everyone, not just our industry."�

Said a leader of ACTION who had attended a daylong board meeting with Spiegel just two days before his death: "We could always count on Manny's continuous and predictable statesmanlike position on any matter."�

Survivors include his wife, Fritzi, a daughter, Mrs. Judy Geiger, two grandchildren, his parents, a sister and a brother. Mrs. Spiegel is well known to builders throughout the country. She accompanied her husband on nearly all his NAHB travels.

PEOPLE continued on p. 93