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by Ada Louise Huxtable Beverly, Mass.-They call it The Shoe. It is the United Shoe Machinery plant, a pioneering, reinforced concrete structure built in 1903-1906 that was the largest building of its type in the world until 1937. With additions, its 34 acres of floor space in three 60-foot-wide wings eventually reached a quarter of a mile in length. The Shoe dominated life and labor in this historic community and its neighboring towns for more than half a century, practicing a benign economic paternalism behind maximum security fences. Its cathedral-size spaces were devoted to the manufacture of the equipment used to make the shoes that were the sustaining industry of this part of New England until antitrust laws forced the breakup of the company in the 1970s. After the plant…

In his 1986 book A Concrete Atlantis, the late architectural writer Reyner Banhamdescribed the United Shoe Machinery Corporation (USM) structure in Beverly, Massachusetts as a concrete-framed factory in its canonical form "a work of crushing self-assurance. Its absence from the general literature on the history of modern architecture is a reproach to scholarship," he added.Banham also described Beverly as "that ultimate masterpiece of [engineer Ernest L.] Ransome's declining years." Ransome, known worldwide for his then revolutionary technology, himself authored a book, Reinforced Concrete Buildings, with co-author Alexis Saurbrey in 1912, published in New York City by McGraw-Hill.Cummings Center, the former USM site, is today a massive complex of Ransome's renovated commercial buildings and landscape features on a 74-acre site near Beverly's downtown business district. Construction of the original plant began in 1904…