CHINA: Airport in Middle

How should a new capital city for a country of 400 million people be built? What should it include?

1) It should cover 100 square miles to give elbow room to its two million inhabitants.

2) No house should be more than three stories high, not for fear of earthquakes, but to avoid such traffic congestion as is found in U. S. cities.

3) It should be designed around a monumental group of Government buildings.

4) Because of the importance of air transportation in a sprawling, railway-poor country like China, there should be a model airport in the centre of the city.

5) There should be many outlying parks and playgrounds, convertible, if need be, into additional landing fields.

These were some of the plans disclosed last week by deep-voiced, horn-bespectacled Henry Killam Murphy, able Manhattan architect, designer of”Yale in China” (Ya-li), Changsha, Hunan; Yenching University, Peking; William (“Billy”) Lyon Phelps’s residence. New Haven, Conn. Undeterred by wars, far-sighted President Chiang Kai-shek had commissioned Architect Murphy to plan a new city of Nanking, a new capital for the Nationalist government.*

So vast is the project, so many millions of dollars will it cost, that the new Nanking will probably still be abuilding when the William Lyon Phelps residence crumbles in decay.

* Other made-to-order capitals for young commonwealths include: Washington, D. C.; Canberra, New South Wales; New Delhi, India.