Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/293

THE IMMEDIATE, IMPERATIVE OBJECTIVE Institute of Pathology building, including all necessary auxiliary facilities," to be located at Forest Glen, Md.

The Chief of Engineers, whose office was responsible for the planning and erection of the building for the Institute, assigned the work to the District Engineer Commissioner who, on 13 October 1948, contracted with the firm of Faulkner, Kingsbury, and Stenhouse, Washington architects and engineers to draw preliminary plans, relying upon the availability of funds under the provisions of Public Law 626.

By this time, the Forest Glen site had been abandoned, due to a ruling by the Bureau of the Budget and other Federal agencies concerned that no additional hospital beds for the Army should be constructed in the Washington area. Since the Institute could not conduct its program of research and teaching without access to the clinical facilities of a hospital, the Director of the Institute and its Scientific Advisory Board had, in December 1947, recommended to The Surgeon General that the new Institute be set up as a "self-contained unit" on the grounds of an existing hospital in the Washington area. 14 The logic of the situation pointed directly to the Walter Reed General Hospital as the hospital; to the area of the existing Army Medical Center as the site; and to the $600,000 authorized by Public Law 626 as the fund for planning the new building.

But such a simple solution ran against the specificity with which Forest Glen had been designated as the site upon which the building was to be erected. Public Law 626, the Comptroller General ruled, on 19 November 1948, provided funds for drawing plans and specifications for a building at Forest Glen, Md., and nowhere else. 15

Extensive and detailed studies were made of the functions and needs of the various segments of the Institute's operations; visits were made to a score of the most modern laboratory and technical installations, military and civilian; and, in the light of all these studies, preliminary plans— all that could be done within the existing limitations upon availability of funds— were carried forward. These plans were submitted by the firm of architects-engineers to the responsible representatives of the Chief of Engineers and The Surgeon General and by 1 June 1949 had received approval. 16

In the existing state of the statutes and the rulings of fiscal authority, this was as far as the project could be carried at the time, but studies by the Institute