Warren Corman has a story he likes to tell about Phog Allen. Corman, who will turn 94 this month, is the lone surviving architect from the team that designed Allen Fieldhouse on the University of Kansas campus. He also got to know Allen well, and at one time he was the the president of the Topeka Rotary Club while Allen was the president of the Lawrence chapter. One year there was a conference at the Muehlebach in Kansas City, Mo. A fancy dinner and dance is the scene for Corman’s story. 

Corman, seated at Allen’s table that night, had told the old coach that his wife, Juanita, did not believe footwork was important to the game of basketball. Shooting was what really mattered. “Man, that triggered him,” Corman recalls. 

Allen grabbed Juanita by the arm and pulled her onto the dance floor in the middle of dinner. “Now you stand there, you’ve got the ball and I’m on defense and here’s how I move my feet,” Allen told her. 

An embarrassed Juanita said, “OK, thank you,” and tried to return to her seat. Allen wasn’t finished. “No,” he told her as she stood in her high heels. “Now I’ve got the ball and you’re on defense.” 

By this time, a crowd had gathered around Allen and Juanita, watching and clapping. “She was just getting madder than hell,” Corman says, giggling. “That’s the kind of guy he was. He wasn’t going to lose an opportunity to teach somebody.” 

The story is relevant as Corman looks back all these years later on how Allen Fieldhouse came to be one of the most historic venues in all of sports. “We got everything we wanted in the building because of him,” he says. 

The longevity of Allen Fieldhouse, which opened in 1955 and probably will never be replaced, was a result of Allen’s envy, stubbornness, one-upmanship — and perfect timing. 

Allen wanted a new field house for the Jayhawks as early as 1927. That campaign failed for a number of reasons, and when the state built Ahearn Fieldhouse for Kansas State in the late 1940s, Allen was none too pleased the in-state rival got its building first. He decided not only did he want his field house to finally get built, but he also wanted it to be twice as big as the 90,000-square-foot Ahearn and for the seating capacity to be 17,000. (Ahearn held 14,000.) 

“He got mad all the time they built Ahearn first,” Corman says. “But it worked out. It gave us a chance to realize what was good and what was bad (about Ahearn).”

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Corman worked in the state architect office at the time, and the law required all state buildings be designed by the state architect. Allen’s quest began in 1947 when a bill was introduced into the Kansas House to provide $650,000 for the construction of the facility. That bill was squashed, but two years later Allen got his funding, and in December 1949, state architect Charles Marshall told the Board of Regents his office had begun preliminary plans. 

The main architect was Frank Johnson, who hailed from Wisconsin and was influenced by Wisconsin’s Field House, which opened in 1930. Corman was one of four architects who would design what was then known as the Physical Education Building for the University of Kansas, although it would be renamed in Allen’s honor before the Jayhawks ever played a game in the place.

One of Corman’s responsibilities was counting the seats. “It had to be 17,000 seats, period,” he says.

Allen had his skeptics that Kansas would be able to fill the building, but he insisted that’s what he wanted. The size of such a structure required construction away from campus, the site a corn field off what is now Naismith Drive. That elicited more skepticism. Hoch Auditorium, where KU played before, was in the heart of campus. 

Allen would stop by the state building in Topeka every Friday afternoon to check on the architect’s progress. In March 1952, crews poured 900 concrete pillars, but construction stalled when KU was not able to secure the steel needed. The project sat dormant for nearly two years during the Korean War, as steel was in high demand. 

Allen and a group that included Thomas DeWitt Carr, the dean of engineering at KU, went to Washington, D.C. to meet with the Federal Security Agency to secure approval for the amount of steel needed. The men employed a few clever tactics to get what they needed. A former captain in the U.S. Navy, Carr wore his uniform to the meeting. They also pitched that the field house could be used as a national guard armory. It worked.

When the men returned, they asked the architects to tweak the drawings to convert a few of the rooms on the west side of the building that Corman believes were originally intended for storage into what were called armory rooms. 

“We were under a real pressure from Phog to get the dang thing out for bids,” Corman says. “We were working weekends — Saturday and Sundays — redoing the drawings.”

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They worked on a giant starched linen sheet with two architects on each side, those on the top side working upside-down. Checking in on their progress one Sunday, Marshall’s secretary knocked over a bottle of India ink that was sitting on top of a file cabinet onto the drawings. “We could have killed her, but we never told her boss,” Corman says. “We had to redraw the damn sheet.” 

Once the design was finally finished, it was time to find the steel. Allied Metal Company of Chicago got the contract, only to inform KU it didn’t have enough steel. “Boy, Phog and all them got madder than hell again,” Corman says. 

So Allen and a group that included athletic director Dutch Lonborg hit the road again, this time for Chicago to meet with two senior vice presidents at Allied Metal. The VPs announced they had too many requests for steel, and KU wasn’t on the highest priority list. The Kansas contingent was about to storm out when the president of the company walked in. 

“Dutch, what the hell are you doing here?” the president asked. 

It turned out Lonborg and the president were old friends from Lonborg’s time as the basketball coach at Northwestern. Lonborg explained to his buddy that the sides had a contract but the company wasn’t holding up its end of the deal. The story goes, as Corman was told, that the president told his VPs they had one day to figure out how they were going to get KU its steel or they would be fired. 

“So we got the steel,” Corman says. “It was the largest steel order of its time in the country except for military.”

The design of the steel is one reason the building has held up all these years. It is a rigid steel design, but a building that big hadn’t been designed in that way. Typically, steel was hot-riveted in those days. Roy Finney, the structural engineer, decided the steel inside Allen Fieldhouse would be welded. “It was a new idea, because they had to ship it down from Chicago on flat cards,” Corman explains. “It couldn’t be more than 40 to 50 feet long.”

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The old method would have involved building giant exterior walls and then laying the steel horizontally. The design called for a three-hinged arch. On those buildings when faced with an external dead load — wind or snow, for instance — the columns at the bottom want to go horizontal and could potentially collapse. Allen, which required 2,700 tons of steel and was 180,000-square feet, was built at a cost of $2.613 million.

“Normally on smaller buildings you run a steel cable underneath the floor and connect each of those things so they couldn’t move out — a tension cable,” Corman explains. “We didn’t want to do that because we wanted this building to last forever, and if it ever rotted out or rusted out, we’d have to go in there and redo the damn thing. So we came up with using concrete pillars down to rock about 30 feet, and we angled them at 45 degrees outward to take the horizontal thrust. That was a novel idea.”

This was Finney’s idea as well. Years later KU X-rayed the steel and found some bad welds, which were repaired. But it appears the design accomplished its job. The building has stood the test of time. 

Ahearn was replaced as the basketball arena at K-State by Bramlage Coliseum, which was built in 1988. Corman says the issue with Ahearn was there wasn’t enough money to do it really well at the time, and it was just one level. Allen was designed with multiple levels and concourses. The entire experience has always been important to Corman, so when he was university architect at KU during the renovation of Allen Fieldhouse in 1999, the bathrooms were of utmost importance to him. 

“My wife would give me hell because there’s always great big lines at halftime,” he says. 

Corman visited several venues, including Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Mo., and he’d stand outside the restrooms and count how long people were inside. Women, he found, spent three times as long as men. So during the remodel, he demanded that twice as many toilets be added for the women. (Corman is still a season ticket holder. Be sure and thank him next time you see him at Allen, ladies.) 

Other than a few touchups during multiple renovations through the years, the look and feel of Allen Fieldhouse has stayed mostly the same. Every time you enter the building, you feel you’re going back in time.

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Corman is proud of what he helped design, but he believes the magic is in the memories. 

“It wasn’t because the building was beautiful,” he says. “It’s really just a big barn when you think about it. But it probably has the richest history and tradition for basketball of any campus in the country, and I’ve visited damn near all of them through the 70 years I’ve been an architect.” 

He’s selling the old barn short, though. The sight lines are great no matter where you sit. The old-time bleachers and seats give it charm. And then there’s the noise. Players have said they can feel the floor shake underneath them. At least one writer’s laptop has frozen from the reverberations. You can feel it in your heart. 

In new venues, architects bring in acoustic engineers in an attempt to replicate that. “It has worked out pretty well,” Corman says. “That’s just plain luck.”

Maybe so. But Allen seemed to have a vision for how to build on the history he’d already helped establish. 

Corman points out K-State also had a great tradition back when it played in Ahearn, a building in which the men’s team won 79 percent of its games. When K-State was considering the construction of Bramlage, he worked at the state regents, and he told KSU officials, “If you move out of there and into a modern building, it’s going to be cheap and you’re going to lose the tradition.” 

In 39 years at Ahearn, K-State won 14 conference regular-season titles and made three Final Four appearances. Since then, the Cats have won two conference titles and made no trips to the Final Four. 

Since Allen Fieldhouse opened in 1955, KU has won 32 conference titles, made 14 Final Four appearances, won two national titles and cemented itself as a blue blood in the sport. 

It’s just yet another win for Allen over his old rival. He got the better and bigger building. Exactly twice the size, in fact. Just like with footwork, the details mattered.

(Top photo: Ed Zurga / Getty)