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ST. LOUIS • Six, seven and, finally, eight times, Geoffrey Baer walked across the lobby of the Wainwright Building until the director got the camera shot he wanted for a future public broadcasting program.

“10 Buildings that Changed America,” scheduled to air early next year, will include the Wainwright, in downtown St. Louis, and nine other buildings. The buildings span 215 years of American architecture, from the Virginia State Capitol, designed by Thomas Jefferson, to Frank Gehry’s steel-clad Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

Baer, an affable longtime public broadcasting presence in Chicago, will host the program. WTTW, the public broadcasting station in Chicago, is producing it. Recording began in April. Baer, director Dan Protess and camerman Tim Boyd were in St. Louis last week to examine the Wainwright, the granddaddy of all skyscrapers.

Though not the first tall building with a structural steel frame, the Wainwright showed in 1891 that steel could allow even brick to appear to soar. Famed Chicago architect Louis Sullivan designed for St. Louis financier Ellis Wainwright the nine-story office building of narrow red brick piers that wrap the vertical portions of the steel framework.

Baer said that Sullivan, through his design of “soaring verticality,” demonstrated with the Wainwright how a building could resemble a column with a base, a shaft and a capital.

“The Wainwright is the one that defined what skyscrapers should look like,” he said.

Inclusion of the Wainwright, a National Historic Landmark, was a no-brainer for the 19 architects and architectural historians who helped determine what buildings to squeeze into the one-hour PBS program, Baer said.

“I think Wainwright was never in doubt,” he said. “I think it was always on the list.”

Other buildings featured will include a 19th-century church, an early Ford assembly plant, the first enclosed shopping mall and a post-modernist house.

There were some eligibility rules: All the buildings had to be in different cities and no architect could have more than one building presented. For example, Eero Saarinen’s most famous work is the Arch but the program features his Dulles International Airport terminal near Washington.

Each of the 10 buildings will only get five minutes of air time. Baer and Protess, who double as the program’s writers (and whose wives are from St. Louis), will present the structures in the order built and describe their innovations in style and construction. Baer said the program is not meant as a “10-best” list but as an effort to show buildings that had a lasting influence on American architecture.

“It’s not a competition — it’s not a horse race,” he said.

Among Sullivan’s contributions to the Wainwright was a demonstration of how a steel frame freed architects to design office buildings to be more pleasant for their occupants business cards. He included large windows that improved ventilation and provided more natural light in a time of primitive electric lighting. (Advances by Elisha Otis and others produced safer and faster elevators, making the modern skyscraper a practical reality.)

Only one true skyscraper, the 38-story Seagram Building in New York, made the program’s cut. Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe’s design, completed in 1958, epitomizes the sleek international style that stripped away exterior ornamentation and emphasized the building’s structural elements.

The Seagram will appear in the second half of “10 Buildings.” Immediately after the Wainwright, viewers will see the Robie House, the Chicago residence designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who briefly worked for Sullivan.

That the Wainwright survives is a tribute to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which took an option on the building, and the state of Missouri, which bought it for renovation in 1981 as offices. The neighboring Title Guaranty building, designed by architecture firm Eames and Young and built in 1898, was demolished in 1983. Gateway One, the building that includes Peabody Energy’s headquarters, occupies the site now.

During a downpour last Monday, Protess directed Baer to walk repeatedly across the Wainwright’s lobby while Boyd changed camera angles. Protess eventually got his desired shot of Baer striding across the tile floor as Boyd tilted the camera to capture the host gazing up toward the skylight added in the 1980s renovation.

PBS viewers will not see that Baer had to avoid a large rainwater puddle that spread across the floor below — a skylight leak. Protess fretted that rain would disrupt the next day’s shooting schedule.

“Tomorrow morning, I want it to be beautiful,” he muttered.

It was.

THE BIG 10

Here is a list of the program’s buildings with location, designer and year completed.

1. Virginia State Capitol, Richmond, Thomas Jefferson, 1788

2. Trinity Church, Boston, H.H. Richardson, 1877

3. Wainwright Building, St. Louis, Louis Sullivan, 1891

4. Robie House, Chicago, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1910

5. Highland Park Ford Plant, Highland Park, Mich.; Albert Kahn, 1910

6. Southdale Center, Edina, Minn.; Victor Gruen, 1956

7. Seagram Building, New York, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, 1958

8. Dulles International Airport, Chantilly, Va.; Eero Saarinen, 1963

9. Vanna Venturi House, Chestnut Hill, Penn., Robert Venturi, 1964

10. Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, Frank Gehry, 2003

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Wholesale prices in the U.S. fell in April for the first time in four months, led by a decline in fuel costs that signals inflation may cool.

The producer price index dropped 0.2 percent after no change in March, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. Economists projected the gauge would be unchanged in April, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. The 1.9 percent increase over the past 12 months was the smallest since October 2009.

Falling raw-material costs mean companies will have less incentive to charge customers more. Slowing inflation would underscore views of some Federal Reserve policy makers who have said higher fuel prices will have only a temporary effect, allowing the central bank to stick to its plan to keep interest rates low at least until late 2014.

OAKVILLE, ONT.

Treasury 10-year note yields fell for the sixth week in a row, matching the longest streak since June, as slowing growth and concern Europe

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An Iraqi police official says 17 detainees have broken out of prison in a northern city.

Police spokesman in Kirkuk city Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir said Friday that 10 of those who escaped from an interior ministry detention center were al-Qaida-affiliated detainees.

Qadir said the detainees escaped at dawn from a small window using rope made of blankets. Police started a manhunt to find them, he said.

Kirkuk, which is 180 miles (290 kilometers) north of Baghdad, is the main oil hub in northern Iraq. It’s been the scene of sporadic insurgent violence and ongoing tensions between the region’s three main groups _ Kurds, Arabs and Turkomen.

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WASHINGTON — Beware of car dealer ads that promise to pay off the loan on your trade-in.

In a first-of-its-kind case, the Federal Trade Commission targeted five car dealers in four states that regulators say deceived consumers by promising to pay off their loans, no matter what was owed on the cars. The balance, the FTC said, was usually rolled right into the new car loan. One dealer later required customers to pay the balance out of pocket.

Settlements agreed to by the dealers would require them to stop running the ads on their webpages and other sites such as YouTube. The settlements remain subject to a final vote by the commission after a 30-day public comment period.

Wednesday’s announcement from the commission named the following companies: Billion Auto Inc. of Sioux Falls, S.D.; Frank Myers AutoMaxx LLC of Winston-Salem, N.C.; Key Hyundai of Manchester LLC in Vernon, Conn., and Hyundai of Milford LLC in Milford, Conn., which advertised jointly; and Ramey Motors Inc. of Princeton, W.Va.

The FTC has brought cases against auto dealers before, but not for this kind of advertising.

“Buying a new car or truck is a major financial commitment, and the last thing consumers need is to be tricked into thinking that a dealer will pay off what they owe on their current vehicle, when they really won’t,” said David Vladeck, head of the commission’s consumer protection bureau.

The promises might sound attractive to anyone facing tough financial times. Rosemary Shahan, president of California-based Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety, says this kind of misleading advertising pitch is a common practice among dealers, and that people who are upside down on their loans — owing more on the old car than its actual value — are especially vulnerable.

“A huge percentage of people are upside down,” Shahan said. “What they don’t realize is that they are just getting deeper and deeper into debt.”

She says it’s usually better to keep the old car and pay off the loan before buying a new car. Despite the claims, consumers still ended up being responsible for paying the difference between the trade-in loan balance and the vehicle’s value, the commission said.

As part of the proposed settlements, the dealers would be barred from future deceptive ads. They also would not be allowed to misrepresent any other facts.

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Apple’s decision to keep the new iPad’s size nearly identical to the iPad 2 is giving case makers some wiggle room — literally.

The third-generation iPad, set to hit stores March 16, will be less than a millimeter thicker than the last one. It doesn’t sound like much, but for makers of plastic, wood or metal tablet cases, it means manufacturing changes that can keep their products from store shelves during the pivotal first few weeks after a release.

Apple doesn’t announce its product specs in advance, so manufacturers find out about changes at the same time as everyone else. The best prepared are the ones that gambled and started making a tablet case with enough space inside to house either the iPad 2 or a slightly modified version.

The moment of truth for BodyGuardz came when Apple (, Fortune 500) CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad’s dimensions on Wednesday.

Dain Hodson, BodyGuardz’s chief operating officer, was following tech blog Engadget’s live coverage of the event. When news came that the new model would be "9.4 millimeters thin," Hodson immediately reached for the tape measure in his drawer.

New 4G iPad marks the beginning of the end for 3G

Cradling the phone on his shoulder, he carefully measured the plastic production sample case that had just arrived from China.

"Looks like we’re good," he announced with relief. "That’s everything. That’s the starting gun for us."

BodyGuardz will now ramp up production, but in reality, its manufacturing cycle started weeks ago. The Bluffdale, Utah company decided to roll the dice after a mysterious e-mail arrived two months ago. The message came from an unknown Chinese manufacturing company that claimed it had the secret iPad 3 specs everyone desired.

"I’m very leery when I hear that, because especially for cases, there are some companies out there that will say they have five designs they’re speculating will be the right size," Hodson said. "And many times, they’re not right. You can be one millimeter off and you’re impeding somebody from using the device correctly."

Changes in the placement of buttons, cameras, speakers and USB ports are all a nightmare for companies that start early. Wednesday’s announcement gave BodyGuardz executives some relief: It looks like the Chinese source was right, and BodyGuardz’s cases will fit both the new iPad and the previous model.

Still, Hodson admits they won’t really know it’s perfect until they can buy a new iPad next week.

"That’s the danger in this game," he said.

Other case makers aren’t rushing off the blocks.

Grove, in Portland, Ore., makes all of its bamboo-and-leather cases by hand. The company’s 23 employees pride themselves on their cases’ artistic finishes, and a pristine fit is paramount. Co-founder Ken Tomita said Grove won’t start adjusting its milling machines until an employee comes back with a model from the nearby Apple store.

Until then, he’s wrestling another dilemma: Apple’s baffling name choice. It’s not the iPad 3 or iPad HD. It’s just "the new iPad."

"Apple really threw us a curve ball," Tomita said. "We had a debate today for half an hour. We can’t just call it ‘the new iPad case.’ That’s confusing."

Until Grove figures that out, its packaging and marketing plans are on hold. But Tomita is relieved that his company doesn’t have to place its big bets in advance.

"The people who are sweating bullets are the ones who use injection molds," Tomita said.

Take the cautionary tale of Hard Candy Cases. The San Francisco company paid $50,000 last year for steel moldings after several Chinese manufacturers claimed the iPhone 4S would have a different shape and a widened home button.

It didn’t. Oops.

"You move forward based on your gut feeling and experiences in the past," said A.G. Findings CEO Hank Goradesky, whose company makes the tough Ballistic line of cases. "There are times when we’ve gambled and lost inventory and tooling."

Goradesky wasn’t willing to miss out on a moment of production time, so he’s had three executives in China overseeing manufacturing for the last two weeks. Relying on the Apple rumor mill, they guessed that the new iPad’s dimensions would be almost identical to the last model.

Wednesday’s confirmation of that was a giant relief.

"God forbid that this thing doesn’t fit and it’s in a store," Goradesky said. "You can’t explain that. Those scenarios can’t exist."  

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Battered by the strong yen and supply disruptions from Thailand’s floods, Honda said Tuesday that its net earnings in the October-December quarter tumbled 41 percent to 47.6 billion yen ($625 million) and projected a sharply lower full-year profit.

The Japanese automobile and motorcycle maker forecast it would earn 215 billion yen for the fiscal year through March, down nearly 60 percent from the 534 billion yen it earned the previous fiscal year.

Honda had scrapped its earnings forecast in October, when it reported its previous quarterly results, because the flooding in Thailand _ a key Asian production hub for Honda and many Japanese companies _ made the outlook too uncertain.

Honda stopped making cars at its automobile assembly plant in Ayutthaya, north of Bangkok, in October after it was damaged in the worst floods to hit Thailand in 50 years. The company said in a statement that it was making progress on draining the plant of flood water and cleaning up equipment, and that production was expected to resume by the end of March.

The flooding also disrupted the output at many Honda suppliers in Thailand, forcing it to reduce production as far away as the U.S. and Canada. Honda said production in neighboring Asian countries interrupted by the problems in Thailand was expected to return to normal by April.

All told, the problems related to flooding in Thailand have cost the company 260,000 vehicles in lost production worldwide, according to Tomohiro Okada, a company spokesman.

Quarterly sales slid 8 percent during the fiscal third quarter to 1.942 trillion yen.

The strong yen, which erodes Japanese exporters’ foreign earned income when repatriated, also ate into the company’s income. Declines due to unfavorable exchange rates accounted for 33.6 billion yen, or nearly half, of the 73.1 billion yen drop in net income before taxes reported the same quarter a year ago, Okada said.

A bright spot for the company was its motorcycle business, amid strong demand in emerging markets. Motorcycle sales rose 6.3 percent during the quarter to nearly 3.1 million units.

(This version CORRECTS Corrects impact from currencies in paragraph 8, adds lost production of vehicles from Thai flooding in paragraph 6, adds details about growth in motorcycle business)

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