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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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European Central Bank officials led by President Mario Draghi resisted calls from the International Monetary Fund and U.S. Treasury to do more to stem the debt crisis roiling the euro-area economy.

As talks of global finance chiefs ended yesterday in Washington, euro-area central bankers from Draghi to Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann argued they have done enough by cutting interest rates and issuing more long-term bank loans.

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General Electric Co.

A California “social lending” company will offer to return $461,000 to at least 175 Missouri investors under an agreement with Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan.

Lending Club, based in San Francisco, sells notes to individual investors, and uses the money to fund loans to individuals.  The loans back the notes.  The company seeks both borrowers and investors over the Internet.

Carnahan’s office said the company violated state law by failing to renew its state registration.  The law requires that most securities be registered before they can be sold to investors.

Lending Club registered its investments with the state in 2008, but let the registration lapse in 2010.

In a settlement with Carnahan, the company agreed to offer refunds, along with interest calculated at 8 percent annually, to investors who want them.  The firm also will pay $100,000 to the state’s Investor Education and Protection Fund and $5,000 to the Secretary of State’s office.

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FRANKFURT, Germany _ Europe is searching for something to get growth going again and pull the eurozone’s heavily indebted countries out of their troubles _ but with little luck.

Unemployment and manufacturing indicators suggest the 17 countries that use the euro are headed for an official recession. Adding to these worrying signs is the realization that many of the traditional tools to give growth a shove _ government spending, tax cuts and lower central bank interest rates _ are off the table.

The absence of growth will be a big concern for European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and the bank’s governing council when they meet Wednesday to decide the eurozone’s benchmark refinancing rate. No change in the rate _ which is at a record low of 1 percent _ is expected this time around.

A recent round of economic indicators will be prominent in the governing council’s minds when it meets. On Monday, the Markit index of industrial activity for the eurozone strongly suggested that the region’s economy is still contracting after shrinking 0.3 percent in the last three months of 2011. Two straight quarters of falling output are a common definition of recession. Meanwhile, unemployment across the 17-country group crept up to a record 10.8 percent, official figures also released on Monday showed. And national jobless rates paint an even more disturbing picture _ especially among the countries hit worst by the debt crisis: Spain at 23.6 percent unemployed, Greece 21.0 percent, Ireland 14.7 percent.

The European Union’s executive commission estimates that the eurozone economy will shrink by 0.3 percent this year, while Greece faces shrinkage of 4.4 percent in the fifth year of a deep recession. Italy faces 1.3 drop in output according to commission forecasts while Spain will fall 1.0 percent.

Short-term answers are scarce. The debt crisis hitting the eurozone means governments can no longer spend their way out of a downturn_ in fact, they are doing the opposite and embarking on rounds of austerity cuts.

On top of this, the ECB is restrained from cutting interest rates by the eurozone’s stubbornly high inflation rate, which has been pushed up oil prices and some taxes to 2.6 percent. The ECB is concentrating on getting price increases down to under 2 percent and lowering interest rates would push inflation up.

The region could even face the prospect of so-called “stagflation” _ a period of no or very little economic growth accompanied by inflation _ according to Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING.

“The fact that the recovery of the eurozone economy would be slow and bumpy was already clear,” Brzeski wrote in a note to investors.

“Now, high energy prices have even increased the risk of stagflation in the eurozone, a worst-case scenario which should cause concern at the Eurotower in coming months” _ a reference to the ECB’s Frankfurt skyscraper headquarters payday loans.

Brzeski adds that the stubborn inflation rate meant that “further rate cuts should be off the table”.

Another weapon in the ECB’s arsenal has also put beyond use. The (EURO)1 trillion program of “all-you-can-eat” loans to banks in December and February did manage to take some heat off the debt crisis that was crippling governments including Spain and Italy. Some banks used the cheap money flooding the markets to snap up government debt. The program has helped lower costs at which governments borrow on the financial markets and stopped the recession from becoming much deeper.

But the ECB loans are seen as a stopgap at best. The bank is currently in a holding pattern before it can start further, similar, measures as it waits to see whether that money finds its way through to loans to businesses and the wider economy.

The problem remains: Countries that don’t slash spending risk being unable to borrow money from bond investors because the borrowing costs set by those investors _ the so-called yields _ are too high. Once they are of cut off from the bond market by prohibitively high yields, a bailout is the only alternative to default. Greece, Ireland and Portugal have already been forced to seek help from the other eurozone member countries and the International Monetary Fund.

Spanish and Italian yields were hitting the dangerously high levels around 7 percent late last year before the ECB stepped in with its cheap loans. The countries’ yields dropped to more manageable levels, but are beginning to creep up again. Spanish 10-year bond yields have edged up to 5.42 percent on Tuesday, from under 5 percent a month ago. Italy’s 10-year bonds yielded 5.15 percent, also up from under 5 percent last month.

The solution to the debt crisis, eurozone officials, the ECB and economists all say, is structural reforms to make indebted countries more business-friendly by slashing regulation and eliminating costly restrictive labour practices.

As the economy gets bigger, the relative size of the debt pile shrinks, and higher tax revenues and stronger finances reassure bond investors _ so they will loan money at affordable rates.

But those changes to labor markets take time to win approval in parliaments _ often against resistance from labor and business special interests. Then they may years to show results in terms of higher growth.

“The kind of structural reforms that we are talking about will take five, six, seven years to really have a full impact,” said Guntram Wolff, deputy director of the Bruegel research institute in Brussels.

For short-term growth, aside from the ECB loans, “we really don’t have a story there,” Wolff warns.

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Emerson said today it has purchased Avtron Loadbank, a Cleveland-based firm that makes testing equipment for standby power generators.

Avtron will become part of the Ferguson-based manufacturer’s Network Power division, which has seen its data center business grow in recent years. The company, which has about 200 employees and three factories in the U.S. and U.K., makes equipment that tests the emergency power supplies that keep data centers up and running if normal power fails.

“The acquisition is a perfect fit with our existing services network, expanding the touch points we’re able to provide data center managers,” said Armand Visioli, president of the Emerson division that Avtron will join.

Avtron Load Bank is a division of Avtron Holdings, LLC, which is owned by Morgenthaler Private Equity. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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The Greek government

Just past the security gate for the world’s largest cell phone trade show in Barcelona, executives of big mobile carriers can’t avoid walking past a booth they would probably rather not see: It’s for “Pinger,” a small California company that offers free texting in the United States and Germany and has global expansion plans.

Pinger _ along with an explosion of smartphone messaging services like iMessage, BlackBerry Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber Media, Facebook Messenger and KakaoTalk _ have managed in just a few years to slash away at the important revenue that cell phone companies get from text messaging, and analysts say there’s no end in sight to the financial blood letting.

They do it by offering messaging applications that let phone users chat for free on the carriers’ data networks or Wi-Fi. Some, like Pinger, make money from advertisements and work on computers as well.

The London-based Ovum research firm estimates telecommunications companies lost nearly $14 billion last year in text-messaging revenue as consumers migrated to applications allowing them to send messages over cell phone data networks.

Ovum said the companies still took in an estimated $153 billion, but that was down 9 percent from a year earlier, and Pinger co-founder Joe Stipher wants to reduce the amount even more.

“Text messaging is free, and calling is going to be free,” said Stipher, wearing jeans in contrast to the dark suits favored by thousands of cell phone company executives attending the 2012 Mobile World Congress that ends Thursday. “Data is going to be like electricity or water, not totally free, but do you worry about giving someone a glass of water at your home or letting them plug in? No.”

Needless to say, mobile companies are not happy at the flood of free messaging services piggybacking their networks. Telecom Italia SpA chief executive Franco Bernabe told MWC that free messaging services are undercutting the ability of phone companies to invest in their networks. Paid texting, or SMS, has been a cash cow for phone companies that uses minimal network capacity.

The new “players have based their innovation in the mobile domain, without a deep understanding of the complex technical environment of our industry. This is increasingly creating significant problems to the overall service offered to the end user and driving additional investments for mobile operators,” Bernabe said.

After years of study, the big telecommunications operators announced this week that they will try to fight back by introducing software this year embedded in new cellphones that will allow users to do the same sort of Internet-based messaging and voice calls that consumers want without paying separate fees.

The new messaging method introduced by the industry group GSMA, or Groupe Speciale Mobile Association, is dubbed “Joyn” and will be launched this year by operators in France, Germany, Italy and South Korea. In industry parlance, the application is known as “Rich Communications Suite,” or RCS.

Joyn tries to deal with one major shortcoming of the messaging apps _ both the sender and the recipient have to have the same app. But it’s not clear if RCS will work on every phone. Apple Inc., for example, has a long history of not playing by mobile company rules.

“Since Rich Communications (Suite) will be fully integrated in devices, there is no need for our customers to download or install anything,” said Rene Obermann, chief executive of Germany’s Deutsche Telekom AG. “Ease of use is thus ensured and it will just work. We are looking forward to offer new services like text chat, file and live video sharing during a call to our customers soon.”

But analysts say there’s no way of knowing whether consumers will migrate to Joyn until after it is released and consumers try it out, and note that the last major technological advance by mobile operators came in the 1990s, when text messaging was launched. And cell phones issued by mobile carriers often come loaded with software that many people rarely or never use because they don’t like them.

“It is possible this will be their last chance to see if they can play more of a role,” said Pamela Clark-Dickson, an analyst at London’s Informa Telecoms & Media research group. “The user experience is key, and if they don’t get it right people won’t use it.”

The GSMA didn’t say how operators will charge for Joyn _ and how much. The carriers face an uphill battle denting the popularity of the free messaging services. WhatsApp chief executive officer Jan Koum told the mobile congress that its users are now sending more than 2 billion messages per day, up from 1 billion in October. The much smaller Pinger saw its users send 2 billion messages in January, up from 1.7 billion in December, Sipher said.

And he says the mobile operators should stay away from free messaging because “they aren’t good at it and haven’t done applications.”

“The carriers should be smart, reliable pipes” providing Internet data access like utilities give reliable water and electricity, he said. “They need to focus on being good network operators.”

Obermann said carriers are at a crucial point at which they must “develop our own, innovative product suites” through cooperation with the smaller messaging companies.

“The smart pipe will be one of the areas where (telecommunications companies) will show their innovation,” he said.

His company’s venture capital division, T-Venture, took a stake in Pinger last week just before MWC started, announcing it would provide $7.5 million in venture capital to help Pinger grow internationally, especially in Europe.

For Sipher, it’s a sign that some operators realize they need to work with messaging startups instead of against them.

“We’re saying to the telecoms that we’re here, we’re big, and we’re playing,” Sipher said. “When’s the last time a carrier introduced a successful application? That would be SMS and that’s almost 15 years ago.”

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Just two years after it was rescued and reconstituted through bankruptcy and a government bailout, General Motors Co. cruised through 2011 to post the biggest profit in its history.

The 103-year-old company, leaner and smarter under new management, cut costs by taking advantage of its size around the globe. And its new products boosted sales so much that it has reclaimed the title of world’s biggest automaker from Toyota.

GM may have a hard time breaking this record in 2012 because it is losing money in Europe and South America, and U.S. sales growth slowed in the last three months.

But the company’s performance in North America and Asia still helped it earn $7.6 billion for the year, beating the record of $6.7 billion set during the truck boom in 1997.

The profit won’t stop the debate about spending $49.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to save GM. But it did drive up the company’s stock price, which could help the government get more of its money back.

The bailout of GM and Chrysler Group LLC, begun by George W. Bush and finished by Barack Obama, remains a major issue in this year’s presidential campaign. It’s so politically charged that even a Super Bowl ad celebrating Chrysler’s rebirth caused arguments.

GM, which released its earnings Thursday, performed best in its home territory, posting a $7.2 billion pretax profit in North America. The numbers were so good that 47,500 blue-collar workers will get $7,000 profit-sharing checks, the maximum allowable under their new union contract. International Operations, which includes Asia, made $1.9 billion before taxes, but that was down from 2010.

GM’s cost cuts, and its outlook for this year helped to push up the stock price by almost 9 percent to $27.08. The company said it trimmed costs by $500 million in the fourth quarter alone mainly by consolidating advertising agencies and engineering operations. A prediction that costs wouldn’t rise this year wowed investors, especially since other automakers have forecast rising costs, said Itay Michaeli, an analyst for Citi Investment Research.

“That was a very pleasant surprise,” he said.

GM also was optimistic about sales and revenue. It sees its global market share holding steady at 11.9 percent, and if global auto sales rise as expected this year, GM’s slice of that would also increase no fax cash loans.

That’s especially promising, since GM managed to make money last year with industry-wide sales in the U.S. at a historically low 12.8 million. Sales this year could rise to 14 million.

The company expects to charge more for its cars and trucks this year, but warned that the prices could be pressured as the market shifts toward smaller, less-expensive vehicles.

CEO Dan Akerson hinted at a better year for GM in 2012, saying that the company will build on the 2011 results as it brings more new products into the market.

“The outlook here is quite favorable for earnings growth,” said Citi’s Michaeli. “They’re keeping their costs really under control.”

That’s good news for the U.S. government, which still owns 26.5 percent of the company and needs more strong earnings to push up the stock price.

The government owns 500 million shares of GM, which it got in exchange for the $49.5 billion bailout. Through earlier stock sales and loan repayments, the government has recouped about $22.3 billion of that money. The remaining shares would have to double in price and sell for around $53 for the government to get back the rest.

Despite the big annual profit and optimistic outlook, GM still lost $747 million before taxes in Europe last year, and its losses are expected to continue until a restructuring plan takes hold.

Akerson said GM will have to cut its European factory capacity to match lower sales. South America lost money, too: $122 million for the year. GM’s fourth-quarter profit fell 8 percent, and its U.S. sales growth slowed in the quarter even as more Americans bought cars and trucks.

Also, GM’s U.S. stockpile of cars and trucks is growing, and that could force it to offer discounts, especially in competitive market segments like pickup trucks and midsize cars. In January, GM’s inventory was about 620,000, enough to supply its dealers for 89 days. That’s up by more than 100,000 from a year earlier, when GM had a 68-day supply, according to Ward’s AutoInfoBank.

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